Popol Vuh: Not Of This World

Any attempt to pigeonhole or simply reduce the stylistic merits of Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh to fit neatly into the rubric of prog-rock, krautrock or proto-new age would not only be terribly limiting, but would be a misnomer to the genres that Fricke's music flirted with in a restless yet glorious courtship.

Florian Fricke is much closer at heart to the likes of Wagner and Strauss than Roedelius or Schulze. It's no coincidence that Fricke often collaborated with Werner Herzog, whose grand cinematic scale is forged from the same weltanschauung of the giants of Germanic opera. From Fricke's first outing with Herzog on the legendary Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the posthumously released Wheel of Time, Fricke and his various incarnations of Popol Vuh provided the musical narrative to Herzog's mythic forays into delusion, madness, hubris and the unavoidable fall. Who was Fricke, and what was the source of the capricious, divine muse that moved him away from the cosmic energy of patchwork synths, loops, and chiming guitars to acoustic suites of pure devotion to a decidedly Christian God?

Fricke was born under the sign of Pisces, on February 23, 1944, as the final stages of World War II played themselves out. He grew up in a post-war German landscape that was not only physically scarred by the wages of combat, but a nation that was psychically in need of healing and redemption. Whether or not Fricke's music expressed this consciously is hard to quantify, yet the themes of forgiveness and love recur over and over again in albums like Agape-Agape, Hosianna Mantra and Sei Still, wisse ich bin ("Is quiet knows I AM"). Whether it was Eastern or Western mystical themes, to which Fricke became more and more drawn, he and Popol Vuh were perhaps the most deeply religious of any of the great German bands of the '70s and '80s, such as Can, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, Cluster and Ash Ra Temple.

Initially drawn to and then deeply immersed in Mayan mythology (hence his band's name), Fricke started Popol Vuh in 1970 with synth player Frank Fiedler and percussionist Holger Trulzch. Their debut release, Affenstunde, is a classic, using early synthesizers and percussion to create eerie yet highly effective space music. It's often disorienting, especially on the 18-minute-long title track — truly heady stuff for its day. We've had decades to decode scores of electronic music and have developed language to describe what we hear, but when Fricke and company released Affenstunde it must've sounded like music from the future. Thirty-six years after its release, it still sounds engaging and not at all dated nor kitschy. Like other German electronic records that were to follow in its wake, the sound of the synth is synonymous with the rise of post-war electronics in Germany. From advanced audio-circuitry to state-of-the-art automobiles, the Moogs and synths on Affenstunde offer a loving embrace of technology that affirms life rather than obliterates it.

Playing these monstrous machines was no easy feat, either. Synth pioneer Robert Moog didn't introduce the more compact Minimoog until June, 1971, a year after Affenstunde was recorded; until then, the Moog was still a large, wires-out cabinet. Fricke was a true pioneer, plugging and patching and bending sine waves into sound. It's hard for many of us to imagine how difficult it was to tame one of Moog's noisy robots in their early incarnations.

Popol Vuh made one more remarkable electronic record before Fricke had a conversion experience that led him to ditch both electronic music and occult mysticism. In den Garten Pharaos ("In the Garden of Pharaohs") might be the electronic equivalent of Paul Horn's Inside The Taj Mahal, and maybe the first synth-driven new age record. The title track (and most of the album, for that matter) is so far ahead of what almost anyone else was doing at the time, it sounds completely contemporary.

The restless spirit of Fricke moved radically away from electronics on the follow-up to Garden. In fact, he sold his beloved Moog to Tangerine Dream's Klaus Schulze. His quiet revelation led to the stunningly beautiful Hosianna Mantra, which was the musical expression of Fricke's conversion to Christianity. Built mainly around piano, voice and both acoustic and electric guitar, it presages a direction that Fricke would follow for the better part of the '70s and '80s.

But while Fricke sought both musical and spiritual purity, his association with Herzog brought him in contact with a director often so possessed by his vision for a film that he bordered on the demonic. The music of Herzog's films is critical; for Aguirre, Fricke employed the use of a "choir-organ," which has three dozen different tapes running parallel to each other in loops and a keyboard, played like an organ, with a human-choir sound that is quite artificial. Fricke was able to concoct an eerie sound without having to resort to electronics; he was able to stay true to his acoustic leanings and humble spirit while providing Herzog with a soundtrack that is both haunting and unforgettable. Later releases like Yoga, Tantric Songs and Letzte-Tage, Letzte-Nacht became canonical sacred-music recordings that were ultimately marketed as new age, for an emerging genre that was rising in commercial status. Up until his untimely death in 2001, Florian Fricke was a man who aspired to live in this world yet not be of it, his music a testament to the commitment and expression of that lofty principle of a life in sound.