Popol Vuh

He wasn't a man of many words, Florian Fricke. Put simply, one could say he preferred to let his music do the talking, and that would hardly be far from the truth. But what did his music "say"? Or better still: what does it still tell us today? Now, I can't speak for others, but to me it has always conveyed a deep sense of spirituality. Florian wanted to give voice to the spirit, and music, the art form par excellence of the ineffable, was for him an almost inevitable choice.
He began playing it just after turning eleven, studying classical piano, and a few years later he enrolled in a "special higher school for music", at an age when others usually only joined after coming of age. His father, however - himself a seasoned musician, an opera singer by trade - had evidently sensed his son's talent and managed to convince the school's administrators that the boy was already ready to make the leap: ready to study with Rudolf Hindemith, brother of the more famous Paul, and with Edith Picht-Axenfeld. Yet Florian only lasted there until he was nineteen, finding the school too harsh - he "wanted to live", he said, and couldn't stand "running through the fields" any longer, weeping in despair…

Florian was born in 1944 in Lindau, Bavaria, and had studied both in Freiburg and Munich, feeling himself part of a tradition rooted in early polyphonic music and the work of Mozart. Then he stumbled upon free jazz, though naturally it was the more spiritually charged grooves that struck him most, which is how John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders became two of his heroes. Nor was he deaf to the call of cinema, drawn in by those young directors who in the Sixties had set out to shake up the world of German celluloid - a scene in which Florian himself tried his hand, shooting a few short films, though without much real conviction.
Still, music was always there, within reach, while the scent of revolution kept spreading through the air. Germany had a recent past it was eager to shed as quickly as possible, and it was above all the young who sought an escape route from a present that reeked of the corpse. Across the ocean, hippie culture had entrusted psychedelic drugs with the task of freeing consciousness and putting it in touch with the deepest essence of the world. LSD, in short, was a powerful tool for grasping that Self and World are, at bottom, one and the same thing - but for Florian, drugs mattered mainly as a means of relaxing and keeping inspiration alive, since it was through music that he sought true illumination.
What he needed, though, was an instrument different from his usual piano. At first, he tried an Elektronium, a valve synthesizer with an electromechanical preset system for adjusting filters, which he had seen in action - in his role as music critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung - during a performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Kurzwellen" (1968). In the end, though, he managed to bring home a modular Moog III C synthesizer, an instrument that, given its exorbitant cost (he paid the considerable sum of 65,000 marks of the time) and the difficulty of mastering it (there were practically no instructions!), had until then had only one buyer in Germany: Eberhard Schoener. It was while assisting Schoener at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka that Florian first grasped the potential of the instrument Robert Moog had developed in 1964.

The Moog's vast sonic palette ("here a horn of Ramses, there an Ethiopian harp, there Solomon's spice garden, the wind") allowed Florian to launch his first sonic explorations, searching for the "sound that manifests human desire itself" and moving like a spelunker through the darkness of his own inner life. Accompanying him at first were percussionist Holger Trülzsch and fellow electronic musician Frank Fielder. Florian had chosen for his creation the evocative name Popol Vuh, drawn from the Quiché "Book of the Community" of the same name (or "Book of Counsel"), which recounts the history and mythology of this Maya people, and which refers to the ability of particularly low, penetrating sounds to act beneficially on the human psyche. That was, in short, what Florian was looking for, and it struck him, he said, "like a thunderstorm", carrying his mind back to the beginning of Creation - a direction toward which other sacred texts, such as the Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, had already pushed him, or would push him in the future. From that inner mirage, Popol Vuh sought to forge a connection with the most ancient peoples, though without necessarily appropriating their culture. As Florian himself put it: "Through our music, we express a form of meditation that stems from our own culture, not from that of India or anywhere else".
From there, it was a short step to putting into sound what he now sensed was the essential core of his relationship with the world. After working on the soundtrack for Werner Herzog's "Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen" (1970) - to be followed a year later by scores for Ulf von Mechow's "Wintermärchen" and George Moorse's "Antarktis" - Florian was contacted by Gerhard Augustin of Liberty Records, who, during a trip to the United States, had heard about the Moog, fallen in love with it, and was now looking for a "Moog act" to produce an album of electronic music.

