UNITED ONE. RECORDS CHRIS KARRER

Chris Karrer - Grandezza Mora - U1-2010-2 "What a trip, the world of Chris Karrer! Amon Düül is only a memory: Chris Karrer is reborn as a pioneer of world music!" (AZ, München) "He paints his sound pictures in dark colors: melodic, compact and rhythmic, dramatic miniatures, floating between melancholy and Ioneliness. The sounds of the world reflect the honesty of an individual who is going his own way, even if the end result is the lonely life of a dropout at the border of the aflluent society." (SZ, Stuttgart) For the last thirty years, Chris Karrer has been one of the rare constants in the German music scene. With his band Amon Düül II, he showed us that there is more going on than in the Anglo-American mainstream. Even at that time, his ears were attuned to the music of the Orient, but it was not until he joined the music-caravan that was Embryo that his musical travels brought him face to face with other cultures. At the beginning of the eighties, he lived with Egyptian dervishes in order to study the oud, the arabic lute, and absorbed their culture and religion. Sufism increased his openess to foreign culture and his dislike for regimentation and restriction. Off the beaten track, Chris Karrer developed his own musical style, somewhere between Afghan folklore and Andalusian classic. Since the mid-eighties, Chris Karrer appeared regularly with a "Musical Trip from Orient to Occident". He has released parts of that programme on the CD's "Dervish Kiss" (1991) and "Sufisticated" (1996) with some old friends. Now he has gone one step further and released a strictly solo-CD - bare, naked, with no safety net. It's a brave step, one for which most musicians is a step too far. There is no hiding weakness and lack of fantasy, technical weaknesses are exposed and there is nobody to help you. Chris Karrer has nothing to hide. Nobody has to "cover his ass" for him. The slogan of the CD was "the first take is holy!" And first reactions show that he was right - "It's an album full of fantasy!" (Roman Bunka) Personnel: Chris Karrer (g, oud, rubab) Page about CHRIS KARRER/Amon Düül