Of the pioneers blasting out of Germany in the '60s and '70s, one band remains elusive. As a major reissue campaign gets underway, we tackle the genre-spanning, shape-shifting, release-befuddling Popol Vuh
"I have answered this question before; I always find new styles, different forms of playing, that I'm incorporating into the music of Popol Vuh. The essence of my music remains the same. The forms are changing, but the essence remains the same."
So said the late Florian Fricke, leader of Popol Vuh, answering a question posed by producer/ presenter Gerhard Augustin in 1996 about the band's latest stylistic departure. There's a hint of weariness in Fricke's response. He's been asked this sort of thing before. Many times.
Of the first generation of electronic and experimental bands to come out of Germany in the late '60s, Fricke's Popol Vuh are the hardest to pin down. There's a sense in which Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream are understood, retrospectively. Not so Popol Vuh, who still seem, to use a period phrase, out of sight.
This can be attributed in part to the sheer scale of the band's back catalogue. There were twenty-one albums between 1970 and 1999, released on multiple labels, and many already reissued more than once since. Add in compilations, boxsets, an unauthorised album of Fricke playing with Indian musicians, along with a raft of Fricke solo albums, and it's a formidable task keeping track of it all. And then there's the range of the music. At risk of reducing this most uncategorisable of bands to neat genre definitions, they made electronic, prog, jazz, soundtrack, ambient, piano-based modern classical and new age material. Sometimes all at once.
In the face of such complexity, Fricke's son Johannes and former band members Guido Hieronymus and Frank Fiedler are taking a welcome curatorial approach to the latest reissue programme - starting with six albums (though not the first six), released separately and in a vinyl boxset. There's a sense of providing listeners with routes through a labyrinthine sound world in which they might otherwise get hopelessly lost. It's not a career that can be summed up lightly, so continuing with a critical approach of our own, here we concentrate on one facet of Fricke's expansively diverse body of work.
Florian Fricke was born in 1944. He was an early starter on piano, and later studied at the Conservatories in Freiburg and Munich. He was briefly a music and film critic, in which capacity he met German film director Werner Herzog in 1967. Fricke had a small role in Herzog's Lebenszeichen (1968), the first fruit of a creative relationship that became a significant part of Popol Vuh's story.
Sometime in 1969, Fricke bought a Moog III modular synthesiser, and Gerhard Augustin of Liberty Records signed him up to produce a Moog album. Some reports say Fricke's was the first Moog in Germany, though Fiedler says it was the second. "The first one went to Eberhard Schoener a year earlier," he says.
To realise Augustin's commission, Fricke founded Popol Vuh with Holger Trulzsch (percussion), Fiedler (recording engineer) and his wife, Bettina Fricke (tablas and production). Members came and went over the next twenty years, with Fricke the one constant. The band's name was taken from the book Popol Vuh, a Mayan creation narrative originating from the K'iche' people before the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. It was something of a counter- cultural favourite at the time, pointing to the themes of spiritual and cultural exploration that ran through Fricke's subsequent music.
Released in 1970, Popol Vuh's first album, Affenstunde, was a revolutionary record. Both Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream released their debuts around the same time. Electronic milestones both, but technologically they were in a different category entirely from Affenstunde, constructed as they were primarily of electronic and tape manipulation of traditional instruments (flutes, organs, electric guitars) over rock drums. And not a synth in sight.
Affenstunde, on the other hand, was a Moog album. There had been Moog albums before (Switched On Bach, George Harrison's Electronic Sound), but nothing came close to Fricke's inventiveness with an instrument then little understood. It's music made before any conventions about how to make this sort of music were established. Johannes thinks his father's classical training was significant, enabling him to create harmonically rich tones from multitracking the monophonic Moog. Somehow both freeform and structured, it goes far beyond the anyone-could-do-it accusation often directed at drone-based early electronic music.
"We used audiotapes like notation paper," says Fiedler. "We produced a series of sound recordings [on a pair of Revox tape decks that constituted the band's home studio] and later put them together in the studio on multitrack machines. The invention of the sounds was practically improvisation. The compilation on the multitrack machine could be described as structural finish."
Side one of Affenstunde starts with birdsong, and what might be a recording of someone diving into water, before the listener is submerged in the three-part Ich Mache Einen Spiegel dream series. The title track occupies all of side two. The multitracked Moogs move through spacey murmurs and bubbling refrains to, in the title track, sections of modal bagpipe-like melody. Percussion ebbs and flows, sometimes a gentle pattering, rising to a pummelling rumble. The overall effect is meditative, mysterious, and at times a little unsettling.
The following year came In Den Garten Pharaos (not included in this first phase of the reissue programme), comprising two side-long tracks that, Johannes says, were more scored than the debut. The first, the title track, begins and ends with recordings of running water, pastoral brackets around an immersive composition of varied moods, including, at around ten minutes, a section of '50s sci-fi-style Moog portamento, mimicking a theremin. The track ends with four minutes of loose, jazzy Fender Rhodes/tabla improvisation, calling to mind the vibes and congas on Tim Buckley albums Blue Afternoon and Lorca the previous year.
