POPOL VUH

1. "In den Gärten Pharaos" (17:37) droning, slowly changing, organ and synth are joined in the eighth minute by hand drums and then, in the eleventh minute, by cymbals. This could very well have been similar to the ambient sounds one might hear lilting around in the courtyards and alleys of the royal palaces of Ancient Egyptian kings. At the end of the 13th minute Fender Rhodes takes the fore while the percussion rhythm changes and the organ and synth take a much further-in-the-background role--until a few temporary uprisings occur in the 15th and 17th minutes. Certainly Kosmische Musik! (31/35)

2. "Vuh" (19:48) church organ in a more traditional use--with big chords, long held and slowly shifting--comes out as the principle music maker here though crashing, crescendoing, and tinkling cymbals, synth "flutes," and "heavenly" choral voices are also heard. And that's pretty much it! Hand drums in the far distance join the cymbal cacophony in the eighth minute and then gain an increasing share of the soundscape (moved forward in the mix) during the 12th minute and beyond (as the organ is commensurately moved to the background). What I thought was going to be a gentle, beautiful organ concerto turns out to be a bull-in-the-china-shop cymbal exhibition. With the 15th minute the cymbals and drumming take a break, allowing the still-droning, rhythmically-shifting organ to take the fore again, but then the cymbals rise again in the 16th minute, hand drums in the 17th. This music was obviously a big inspiration for Vangelis' 1970s work as well as most of Stefano Musso's great career as ALIO DIE. Also for Jonathan Goldman's work with trance-generating and other meditative/breath work musical guides. (35.5/40)

Total Time: 37:25

I'm not sure which of the two side-long mesmerics I like more--probably "Vuh" due to the presence of the drone organ and mysterious background vocals (which also lend credibility to the possibility of this type of music/sound being familiar to Egyptian palace workers 4500 years ago.

B/four stars; an excellent album that will not be everyone's cup of tea but should not be missed in terms of hearing yet another of the diverse musical forms of expression contrived over the late 1960s and early 1970s. Despite my overall lower than expected marks, I do consider this album a major landmark in the formation and solidification of a niche of music that will have profound use and effect in the "human potential" movements of the 1970s and 1980s; a sure-fire masterpiece of Kosmische Musik.

It is interesting that, unlike other bands in the same situation, like Tangerine Dream and Kluster, which evolved in their way of doing the electronic prog albums, Popol Vuh remained in the progressive rock realm but with a completely different style.

Not wanting to go too much in what isn't in the album, Affenstunde is a high-experimental album with only Moog Synthesizer explorations and percussion. Considering the date it was recorded (1970), where analog synthesizers were only in form of big sets of knobs, swithces and cables, it is a great technical acheivement to be able to produce these sounds and be able to fill an entire album with them.

That said, most of the album consists in tuneless melodies that sound improvised. It feels like the purpose of exploring the synth capabilities than to using it to generated the sounds to play a composed song. The songs have long parts of drone sounds with some improvised melodies. The percussion sometimes gives a rhythmic feel to the long drones, sometimes are improvised as well, as if each musician was playing their own thing.

To be able to enjoy this album, one must like a very specific kind of music, experimental and improvisational. And, even for the ones who like it, there are some better albums out there (for example, the second Popol Vuh album). So, while I enjoy it, I'd recommend this album only to those who have an idea of what to expect.

I'll start with latter, the title work Kailash, subtitled Pilgrimage to the Throne of Gods. Strangely I don't find anywhere on this set the information revealing WHEN the film and the music were done, but it really is timeless, in a way. Listened to individually without the film, the music for Kailash (named after a Tibetan mountain) makes one think how spiritual person Florian Fricke must have been. The instrumental music, at times coloured by local chant-oriented music, is in a word meditative. The Austrian artist Gandalf has done rather similar sort of New Age-y, spiritually felt music. Safe to say that a listener without any sympathy towards New Age music will get pretty bored if not falling asleep.

The 53-minute film is mostly a work of amateurs and it's not attempting to be any fancier than it is, with a bit shaky camera runs and such. It's a harmonic and unhurried view on Tibet, its nature and people who undoubtedly live the way their ancestors have lived for centuries. Nature, harmony, divinity. Without personally wishing to visit there, I must admit the local people seem to be quite happy and free of social troubles. Speaking of the music (other things heard on the film are minimal, for example no speaking at all), it becomes somehow more trivial and almost unnoticed. I borrowed the set from library and I have no interest for a second viewing or listening.

The first disc featuring eight solo piano pieces is musically more enduring and satisfying. According to liner notes, "with the background of a classical composer, it was one of Florian's late wishes to release 'piano only' recordings". The pieces are very calm and introvert. They have a spiritual simplicity comparable to the music of Arvo Pärt. Perhaps Erik Satie could be mentioned too, although Fricke's spacey minimalism is less melodic and much more serious and introvert on mood. Some pieces are studies for Popol Vuh tracks on albums such as Hosianna Mantra (1973). This set can be recommended to a dedicated fan, but its musical appeal remains very minor for others.