The result was "Affenstunde" (literally: "The Hour of the Ape"), for Florian an attempt to "capture the moment when the ape gives way to the human being" - which was another way of saying he wanted to seize, of course through sound, that moment, already entrusted to the mythic narratives of the most varied ancient peoples, in which Man comes to himself through the emergence of consciousness. As an avid film buff, Florian had surely also drawn inspiration from Kubrick's masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey", in whose opening sequences, within the aptly titled section "The Dawn of Man" - the one, to be clear, set to the majestic strains of Richard Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra" (1896) - an ape is seen lifting a shinbone from a pile of bones before hurling it into the sky, where, via an extraordinary jump cut, it "turns into" a spacecraft. Man's ancestor had, in other words, discovered technology, thereby becoming more than a mere living being among other living beings, since from that precise moment he ceased to be an ape and became a man. "Affenstunde" sold very little, though it found admirers in, among others, John Lennon and Bob Dylan, while Karlheinz Stockhausen had plenty to object to… On the record, Florian and his Moog are still feeling each other out, but it is precisely this distance that makes his explorations of cosmic and/or inner space at once fascinating and enigmatic.
From this point of view, his approach was the polar opposite of that of another Moog pioneer and great specialist of the instrument, Walter (Wendy) Carlos, who in 1968 had made a name for himself with "Switched On Bach", an electronic interpretation of the works of the great German composer. Compared to Carlos's approach, which had something mathematical and rigorous about it, Florian's was entirely instinctive, one in which technology fused with the ancestral essence of primitive music (a debt reflected in his use of percussion).

He proved it even more clearly on the two compositions of "In den Gärten Pharaos", released in 1971 on the Pilz label, founded that same year by journalist, writer and producer Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, one of the key figures of krautrock, if only for having coined the term "kosmische musik", which represented the vision, as Ulrich Adelt writes in his "Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies", of "a deterritorialized, post-national cosmological identity, which entailed the consumption of psychedelic drugs and the invention of new sounds, particularly through the use of the synthesizer".
On "In den Gärten Pharaos", Florian moves with extraordinary inspiration, showing that he has become far more of a master of the Moog. On the title track, we hear a veritable ritual, in which, according to Quiché teaching, the listener's participation must be highly "active", on pain of dissipating much of the music's purifying power. The importance of purification is underscored by the soft murmur of water. The synth's smoky vortices expand and contract, in a mystically charged revisiting of cosmic music. Meanwhile, Trülzsch's percussion dredges up from the depths of memory echoes of African and Turkish traditions. Between ancient and future, the music of Popol Vuh invites the listener to slip through the folds of the present, in order to grasp its intimate, ineffable nature.
On side B, "Vuh" finds Florian at the pipe organ of Baumburg Cathedral, played in a single grandiloquent, liturgical, unbroken cycle, testifying to the deep synergy between cosmic music and that "mystic readiness for the absolute" ("mystische Bereitschaft zum Absoluten") which is one of the essential elements of the German spirit.

Although it marked an incredible leap in quality compared to "Affenstunde", "In den Gärten Pharaos" was the record that convinced Florian to abandon the Moog. He had played it with passion, but had never really tried to test its limits and possibilities. In that sense, he came to feel it as a limitation on his most intimate inspiration - this despite the fact that, at first, he had said that with the Moog a composer had the chance to produce sounds that no other instrument could ever achieve.
So, after playing it as a guest on "Birth Of Liquid Plejades", the opening track of Tangerine Dream's monumental "Zeit", Florian sold his Moog to his friend Klaus Schulze, and from that moment he went back to devoting himself to his beloved piano, an instrument he knew intimately and knew what to expect from. "The shift from improvised to written music never posed any problem for me, since I had been playing classical piano since the age of eleven and had started composing very early on. For me, it wasn't a matter of progress or regression, but simply another way of expressing myself. As a composer, I felt drawn to classical music".