On to side two, and the epic Vuh, recorded live in a church. Minor key gothic organ, vox humana synths and billowing crash cymbals resolve into hand drums, a major key chord change, and cymbals now ringing like a peal of mad bells. It's an intense, cascading, overwhelming listen, overflowing with invention. Bonus tracks on an earlier reissue - Kha-White Structures 1 and Kha-White Structures 2 - show a menacing, ambivalent edge that rarely surfaced again in Popol Vuh's story. The first is perhaps the closest the band got to the krautrock of popular imagination, with a bracing, distorted Moog lead over a circular, repetitive sequence.
However, Fricke's relationship with the Moog was to be a brief, intense affair.
"It was a great fascination to encounter sounds that were until those days not heard before from the outside," he told Gerhard Augustin in his 1996 interview. "It was the possibility to express sounds that a composer was hearing from within himself, which in many cases are different from what a normal instrument could express. Therefore, this was a fantastic way into my inside consciousness, to express what I was hearing within myself."
But the moment passed. The third Popol Vuh album sounded like an entirely different band. Fricke aside, it was an entirely different band. For Hosianna Mantra (1972), he abandoned the Moog in favour of piano, and drafted in oboe, guitar, tamboura, and Korean soprano Djong Yun. It's a spectacular album, but it's not an electronic one. In fact, electric guitar aside, it's an acoustic one. Fricke sold the Moog to Klaus Schulze, and never again made another record like Affenstunde or In Den Garten Pharaos.
At this point, things start to get complicated. In the next two years, three largely acoustic albums followed, with Fricke leading on piano. Then came the release of Aguirre, the soundtrack to Herzog's 1972 film Aguirre, Der Zorn Gottes. The album was released in 1975, but the tracks mostly date from 1972, and includes Vergegenwartigung, nearly seventeen minutes of minimalist Moog textures.
The Aguirre theme itself appears in several versions, a sweeping choral piece rendered on an instrumentthat remains something of an enigma. Fricke had lent his Moog to Amon Düül II for their 1971 album Tanz Der Lemminge, which features one Jimmy Jackson playing the "choir-organ". It's this same instrument that Fricke uses for Aguirre. Most accounts agree it was a Mellotron-like keyboard playing tape loops of choirs. Whether it was actually a modified Mellotron, a version of the Mellotron's ancestor the Chamberlin, or a homemade one-off is unclear. One description has it as four boxes of tape recorders, each with a keyboard. Fiedler remembers two big plywood boxes, weighing in at up to a hundred and fifty kilos. There's talk of it residing in a museum somewhere, but no one seems to know where. There are no known photos. Whatever it was, or is, with its drawn out vocal tones rendered opaque by tape hiss, it's an appropriately elusive and ghostly presence in the Popol Vuh story.
Another Herzog film, Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht (1979), was the spur for Fricke to once again revisit his Moog period. Herzog commissioned him to write music for the film, which resulted in the album Brüder Des Schattens - Söhne Des Lichts. This was in the now dominant acoustic style, with Fricke on piano.
Tracks from the album were used in the film, but Herzog reportedly wanted "music to be afraid by". This led to a second, more electronic album Nosferatu. By this time, the Moog had gone to Klaus Schulze, but Fricke reopened the boxes of quarter-inch Moog reels he and Fiedler had recorded on their Revoxtape recorders in the early '70s, and used these as the basis for three tracks on this second album. Both albums were released in 1978 on Brain Records. Are you keeping up? Some subsequent reissues have conflated the two albums to some extent, so that pinning down what actually is the "proper" Nosferatu soundtrack becomes a puzzle.
Discographical conundrums aside, the new BMG reissue-which combines both original albums - is a useful entry point into 1970s Popol Vuh, embracing both electronic and acoustic music in a soundtrack context.
Nosferatu was the last expression of the original electronic impulse that drove Popol Vuh. Fricke continued with a stream of often spiritually themed piano-based albums, but by the 1990s, he could once again see a place for electronics in music. Speaking to Augustin Luviano-Cordero in 1994, he talked about how sampling technology opened up new possibilities. Even so, there seems to have been ambivalence.
"But that has really nothing to do with whether or not I value the 'electronic' sound," he said. "I actually don't, because it is foreign to all spiritual vibrations. It is like a person without a shadow."
Train Through Time, a ten-minute bonus track included on the Affenstunde reissue, hints at what might have been a way forward. This rhythmic composition by Fricke and Fiedler, made on an Ensoniq TS 12 workstation synth, uses samples of trains. Dating from around 1997, it nods to the first-ever piece of musique concrete, Pierre Schaeffer's Etude Aux Chemins De Fer, created nearly half a century earlier.
Fricke, who Fiedler describes as "very attentive, alert, relentless... very inspired", died in Munich of a stroke on December 29, 2001, at just fifty-seven. A decade later, SPV released Revisited & Remixed 1970-1999, which combined an idiosyncratic selection of Fricke's original recordings with remixes by contemporary artists, including Mouse On Mars. Stereolab took on Hosianna Mantra, an analogue synth band in thrall to kosmische musik reimagining an original piece of kosmische music that didn't use any synths at all. It's a collaboration that captures something of Fricke's freewheeling, unrestrained, contradictory creative spirit. Johannes Fricke says another remix album pairing Popol Vuh with current artists is planned. Until then, das ist alles.

