Popol Vuh - Music for Space Catacombs

Born in 1969 out of a project by Florian Fricke, a former film critic and director, Popol Vuh are one of the essential bands of German rock. More attuned to mystical and exotic calls than their "cosmic" countrymen (Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk), Fricke and co. laid the groundwork for the ambient and new age music of years to come, and proved that rock too could become spiritual music, reclaiming an ancient sense of the sacred just as classical music had. From their meticulous research into the sacred texts of various religions came an unprecedented strain of metaphysical rock, made of ethereal sounds and celestial chords, an acoustic mysticism uniting old and new, sacred and profane, in a yearning for peace and ecstasy. But their importance is also crucial on the level of technical innovation in electronic music. They were in fact the first band to use the Moog synthesizer, and one of the first groups to seek out contaminations with the kind of "world music" that would later explode in the Nineties, thanks above all to Peter Gabriel.

When Florian Fricke decided to devote himself full-time to music, launching the Popol Vuh project, he had most likely read and reread, to the point of exhaustion, the sacred book of the same name belonging to the Quiché, a tribe of Indigenous people directly descended from the Maya. In it, the leader of the Munich band could engage with the belief that particularly dynamic, powerful and penetrating sounds can have a beneficial effect on the human psyche, restoring harmony and balance. Building on these conjectures, the German band's music would in fact become a "sacred music" with strongly "therapeutic" leanings. Of course, they weren't the only band of the era interested in this kind of thing, but, given the results achieved, they remain the greatest of them all.

The original line-up, formed in Munich in 1970, featured, alongside Fricke (keyboards), Frank Fiedler (synthesizer) and Holger Trulzsch (percussion). The name Popol Vuh is taken from the Book of the Dead of the ancient Maya. Curiously, though, around the same time, a Norwegian progressive group also chose the same name - a coincidence that would cause no small amount of confusion in the years to follow.

Fricke was a devotee of Maya myths and a passionate student of religious themes - a cultural background that surfaces immediately on Popol Vuh's debut album, Affenstunde (1970). But it's still an immature record, one that passed almost unnoticed.

More striking is the ambitious In Den Garten Pharaos, released two years later. A work halfway between classical and electronic, blending ambient atmospheres and percussion, with a distinctive use of acoustic and ethnic instruments (guitars, oboe, tamboura), offering remarkable "snapshots from the garden of the pharaohs".

Split into two long compositions, the album remains one of the highest peaks in the entire "rock" landscape, by virtue of an "esoteric" power that is at times truly "absolute". The line-up, besides Fricke (piano, organ), is made up of Frank Fielder (synthesizer) and percussionist Holger Trulzsch. The first "side" is taken up entirely by the title track (17'39"): amid the rush of water, ambient noises make room for themselves, along with filtered, "liquid" percussion and sine waves that paint a dark, timeless fresco. The smoky swirls of the synth expand and contract, in a reimagining of cosmic music steeped in mysticism.

The garden of the pharaohs is a vast expanse of indecipherable figures, age-old mysteries, divine simulacra. Around the fifth minute, an obsessive tabla rhythm, meticulous in its strongly ritualistic progress, is darkened by menacing synth glissandos. At this point, one gets the impression of hearing, in "earthly" form, the monstrous space trajectories of "Irrlicht" (Klaus Schulze). But instead of annihilating itself in a violent explosion, this duel between "primitive" and "modern" is resolved, at 12'47", in a sublime piece of "fourth-world" jazz (?): tribal tabla patterns, minimalist Moog accents sliding into the metallic sonorities of the vibraphone, hymn-like traces of organ. In the background, the sound of water, which closes out the first side. Worth noting, among other things, is Bettina Rumpf's excellent work on sound.

A grandiloquent, lush organ, along with the vibration of a gong, introduces Popol Vuh's absolute masterpiece: "Vuh" (19'58"). Recorded in Baumburg Cathedral, this track draws not only on the pipe organ (played by Fricke in a single, exhausting continuous cycle), but also on the very spatiality inherent to the sacred building. The power of the sound, in fact, seems to have no limits: one gets the impression that it expands beyond all belief, in a tremendous transcendent effort. Throughout its development, the track lays out a dazzling theorem on the material and immaterial unity of sounds and of the human microcosm, gaining further spiritual force as, over the terrifying organ drone, hallucinated webs of ecstatic singing (electronically synthesized) are joined by the restless, tumultuous rustling of timpani and the linear yet uneasy path of the percussion. Slowly, and almost imperceptibly, the organ drone begins to lose sonic substance. From the fourteenth minute onward, everything regains a more human dimension. Percussion and timpani grow calmer; the organ, "embellished" by flourishes of synth, gradually extinguishes its luminous evocative charge. And everything vanishes into nothing, from where it had come.