At the dawn of 1972, the return to an acoustic dimension seemed to Florian a necessity, a way to channel, along a path of purity, his desire for spirituality and authenticity - already latent in the first two Popol Vuh records, above all in the grooves of "In den Gärten Pharaos", if the latter symbolically represented, in Florian's own words, "the image of Moses coming every day to ask Pharaoh for his people's freedom", a request that was also his own: "To be free to choose my own path". With the Moog set aside, all that remained was for him to be what he had always wanted to be: "I am a conservative artist. I'm not interested in just pushing buttons. Sometimes the power fluctuates, so you can't always get the same sound out of a synthesizer. The machine has too much say in the matter. There's nothing human about it. The piano is more direct. So I realized I would probably be happier using acoustic instruments for my music". And further: "Over the years, music has increasingly become, for me, a form of prayer. With electronics, one can probably reach the depth, the unconscious, the timelessness of the human being more than with other natural sounds: I know this, and it has fascinated me for a long time. And yet, a more beautiful and honest way now seems to me to be purifying and interiorizing oneself without technical aids, and then touching those spaces of darkness or light, the inner man, with a simple, human music".

Florian's conflicted relationship with the Moog synthesizer - an instrument that, by his own account, made him feel uneasy when played within music of strongly religious character - should also be read in light of the complex relationship between music and technology. On this point, the reflections of Paul Théberge are illuminating; in "Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology" (1997) he wrote: "Technological invention is (…) not only a response to musicians' needs but also a driving force that musicians must contend with". In this sense, Ulrich Adelt observes that "musicians such as Florian Fricke, Klaus Schulze and Edgar Froese experimented with synthesizer technology in the early 1970s and tried to use the instrument not simply to reproduce the sounds of traditional instruments, but to create new, unprecedented sounds. To some extent, in doing so they had to let themselves be led by the machines, since early synthesizers were notoriously complex, unreliable and impossible to fully control".
Even while letting themselves be, "to some extent", led by the machines, those musicians - Florian among them - still managed to write some of the finest pages of the musical landscape of those years. They did not follow the emblematic example of Kraftwerk, whose veneration of the "man-machine" was underpinned by the creation of ever more icy, technological music, born of the conviction that the human being is all the more perfect the closer it comes to the perfection of the Machine, since in doing so it ceases to be, in Günther Anders's words, a "faulty construction" ("Die Mensch-Maschine/ Halb Wesen und über Ding", as the four men from Düsseldorf would sing in 1978 on the title track of "Die Mensch-Maschine").

Now, coming back to Florian, one can surmise that, without his rejection of the Moog, he would hardly have given us "Hosianna Mantra", the album that in 1972 set a new standard for "religious rock" - obviously, if by "rock" we mean something far broader than music played with the classic guitar-bass-drums trio.
Before laying down those grooves, Florian had converted to an "anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist" form of Christianity, and had also recorded part of the soundtrack for Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes". Florian had already known Herzog for some years (he was with him when, in the great library of the University of Munich, he first came across a copy of the "Popol Vuh"), and had already collaborated with him as an actor back in 1968 on "Lebenszeichen", the Munich-born director's debut feature.
Meanwhile, the original Popol Vuh line-up no longer existed. Around Florian, now working with piano and harpsichord, a new group had gathered: Conny Veit on electric and twelve-string guitar, Robert Eliscu on oboe, Fritz Sonnleitner on violin, Klaus Wiese on tambura, and Korean soprano Djong Yun on vocals. It was precisely his meeting with the latter that strengthened Florian's resolve to head in this new direction.

Yun was the daughter of avant-garde composer Isang Yun, primarily interested in fusing traditional Korean music with the techniques of Western avant-garde. Along with her family, Yun had long since settled in what was then West Germany, living through a period of terror when, in June 1967, her father, accused of espionage, was kidnapped and taken to South Korea, where he was imprisoned and tortured. After attempting suicide, Isang Yun was forced by violence to confess, and was ultimately sentenced to death. Only thanks to a broad international mobilization, and a petition signed by numerous composers and conductors, was he eventually released, returning to West Berlin at the end of March 1969 and obtaining German citizenship two years later, before being commissioned to write a piece for the opening of the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Meeting the slight, elusive Djong Yun meant finding the voice Florian had been searching for for some years already, at least since 1969, when the idea of composing an oratorio had already taken shape in his mind: "I always had this great desire to find an instrument that could express, through electronic means, a human voice, voices, or, say, a girl's singing. If you listen to side A of 'In den Gärten Pharaos', that voice is there. Then, suddenly, this voice I sensed within me actually entered my life with the appearance of Djong Yun".
At the time, Florian lived with his wife, photographer Bettina von Waldthausen, on the outskirts of Munich, in a house with spacious, old-style rooms, elegantly furnished in light colours - a house that had already, for some time, become a meeting place for German and foreign musicians who, for one reason or another, happened to pass through or live in that great city on the banks of the Isar.