A six-LP vinyl boxset, The Essential Album Collection: Vol. 1, featuring Affenstunde, Hosianna Mantra, Einsjager & Siebenjager, Aguirre and Nosferatu is out now on BMG

Mag sein, dass für Musikkonsumenten unter 50 die Formation Popol Vuh kein Begriff mehr ist. Das ändert jedoch nichts an der historischen Bedeutung jenes außergewöhnlichen Projekts, für das seit jeher der Lindauer Florian Fricke als Mastermind stand.

Der 1944 geborene zog bereits als Teenager nach München, um dort an der Musikhochschule zu studieren. Und blieb der bayerischen Landeshauptstadt bis zu seinem frühen Tod mit nur 57 Jahre am 29.12.2001 treu. Der klassisch ausgebildete Komponist, Pianist und Dirigent Fricke stand seinem Projekt Popol Vuh bis zu seinem Ableben über 30 Jahre lang vor, bekannt geworden ist er einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit vor allem durch die Soundtracks zu Werner Herzog-Filmen wie “Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes”, “Nosferatu” oder “Fitzcaraldo”. Ach ja: In England, Frankreich, Italien oder den USA steckte man Popol Vuh gerne in die New-Age-Ecke in die seine Band nach Frickes Ansicht aber nicht gehörte. Für ihre einst nicht unbeträchtliche Anhängerschar passten Popol Vuh sowieso in keinerlei Stilschublade.

Fricke war neben dem Klassik-Rock-Veteranen Eberhard Schoener derjenige deutsche Musiker, der bereits anno 1969 “über einen Moog-synthesizer verfügte, auf dem er die ersten beiden Popol-Vuh-Alben AFFENSTUNDE und IN DEN GÄRTEN PHARAOS einspielte – noch heute gelten sie als sternstunden im Bereich experimenteller Elektronikmusik. Ab dann wandte der introvertierte Mann sich weitgehend von der Elektronik ab und seinem Sound zu, den man als frühen Ambient bezeichnen kann.

Die fünf vermutlich wichtigsten Popol-Vuh-Alben (AFFENSTUNDE, HOSIANNA MANTRA, EINSJÄGER & SIEBENJÄGER, AGUIRRE, NOSFERATU) sind gerade als Einzel-CDs  wie in einer opulenten Vinylbox unter dem Titel THE ESSENTIAL ALBUM COLLECTION VOL.1 digital remastert neu erschienen. Und weil “Vol.1” auf dem Cover zu lesen ist, bleibt zu hoffen, dass auch die weitern knapp zwei Dutzend Alben des Ausnahmeprojekts bald ihren Weg zurück in die Öffentlichkeit finden und dadurch speziell eine interessierte junge Generation erreichen.

Frank Fiedler ist Musiker, Produzent, Regisseur und kameramann. Der 74-jährige Kieler hat Fricke in seiner Jahrzehntelangen Wahlheimat München, wo er bis heute zu hause ist, bereits Ende der 60er Jahre kennen- und schätzen gelernt. Der gemütliche Norddeutsche zeichne zusammen mit dem Produzenten Guido Hieronymus verantwortlich für die Wiederveröffentlichungen. Deshalb ein entspanntes Gespräch in Fiedlers Wohnung, gelegen in Münchner Stadtteil Schwabing, unweit des Englischen Gartens.

