Kenneth Grant wrote a book called Outside the Circles Of Time. Popol Vuh are a little like that: beyond the vagaries involved in the usual machineries of joy (?) that hold sway and dominance in the business of music, Florian Fricke makes albums in Munich that avoid the crude fits and starts that pass muster as ‘progressions’ in rock. Apart from his early experiments with Moog synthesizers, his records could be shuffled and put in any sequence, rather like a Tarot deck. Intangible as dreams and spirits, they evoke traces of long-dead cultures and timeless Gods.
Here we are in Egypt of Greece of heaven (and I don’t mean the gay niteclub), with Florian caressing his ivories. If Werner Herzog is urged on by a pestiferous Daemon, then acoustic collaborator Fricke is his Guardian Angel on earth, no Lucifer but certainly a lightbringer. His guitarists Conny Veit and Daniel Fichelscher can make that much abused tool sound like the mystical vibration of platinum wires in an angel’s harp. But the part of Popol Vuh’s muse that always – initially and ever since the everlasting first time – shivers me timbers in the choral vocal effect, binding in its purity. One Renate Knaup is responsible, all praise deserved.
The titles are the usual gently informative yet vaguely pantheistic ecstasy symbols – ‘They danced, they laughed, as of old’; ‘The Christ is near’; ‘Behold, the drover summons’; ‘Why do I still sleep’…Why indeed? There’s still time to experience vinyl transubstantiation.
Sandy Robertson