"At that time, I was playing with guitarist Andy Fix, who had started telling me about this incredible girl from Berlin, a singer, saying I absolutely had to meet her. I had done some rehearsals with Esther Ofarim (a singer of Israeli origin, ed.), but it didn't work out, because she refused to sing Christian lyrics - I imagine because she was Jewish - and so she didn't want to perform the kind of song I was preparing. It was a choice I understood". And so it was that the twenty-one-year-old Djong Yun walked through Florian's door. Four intense weeks of rehearsals followed, at the end of which Popol Vuh went into the studio to record the new material.

As for Conny Veit (born Wolf Conrad Veit), he was at the time a member of Gila, the band he had founded in 1969 and which had debuted two years later with the LP "Gila – Free Electric Sound". In 1972, he was invited to Munich by Florian to prepare material for "Hosianna Mantra". Every day, for six months, the two of them met and played together, often surrendering to the ecstasy of some sudden, lightning-quick flash of inspiration. Florian recalled: "In creativity there aren't always reasons. Some things simply happen. At the time, though, I was particularly interested in using the words first and then creating music for the words: in other words, there were already lyrics to which I wanted to add music. The idea was to convey the depth of meaning of a word and then transform it into a form of musical expression. That's one way I have of composing music. I don't always do it that way, but every now and then I go back to it".

As for Klaus Wiese, who was credited in the liner notes as a band member playing tambura, a clarification is in order, because it seems Wiese didn't actually play a single note on "Hosianna Mantra", as reported on the site popolvuh.nl, which cites what sitarist and composer Al Gromer Khan wrote on his Facebook page on 29 January 2015 (the sixth anniversary of Wiese's death): "Wiese was never an actual member of Popol Vuh. He did, however, own a Volkswagen van, unlike Florian Fricke. Florian needed a roadie, someone who (…) could haul the band's gear from Peterskirchen to Bavaria Studio. In exchange, Klaus was granted a photo shoot, complete with an old sitar he'd brought back from a recent trip to India. And since Florian was a generous man, and since 'tanpoura' sounded exotic, and since anyone can play the tanpoura, Klaus got a credit on the cover of 'Hosianna Mantra'".

In an interview given in 2007 to the same Dutch site dedicated to the German band, Wiese recalled his first meeting with Florian and his time in the orbit of Popol Vuh: “I met Florian in the early Seventies and he asked me to get hold of a folding tambura from Fazal Inayat-Khan's London music shop, where I was working temporarily at the time. Later, I played this tambura on some (inaudible) tracks during an endless recording session held in a church in eastern Bavaria, near Peterskirchen, where Florian had temporarily set up a studio inside an old castle owned by the Duchess of Lehndorf. As a typical Pisces (he was born on 23 February, ed.), Florian was quite dependent on five-litre bottles of white wine, big joints of Lebanese hash for practical inspiration, and a medieval Christian background of all kinds of inner experiences and visions. He also had a certain interest in Hinduism, with all its gods and goddesses, as was fairly common in those days. Later, he also took a year-long overland trip to Nepal. All the music poured out of his inner 'vision' and took shape over countless rehearsals, sometimes as many as ten sessions in a single afternoon, until it reached its final 'form'”.
Robert Eliscu, American-born (he was born in the state of Georgia in 1944), was at the time principal oboist of the Munich Philharmonic, had a deep knowledge of medieval music, and played with kraut-rockers Between, with whom he recorded “Einstieg” (1971). Guest musician Fritz Sonnleitner (violin) also played in the Munich Philharmonic, but unlike Eliscu he was much older, already fifty-two at the time.