All the songs are similar but I think it works very well because as we listen to it Popol Vuh uses the instruments to slowly create in our minds this ethereal feeling and maintains the same vibe until the end, there are little chorals here and there and is very relaxing.

I was maintained in this spiritual state through all the album and not only this but didn't notice in the first moment that was over and playing again from the beginning.

A very peaceful record that gives to the listener a relaxing and remarkable experience. 4 Stars.

AFFENSTUNDE (in English "monkey hour") was released in 1970, the same year as Tangerine Dream's debut "Electronic Meditation" but while Edgar Froese and company were at the point of flirting with totally cosmic chaos in sound with more emphasis on detachment and escapism in an experimental rock context, POPOL VUH on the other hand had already developed one of the earliest ambient electronic albums that focused on the expansive qualities of the moog synthesizer taking the Krautrock scene out of the heavy psych blues based guitar rock of the 60s and propelling the scene into the distant realms of outer space. Although not usually credited as such, AFFENSTUNDE nonetheless provided a blueprint for many other similarly minded German acts to latch onto.

While Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Igor Wakhévitch and many others would soon make entire careers out of these spaced out journeys into the moog zone, it was really POPOL VUH that started the whole thing before completely abandoning these sounds in order to focus on more organic instrumentation with heavy influences from world music genera. Despite the rich expansive sounds that are experienced on AFFENSTUNDE, in reality all sounds were created on a single 4-module moog synthesizer accompanied by fiery ethnic percussion that included both Indian tablas and Middle Eastern rhythmic percussive drive long before Agitation Free adopted the same hybridization effect.

Although AFFENSTUNDE is broken up into four tracks (a fifth bonus track that fits in quite well is added on the 2004 remaster edition), in reality this is a single spaced out journey that starts out by breaking free of Earth's gravitational pull and provides a soundscape that focuses on bizarre quantum sounding oscillations, strange electronic bloops and bleeps that randomly phase in and out and spaced out atmospheric backdrops that imitate solar winds and heavenly ambience. The original album featured the three part "Ich Mache Einen Spiegel" (I make a mirror) for side A and the 19 minute title track for side B. The album created a bizarre contradiction with ambient sounds that emanated the cold vacuous regions of deep space but reeled in the detachment with heavy doses of randomly displayed ethnic percussion with begin on the "Dream Part 5" (there are no parts 1-3, it all starts with Part 4.)

Basically the "Dream Part 4" is exclusively space ambience and is followed by "Dream Part 5" which is exclusively tribal percussion circles. "Dream Part 49" reverts back to space ambience only makes it all even weirder, more detached and more representative of the deepest recesses of outer space. Like a trip around Pluto perhaps! The grand finale is the side long title track which fuses the two disparate styles together in a stream of consciousness that extends to the 19 minute mark and features the space rock interacting with the tribal percussion. This sequence is perhaps some of the strangest and most forward thinking creative outburst in all of the early Krautrock scene. While it would've been easy to simply feature tribal drumming behind a wall of ambient sound, Fricke was a genius in how he melded the two polar opposites together in a manner that changed the entire effect of both.

This one doesn't seem to get a lot of love as most POPOL VUH fans tend to get to this debut release well after they have become familiar with the more melodic and organic albums that dominated the 70s. AFFENSTUNDE is the anomaly of the POLPOL VUH canon but for those seeking the furthest out there Krautrock trips then this one is surely one for the essential list as it encapsulates everything that makes such music so wildly dynamic. The album is paced well and allows the emotive reactions to ratchet up until climaxes and then moves on as not to become repetitive and redundant. This style of music is subtle and complex but quite rewarding for those who crave a complete disregard for music tradition and like the Star Trek series that ended only the year prior, showcases that pioneering spirit that proves that music could still venture forth into arenas where no human being has gone before. Love this one!

One of the interesting aspects of this album is how spacey it sounds while containing a lot of more krautrock elements into the mix as well, particularly whenever there's drumming. The album's tone is established immediately within the first couple of minutes of the title track, with the relaxing sounds of water with a droning moog creating a very calming atmosphere that definitely has an element of spaciness to it. The drumming is what I find to be quite interesting here, due to the fact that it's quite fast paced and completely contrasts the minimalistic nature of all the other components of the track. This could be seen as a bad thing, but the tribal drumming that regularly falls into hypnotic groove works exceptionally to further add to the track's ability to engross the listener. There's also considerably more progression in this than in a lot of ambient that I've heard, as this has clear sections where things change up to some extent, with the most notable one being where everything begins to build up, the drums get faster, and then everything falls back into the same sort of groove as before, but with an additional keyboard melody over the top, which continues to play on until all that remains is the sound of water once again.

The atmosphere of Vuh is more grandiose than that of the title track, with the inclusion of the church organ as the core of the track creating a far different feel, much more ominous and intense rather than relaxing. That said, the approach remains largely the same, with long periods of droning backed by hand percussion that constantly switches between very fast paced, to extremely rhythmic and hypnotic, both of which play into the track exquisitely. This track manages to perfectly strike an odd balance between sounding downright intense and chaotic at points with how immersive yet majestic the soundscape is, yet still sound like something almost perfect to meditate to. This is the preferred track on the album to me due to the fact that I really can't think of much that sounds even close to this, or at least manages to pull off such a sound as well as this does.