In 1972 Fricke enlisted five collaborators with classical training: Korean soprano Djong Yun, plus Conny Veit of Amon Düül II (guitar), Klaus Wiese (tamboura) and two members of the Munich Philharmonic Academy, Robert Eliscu (oboe) and Fritz Sonnleitner (violin).

From this ensemble came Hosianna Mantra, Popol Vuh's masterpiece. It's a collection of small jewels of mysticism with a fragile harmonic cartilage, a "music for space catacombs", as it has been described.

"Hosianna" and "Mantra" represent two religions at opposite poles, and a single revolutionary musical project: that of merging, into one single sonic flow, Christian revelation and Hindu ritual, Western classical tradition and Vedic chant, a rediscovery of the ancient alongside a projection toward the future. Electronics, the distinctive mark of avant-garde Teutonic rock, is abandoned because, in Fricke's own words, given its artificiality, it proved ill-suited to expressing the purity and depth of his religious hymns.

Simple arrangements are thus favoured, with instrumentation that is largely acoustic and "classical" in character (piano, harpsichord, oboe, violin), with rock elements in the guitars, plus a touch of exoticism from the tamboura (an Indian stringed instrument ideal for producing drones).

From the very first listens, two things stand out: the first is the total absence of percussion, which bathes the songs in a fluid, poetic, transcendent timelessness; the second is the power of love radiating from the eight tracks: an other kind of love, divine, deeply interiorized.

The album is divided into two parts: "Hosianna Mantra" and "Das V Buch Mose". The opening is entrusted to "Ah!", which begins with a minimal, romantic piano sonata over which float notes of guitar and tamboura. The finale offers a dizzying fugue for piano and electric guitar. The second piece is the Kyrie, a Christian litany from the sung mass, unfolding over a Bach-like air for violin, piano and soprano.

The symbol of Popol Vuh's religious poetics is, however, the title track, Hosianna-Mantra. It is in this long metaphysical jam that two forms of ritual, worlds apart from one another, are perfectly distilled: the hymn to Christ ascending to heaven (the Hosanna) and the Hindu hymn built on the continuous repetition of a single formula or word (the mantra). A dreamlike piano and a psychedelic guitar weave the harmonic fabric that underpins the baroque echoes of the oboe and Djong Yun's chant-like singing.

The second part draws on the biblical narratives of the fifth book of Moses: "Abschied" unfolds in the oboe's tears of joy, marked by a melancholic purity; the blessing-song of "Segnung" comes across as a hieratic lied of unheard-of grace. Finally, set between the two brief interludes of "Andacht", lies the ineffable gem titled "Nicht Hoch Im Himmel": an emanation of dark luminosity, bestower of a suffering stillness, born of a sorrowful joy, this composition, in its atmosphere, turns out to be a true oxymoron capable of touching the very flower of darkness and light.

Hosianna Mantra is about experiencing life amid a contemplation of cosmic love. In this sense, Popol Vuh move from a claustrophobic, futurist kosmische musik to an ecumenical, sacred kosmische musik, one capable of anticipating a certain visionary strand of new age music.

In the following years, together with former Amon Duul II drummer Daniel Fichelscher and with the band's lineup in constant flux, Fricke devoted himself to a mystical trilogy born of his research into sacred texts: Seligpreisung, Einsjager und Siebenjager and Das Hohelied Salomos. An ambitious project that nonetheless revealed the German musician's first compositional limits, unable to give a fully realized evolution to the sound of "Hosianna Mantra". That same year Fricke began his fruitful collaboration with German director Werner Herzog, which would yield soundtracks for films such as Aguirre, Wrath Of God, Fitzcarraldo and Nosferatu.

Popol Vuh's subsequent work would instead focus on exploring more rhythmic themes (Letzte Tage Letze Nachte), on new vocal experiments (Die Nacht Der Seele, with Renate Knaup, formerly of Amon Duul, and City Raga, with Maya Rose), or on sunnier sonorities (Agape Agape, Tantric Songs).

But the inspiration of the golden years would gradually fade. What remained, however, was the enormous legacy of Popol Vuh's music on the new age movement that followed, which would rediscover its insights, techniques and structures. The German band kept releasing records, the last being La Messa di Orfeo, and performing around Europe (recently even at the "Il Violino e la Selce" festival in Fano, organized by Franco Battiato).

On December 29, 2001, Florian Fricke died in his sleep, following complications from a heart attack.

His message remains that of shaping humanity's primordial music and exploring the immensity of nature in search of the Sacred. As it is written in the pages of the Maya's "Popol Vuh": "In the beginning there was only the vast sky and the sea in all its calm, and then came sound, and after sound the Creator formed man."

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