From the title alone, "Hosianna Mantra" reveals its intent to break down the barriers between different religious confessions, to reveal their shared essence: the Sacred. A dimension that can only be reached if, first of all, one reconnects with the “inner man” latent within every human being. In this sense, his stance aligns with what the great historian of religions and anthropologist Mircea Eliade wrote: “It is hard to imagine [...] how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man's impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately linked with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has grasped the difference between what reveals itself as real, powerful, rich and meaningful, and what lacks these qualities, i.e. the chaotic and dangerous flow of things, their fortuitous, meaningless appearances and disappearances [...] In other words, being – or rather, becoming – a man means being 'religious'”. As for the choice of title, here is Florian: “'Hosianna Mantra' is really a combination of two different cultures, two different languages, two different lives. It carries a double meaning: 'Hosianna', which is a Christian word, and 'Mantra', from the Indian religion of Hinduism. Beyond all that, I was convinced that fundamentally all religions are the same. It's a truth you can feel in your heart. And the music of 'Hosianna Mantra' is made to touch your heart. That's why you can call it a mass. A mass for your heart”.
In fact, the very name "Popol Vuh" also seems to allude, according to what Florian himself said in a 1992 interview with the French magazine Crystal Infos, to the sense of a deep unity of all things: “'Popol' means unification, people, receptacle. 'Vuh' is the name of a deity, a magic word expressing the fertility that comes from the sky, from the sun, from the seed of fire. Nowadays, researchers specialising in Mayan writings agree on this approximate translation: 'meeting point'. When we say 'Popol Vuh', we evoke, all at once and rather vaguely, God, the All, Om, the Light, Energy…”.

Worlds away from the aesthetic posturing and cut-price spirituality of the so-called “beat masses” (a phenomenon born in Italy – the first being, by most accounts, Marcello Giombini's so-called “Messa dei Giovani”, on 27 April 1966 – and later taken up overseas too, as in “Mass In F Minor”, composed by David Axelrod and recorded in 1968 by the Electric Prunes), the mass that is "Hosianna Mantra" was written by a classically trained musician, a film buff and prime mover of the German kosmische scene, who had for some years already embarked on a profound spiritual path, in search of that Orient of the soul which, to paraphrase Hermann Hesse, is “the homeland and youth of the soul”, but also “the Everywhere”, “the Nowhere” and “the unification of all times”. From this point of view, Florian was not interested in “appearing”, but rather in “being”. The music of Popol Vuh, he said, was meant to carry the listener from the “outer” to the “inner”, inviting them to abandon the idea that the manifestation of the world is the manifestation of an otherness irreducible to consciousness. Evidently struck by the virtuosic acrobatics of some keyboardists of the then-nascent progressive rock scene (Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman would make excellent candidates!), he added that it wasn't about “asserting yourself as a soloist, pushing forward and showing how fast your fingers are or anything like that, but rather about placing yourself at the service of the deep, the vast, the great”. Footage survives online of his home studio, in which, during the "Hosianna Mantra" sessions, he can be seen, along with the other musicians, in what looks like a state of sheer ecstasy as the music – his music, written in a few weeks in a flash of inspiration – takes shape, perhaps clarifying, better than a thousand words, the sense of the adjectives “meditative” or “hymnal” that Florian often liked to invoke when trying to account for these compositions of his.
Having chosen, as a Christian, to abandon the Moog and return to an “organic” dimension meant, in his words, surrendering himself to “a flow, a surrender”. That, he believed, was the way to find true inner peace, as Florian had come to understand by reading the biblical Book of Samuel, in which King Saul, troubled by “an evil spirit”, is soothed by the sound of David's lyre, or by drawing on the Indian tradition, in which sound vibrations, besides representing the origin of everything, are also the ancestral manifestation of spirit turned into matter.

