Georg Deuter

Georg (or Chaitanya Hari) Deuter is a pioneer of world music, having explored during the "hippie" era the fusion between Western and Eastern music. All of his works are marked by an intense, sometimes overwhelming spirituality, and by a pan-ethnic heterogeneity of sound materials. His compositions make extensive use of synthesizer arpeggios and exotic percussion alongside his traditional, enveloping melodic lines for flute.

Born in 1945 and raised in Munich, Deuter began a career as a graphic designer while writing occasionally for music magazines. In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, he suffered a car accident that triggered an existential crisis. Turning to flute, guitar, percussion, and keyboards, he recorded two albums infused with Eastern spirituality, D and Aum, which went largely unnoticed.

D (Kuckuck, 1971) includes Babylon, a four-movement suite in the style of Stockhausen (an andantino elaborating electronically on bell chimes and a baby's cry, an allegro of psychedelic rock for bass, electric guitar, and harpsichord, a "cosmic" andante � la Tangerine Dream, and a breathless raga-ecstatic finale in a tumult of noises), as well as Krishna Eating Fish And Chips, another driving raga joke, the electro-percussive hallucination of Atlantis, and the dark organ requiem Gammastrahlen-Lamm. Deuter performs and processes everything himself.

Aum (Kuckuck, 1972), which predates Popol Vuh�s Hosianna Mantra by a year, is a kind of Indo-Western mass combining Hindu liturgy and avant-garde sonorities. Each dance is accompanied by natural sounds (bird calls in Phoenix, gurgling water in Soham, waves in Soma, seagulls in Susani) and is set against lush festivals of arcane percussion (Aum, Offener Himmel 1, Surat Shabda). Overall, it is a highly original work that applies these harmonic solutions on a large scale for the first time.

With these albums, Deuter had in fact invented a new musical genre, one that uses folk dances and instrumental timbres of Eastern civilizations to create suggestive, mysterious, and unsettling atmospheres.

Deuter, who was inspired by a sincere religious fervor, then moved to India under the guidance of yet another guru-speculator (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), where he composed the albums released by Chidvilas in the following decade. Albums like Basho's Pond (Chidvilas), a collection of ethereal melodies for flute, harp, cello, tambura, tabla, and other string and percussion instruments; Tea From An Empty Cup (Chidvilas), teeming with Zen percussion and lulled by the hypnotic patterns of the shakuhachi flute; and San (Chidvilas, 19##) (Kuckuck, 1985), increasingly mystical and languid; as well as Sambodhi Music (Chidvilas), Flowers Of Silence (Chidvilas), and Buddham Sharnam Gachchami (Chidvilas)�all of these albums use heterogeneous and insistent instrumentation to compose intricate and refined psalms.

The so-called �Indian tetralogy� (composed, recorded, and mixed by himself in Poona, though released years later) consists of works of ever-increasing mystical intensity, crystallizing that static and mystical style around a few basic ideas: endlessly prolonged �om,� �Tibetan� resonances of percussion, cascading twinkles of strings, imperceptible synthesizer drones, and artificial choirs. Celebration (Kuckuck, 1976), the first album of the tetralogy, is an act of humility, well represented by the water and sitar reverberations in Solitary Bird. Haleakala Mystery (Kuckuck, 1978) contains the eponymous, eerie piece that refines voices into a single long otherworldly sound. On Ecstasy (Kuckuck, 1979) appear Back To A Planet and La Ilaha Il Allah, two of his most religiously meditative atmospheres, which, due to the organ, occasionally recall the Pink Floyd of Saucerful Of Secrets.

The tetralogy was completed with Silence Is The Answer (Kuckuck, 1981), his masterpiece. The monumental suite on the first disc of this double album constitutes a summation of this mannered art, while the brief aphorisms on the second disc lean toward the cyclical, crescendoing melodies of Kitaro (Loving A Buddha) and the overwhelming �cosmic� sequencers of Schulze (Dawn), when they do not indulge in pastoral guitar ditties (My Best Friend Is A Buddha) or hare krishna hoppities (Call Of The Unknown). The mood is the innocent enthusiasm of a novice. However, this marks the end of Deuter�s Indian period, as he leaves behind the austere life of the Indian monastery.

After a brief return to his homeland, the new age boom (and the decline of certain pseudo-hippie ideals) led him to move first to France, where he recorded Cicada (Kuckuck, 1982) in Kitaro�s melodic style, an album that showcases the gentle crescendoing hymn of Sky Beyond Clouds, the pastoral refrain of From Here To Here, and the minimalist mantra of Alchemy. He then emigrated to the USA, where he found commercial success with Nirvana Road (Kuckuck, 1984), influenced by the world-music boom, featuring more ethnic pieces like The High Road, and Land Of Enchantment (Kuckuck, 1988).

Call Of The Unknown (Kuckuck, 1986) and Sands Of Time (Kuckuck, 1990) are compilations.

The 1990s saw Deuter repeating himself with little or no innovation on albums that were the quintessence of predictability: Henon (Kuckuck, 1992), with the catchy theme of Sha, the flute solo of Basho and the pastoral exotica of Chichen Itza, Terra Magica: Planet Of Light (Kuckuck, 1994), Wind & Mountain (Relaxation, 1995), Terra Magica (1995), Kundalini (1996), Nadabrahma (1997), the ethnic Nada Himalaya (New Earth, 1997), two droning pieces of overtones from the sounds of Tibetan bells, bowls and chimes, Reiki (New Earth, 1998), that contains six lengthy ambient/new-age pieces for piano and synths, Sun Spirit (2000), Garden of the Gods (2000), Buddha Nature (2001). Like the Wind in the Trees (Sammasati, 2002) is a compilation.