This is easily what I consider to be one of Popol Vuh's best albums, as the band never went this intense before or after, with much less focus on making a merely pleasant experience displayed here, but rather taking the core concept of ambient and then creating something unique from it. This is what krautrock was all about, being unconventional and daring, in this case, not only expanding upon the ambient approach of their debut, Affenstunde, but adding a brand new spin on it through the far more intense approach taken. This not only acts as a point of interest in terms musical influence, but works extremely well as an album in its own right, and is definitely one that I've enjoyed listening to countless times.

Verdict: While not necessarily a great introduction into either ambient or krautrock, this is a very impressive album, both for how ahead of its time it feels, and for how well the album works in its own right, capturing so much intensity at points while still remaining disinctly meditative, leading to a deeply enjoyable album overall.

The b-side, if you will, is a Haswell & Hecker remix of "Aguirre I," originally from the 1972 soundtrack to Aguirre - The Wrath of God (and also included, with "Aguirre II" and several other pieces, on Popol Vuh's 1975 album Aguirre, which did not feature "Aguirre III" in its original form. So it's complicated). Though they were recorded 15 years apart by different lineups of the band, what connects "Nachts: Schnee" and "Aguirre I" is that both were recorded for films by New German Cinema director Werner Herzog. "Aguirre I" comes from the film Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes ("Aguirre, the Wrath of God"), considered one of the best movies of all time. Roger Ebert, for example, included in his personal top-ten in 2002. Ebert devoted two paragraphs in his original movie review to the soundtrack, which he credits to "Florian Fricke, whose band Popol Vuh?has contributed the soundtracks to many Herzog films." Elsewhere, of course, including on this release, it is attributed to Popol Vuh. Like he original "Nachts: Schnee," "Aguirre I" is largely atmospheric, although it contains other elements at the beginning and end of its seven-plus-minute runtime. The Haswell & Hecker track is much in the spirit of the Vainio remix of "Nachts: Schnee."

While I appreciate both of these remixes, and I recognize that they are every bit as musical as Beethoven, I can't say that I understand the exact purpose behind this release. At least as music separate from the films they were created for, the original tracks were average cinema music, and neither of these mixes add much value to its source material.

This music isn't rock: is sacred classical music with modern occidental arrangement. Florian Fricke's piano and harpsichord lead the orchestra formed by the violin and the oboe flanked by instruments typical of western pop-rock: acoustic and electric guitar, played in a classical way by the guitarist Conny Veitt. The eastern part of the sound is entrusted to the Klaus Wiese tambura and the celestial soprano voice, the Korean Djong Yun.

The original album (1972) is composed in two parts: the side A called "Hosianna Mantra", and the side B called "Das V. Buch Mose". "Ah!" is an instrumental piece where the piano repeats hypnotically some ascending and descending stairs. It is an interlocutory piece, which has a certain nervousness. Vote 7,5.

"Kyrie": in this song, embellished by the angelic voice of the singer, you hear more the almost psychedelic phrasing of the electric guitar, which allows you to reach meditative ecstasy. Vote 8.

In "Hosianna - Mantra" (ten minutes, vote 8,5/9) the Christ's ascension into Heaven is accompanied at the beginning by Yun's voice and a crescendo of electric guitar and piano that wants to reach mystical ecstasy. After a slowdown and a pause, the hypnotic cadence of the piece begins again and the cresendo of the song declaiming "Hosianna" is wonderful. The sacred touch is reached by the atmosphere created by the voice and the oboe (played by Robert Eliscu). Great masterpiece.

Side B, "Das V Buch Mose", is inspired by the biblical narratives of the fifth book of Moses. "Abschied" is an instrumental piece driven by the oboe, which gives it melancholy. Vote 7 +. "Segnung" (six minutes) is an atmospheric piece where you hear the harpsichord in the background and Yun's voice is more ethereal than ever. When it seems to go towards fading, the phrasing of the piano returns to make the piece lively. Vote 8+. Masterpiece. "Andacht" are 40 seconds of celestial atmosphere.

"Nicht hoch im Himmel" (again 6 minutes) is the most unpredictable and hybrid piece between meditative tone (the singing) and moments of restlessness (always left to the piano). Not easy to be listened. Vote 7,5/8. "Andacht II" are 35 seconds of final tail.

Hosianna Mantra, year 1972, is an album full of celestial songs, but too homogeneous, that towards the end requires a certain motivation to be listened. The music is not so much a mixture between east and west because the orchestration is typically western, but the meditative and ethereal tone, worthy of a yoga session, make it suitable for the east. Hosianna Mantra anticipates ambient and new Age music.

Medium quality of the songs: 7,92. Vote Album: 8,5. Rating: Four Stars.

The only hangup I have with this album and Popol Vuh in general is they make me feel guilty for not practicing my faith more consistently 4.5 stars