Although he was deeply convinced that no real barriers exist between different religions, the starting point of Popol Vuh's “mass” is nevertheless Christianity, as confirmed by the fact that all the texts sung by Yun are taken from the Bible, a book Florian loved to leaf through and read during rehearsals. “Two years ago a friend gave me the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's translation of the Old Testament”, Florian said in 1973. “The sensual, Mediterranean language, if I may call it that, and the clear dramatic order of this translation brought me very close to the essence of the biblical figures: the Bible became life for me. I read and reread the Book of Samuel, and once I'd finished, I looked for further information on that period in chronicles and history books. I wouldn't call my approach to reading at the time religious. But over time, it seems, it became more refined. Comparing the texts with Luther's translation then made me understand the high intellectual standing of Luther's language and his interpretation”. Starting from the religious culture he felt he belonged to was, for him, a matter of purity: “I realised that encountering God from within the culture you grew up in is the purest commitment. If I encounter an Indian god, it involves a lot of mediated mystery that I haven't experienced from within, from my own roots. So I don't want to make Eastern music, but Christian music”.
Intimately Christian, the music of "Hosianna Mantra" “you can't call sacred music unless you regard your body as the church and your ears as its portal”. Asked by a Sounds journalist to explain further what he meant by “Christian music”, Florian stressed that it is “painful in feeling, smiling in expression: think of our rose as a Christian symbol, as opposed to the Eastern lotus flower. The rose has thorns on its stem, and at the top there's something wonderful, the flower: crucifixion and resurrection, dying in order to be born. That's the Christian understanding, which we find, for instance, in the sound of the oboe, in the harpsichord's crown of thorns, and also in the electric guitar played by Conny, jubilant and mournful at once”.
In the same interview, Conny Veit also spoke, explaining what he had in mind when he took part in making "Hosianna Mantra": “I wanted to use the means at my disposal to grasp the being and feeling of early Christianity, to convey the rightness of the elementary truths contained in the Christian word. Not as a preacher, but as someone who believes archaic ways of life are more valuable and more correct than our contemporary culture”. Christian music, he added, “is not aimed at self-assertion. It is music born of self-surrender. It's not an assertion of egotistical feeling, but devotion as a selfless feeling, which for me is necessary in order to play this music – and that is Christian”.

'Hosianna Mantra' is his first devotion to the female voice, utterly pure and magical
(Bettina von Waldthausen)

Underlining the importance of moving away from the Moog, the opening notes of "Hosianna Mantra", those of “Ah!”, come from the piano, resounding like an awakening and immersed in an undefined space, a symbol of that ineffable quality which the music of Popol Vuh tries to probe in pursuit of the Sacred. The effect is one of being suspended mid-air, at that crossing point of sky and earth, gods and mortals, which German culture, via Martin Heidegger, calls the “Geviert”, and in which, essentially, the fates of man are played out. While the piano notes, before rising and falling in a personal reinterpretation of Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin's “Etude Op. 25 No. 11” (1837), are at the heart of this wonderful opening track, mirages of harpsichord and whispers of guitar open passages toward the unknown (“Conny played as if he'd just woken from a deep sleep, looking around in wonder and saying: 'It's impossible!'”, Florian would recall), inviting the listener to set aside all fear and take on a spiritual journey. A journey that continues with “Kyrie”, an obvious reference to the “Kyrie eleison” (the only two words of the text sung by Yun), one of the oldest prayers in the Christian liturgy, which first appeared in the East after the mid-fourth century, specifically in the ceremonies of the Churches of Antioch and Jerusalem, before entering the Roman liturgy in the following century. Translated as “Lord, have mercy”, this expression (which could also be rendered as “Lord, have compassion” or “have kindness”) is part of the “Kyrie eleison/ Christe eleison/ Kyrie eleison” triptych and expresses a plea for forgiveness, answered by a formula of priestly absolution that is usually resolved through the penitential acts of the Roman rite.
“Kyrie” was the track Florian cited in several interviews from the time, when asked about the essence of Popol Vuh's new album. Even more than “Ah!”, this track is “a preparation for the great central 'Hosanna Mantra'. I had in mind those who acclaimed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey: 'Hosanna, son of David!'. When I play the piece, I find myself in the midst of that crowd of needy people and say to myself: 'Now it's your turn', and then I play and sing what is, if we can call it that, the shabbiest coronation of all time. Music is a service to beauty”. In an interview given at the time of the release of "Hosianna Mantra" to German radio station SWR, he added that “the monks of Mount Athos, who lowered their heads to their chest and gazed at their navel while chanting 'Kyrie, Kyrie Eleison', drew great benefit from it. Why shouldn't I, as a musician, take part too? I make music and forget myself while making it, and I don't turn to the numinous, to the unconscious, in a way where I don't know how to fill it with content, but I try to fill it. And for me, the myth of the divine exists in some way. The same subconscious that other people fill with horror or science-fiction experiences. I also wanted to make music that didn't necessarily need drugs or anything like that, but that conveyed a pure, beautiful emotion”.
Musically speaking, “Kyrie” unfolds ethereally in an unreal landscape, made of delicate piano figures, guitar notes resembling the nocturnal whispers of otherworldly birds, the droning hum of the tambura (played by Florian himself), and Yun's diaphanous voice, a drop of light that helps carve human traces into the divine darkness.

