Popol Vuh

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 Native Americans directly descended from the Maya. In it, the Munich band's leader found confirmation of the belief that particularly dynamic, powerful and penetrating sounds can have a beneficial effect on the human psyche, restoring harmony and balance to it. Building on these ideas, the German band's music was in effect a form of "sacred music" with strongly "therapeutic" leanings. Of course, they weren't the only band of the era interested in such matters, but in terms of results achieved, they remain the greatest of them all. After the still somewhat unripe debut of "Affenstunde" (1971), this desire to "internalize what is external" – as Fricke himself put it to the press at the time – found its first extraordinary realization in "In den Gärten Pharaos".

Split into two lengthy compositions, the album remains one of the highest peaks in the whole of "rock" music, thanks to an "esoteric" power that at times feels truly "absolute". At this point the band consisted of, alongside "mastermind" Florian Fricke (piano, organ), Frank Fielder (synthesizer) and percussionist Holger Trulzsch. The entire first "side" is taken up by the title track (17'39"): amid the rush of water, ambient noises, filtered and "liquid" percussion and sine waves carve out a dark, timeless fresco. It's a genuine ritual, in which – as the Quiché taught – the listener's participation must be highly "active", or else much of the music's purifying power is lost. The importance of purification is underlined by the soft roar of water. The synth's smoky whirlwinds expand and contract, in a mysticism-steeped revisiting of cosmic music. The garden of the pharaohs is a vast expanse of indecipherable figures, millennia-old mysteries, divine simulacra. Around the fifth minute, an obsessive tabla rhythm, meticulous in its strongly ritualistic pace, is darkened by menacing synth glissandi. At this point, one gets the impression of hearing, in a more "earthly" register, the monstrous spatial trajectories of "Irrlicht" (Klaus Schulze). But rather than annihilating itself in a violent explosion, this duel between "primitive" and "modern" is resolved, at 12'47", into a sublime piece of "fourth-world" jazz (if that's the word): tribal tabla patterns, minimalist Moog accents sliding into the metallic tones 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 the sound.

A grandiose, lush organ, and the vibration of a gong, introduce the absolute masterpiece of Popol Vuh: "Vuh" (19'58"). Recorded in Baumburg Cathedral, the track draws not only on the pipe organ (played by Fricke in a single, exhausting, prodigious, apocalyptic continuous cycle) but also on the very spatiality inherent to the sacred building. The power of the sound, in fact, seems to know no limits: one gets the impression that it expands to an almost unbelievable degree, in a terrifying, transcendent effort. Throughout its unfolding (which is, in fact, a non-development, since the track only grows "upon itself", not "from itself"), the piece lays out a dazzling theorem on the material and immaterial unity of sound and of the human microcosm, gathering further spiritual force as, alongside the terrifying organ drone, hallucinated webs of ecstatic (electronically synthesized) vocals, the restless, turbulent battering of timpani, and the linear yet uneasy trajectory of the percussion all come together. Slowly, and almost imperceptibly, the organ drone begins to lose sonic density. 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 blazing evocative charge. And everything fades into nothingness, back to where it came from.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

06/11/2006