The definitive convergence of East and West comes with the following title track, introduced by a hushed dialogue between piano and tambura before being handed over to a kind of liturgical-psychedelic jam, dominated above all by Veit's guitar, its warm spirals of sound soaring toward Jerry Garcia's “black stars”, electric iridescences crossing boundless spaces like echoes of a soul journeying toward the absolute. Yun's usual, sweet voice and the oboe, the latter steeped in nostalgia, help create a timeless atmosphere, in which the totality of human religious experience is probed from the essence that makes every faith a path toward the wellspring of the sacred.
The powerful message of "Hosianna Mantra", and specifically of its title track, finds a sonic counterpart precisely in the dialogue between the acoustic instruments (voice, oboe, piano, tambura) and the electric guitar, between the intrinsically organic, earthbound horizontality of the former and the celestial verticality of the latter. In the background lies the lesson of Martin Buber, especially of one of his most important works, "Ich und Du" (1923), in which emerges the sense of man's twofold inclination toward the world, torn between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. In the latter case, man experiences the world (things first of all, but also his fellow men) through impersonal, superficial and instrumental relations, whereas in the former he meets the other in a profound way, thereby managing to truly be himself – that is, authentic. For Buber, every human being is essentially dialogue, and for that reason is also homo religiosus, because the authenticity of the I-Thou relationship rests on what transcends that relationship.

The second part of the album, titled “Das V. Buch Mose” (“The Fifth Book of Moses”, i.e. “Deuteronomy”), opens with “Abschied”, whose tender oboe melody evokes far-off eras and figures of wanderers destined for oblivion. Conceived by Florian as a “love song” for his wife Bettina, “Segnung” emerges instead from very distant horizons, with Yun's voice cradled by music increasingly free to expand through celestial spaces (“Beati voi, nella città/ Beati voi, nel campo/ (…)/ Beati voi, al vostro arrivo/ Beati voi, nella vostra partenza”, from chapter 28 of "Deuteronomy"), and precisely for that reason ever closer to the essence of the poetic – if poetic images, following Hölderlin as read by Heidegger, are visible embodiments of the invisible, that invisible which, from the fourth minute onward, as the music rises to sublime peaks (Veit's guitar a minimalist churning of glowing notes...), seems to unfold into a thousand petals, like a lotus flower, to paraphrase Khalil Gibran.
Set between the two parts of “Andacht” (“Devotion”), the mournful, magnificent lied of "Nicht hoch im Himmel" (“Not High in the Sky”), with its austere piano counterpoint, brings this masterpiece to an ideal close, inviting man to stop looking upward, because God is here, among us: “I began composing 'Nicht hoch im Himmel' as far back as the time of 'In den Gärten Pharaos'”, Florian would recall, “but I thought setting it to music would be too difficult for me. On the other hand, it struck me deeply, because [the title] is a clear, unambiguous definition of religion. I wrote this piece shortly before the studio session. The text seemed so important to me because I knew a religious text is certainly subject to much misunderstanding, especially nowadays – and this text clearly states that religion is not something beyond man's reach, but that God is here, down below, in our actions, words and feelings. Yes, it's important to say that”.
Once again, the echo of Martin Buber's thought rings out loud and clear, having evidently had a profound impact on Florian and his music. According to the Austrian-born philosopher and theologian, the encounter with God is an event that occurs in the presence of the “here and now”. The encounter with God – with that God who is the ultimate ground of every religion – is an existential event, grounded in the dialogical relationship between the I and the eternal Thou.

…Nicht entrückt ist Es Dir
Nicht hoch im Himmel
Hoch im Himmel
Daß Du sagst:
Wer steigt für uns hinauf
Und holt uns. Sieh, nicht überm Meer ist's
Nicht fern
Daß du sagst:
Wer fährt uns übers Meer hinüber
Und holt uns. Nein,
Sehr nah ist Dir das Wort:
In deinem Mund und
In Deinem Herzen,
Es zu tun

Steeped in candour and transcendence, touched by grace, the music of "Hosianna Mantra" has the clarity of rock crystal. Having abandoned electronics, Florian combined contemplation and lyrical flight on this record, at the same time transforming the introspection of the earlier albums into true prayer.

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14/03/2026