Wie kam er zu den Wiederveröfftenlichungen?

Florians Sohn Johannes stand Ende 2017 bei mir in der Tür, einen Vertrag in der Hand. Er wollte, dass ich, als enger Begleiter seines Vaters, die alten sachen sensibel bearbeitete. Das habe ich mit Guido getan. Sehr gerne verständlich.

Welche Rolle spielst du im Popol-Vuh-Kosmos?

Ich bin der große Archivar, wenn man so will.  Außerdem waren Florian und ich enge Freunde, wobei wir durchaus auch mal Streit hatten. Wie das bei wahren Freunden üblich ist. Wir teilten eine Menge kreativer Ideen, waren im ständigen Austausch. Florian und ich wussten, wie der andere in künstlerischer Hinsicht tickt.

Wann wurden Florian und du Freunde?

Robert Moog, Erbauer des Moog Synthesizers, kam 1969 nach Deutchland, um Florian in die Bedienung seines Instruments einzuweisen. Doch Florian war nie ein großer Technikfreak. Durch eine gemeinsame Freundin kam ich ins Spiel. Ich liebe Technologie! Fortan haben wir beide uns die Nächte um die Ohren gehauen, damit wir dieses neuartige, völlig irre Gerät in den Griff bekommen und ihm schöne Musik entlocken.

Wie ging es weiter zwischen euch?

Die ersten beiden Alben haben wir komplett im Alleingang ersonnen und mit einigen Musikerkumpels aufgenommen. Danach hat sich Florian weitgehend von der Elektronik abgewandt. Ich wiederum habe mich verstärkt um Filmeprojekte gekümmert. Aber wir blieben bis zu Florians Tod beständig in Kontakt. Ich war an jeder neuen Produktion in irgendeiner Form beteiligt.

Warum hat sich Florian deiner Anischt nach schon bald von elektronischen Sounds verabscheidet?

Er fand die Klänge, die mit dem Moog erzeugt werden konnten, zwar äußerst spannend. Aber auf Dauer war ihm das zu seelenlos. Folgerichtig hat er sich eine ‘natürliche’ Instrumentierung zurückbesonnen, schließlich war er studierter Musiker. Und er war großer Mozart-Fan. Das wollte er die Welt durch eigene Musik wissen lassen.

Wird er weitergehen mit der Popol Vuh-Wiederveröffentlichungswelle?

Sieht gut aus! Bereits im Herbst soll die nächste Box erscheinen, im Frühjahr eine weitere. BMG glaubt fest daran, dassdieser Sound eine Menge alter  wie neuer Hörer finden wird. Das glaube ich übrigens auch. Es würdem ich sehr freuen.

“Florian was more interested in how, over the history of mankind, people gathered over religious lifestyles and then created music. And so he studied Buddhism, Hinduism, he also studied the Bible”

Enigmatic krautrock pioneers Popol Vuh continue to intrigue fifty years on from their inception. Prog lifts the lid on their enthralling career...

Out of all the groups active in Germany in the so-called 'krautrock' scene of the late '60s into the '70s, Popol Vuh were the most mysterious and enigmatic. With their exploration of the transcendental in electronic and acoustic music they had little overlap with rock, and stylistically found themselves set apart from their peers. The group's founder and sole constant member, keyboard player Florian Fricke, was musically active until his death in 2001, but he had rarely been interviewed for the UK music press and many releases flew under the radar.

But now BMG are beginning a reissue campaign with The Essential Album Collection Vol. 1 on CD and vinyl box sets, remastered by Frank Fiedler from the original line-up and latterday Popol Vuh member Guido Hieronymus. An image had formed around Fricke of a shadowy, almost hieratic figure, inhabiting a rarefied creative space in which he made his avowedly spiritual music, while also contributing soundtracks to films by the German film director Werner Herzog.

Fiedler remembers him rather differently:

"Florian was a very good worker - he could see a whole project through to a good end. He was a family man, too. He liked to cook, he liked to go to restaurants, drink wine and be in good company, laughing and relaxing. And when he had money he was very generous."

In 1969 Fiedler was a student at the Berlin Film Academy and was hired by a young woman from Munich as a cameraman for a portrait of the film director Pasolini. He went to her apartment in Munich where Fricke was also a guest.

"I met him more and more, and we started to get into deeper discussions as to what is going on in the world," says Fiedler. "We both read the Popol Vuh, the book of the K'iche' Indians [of Guatemala, which includes the Mayan creation myth]. The title was hanging in the air, and so the project's name became Popol Vuh."

Born in 1945 in Kiel on the north German coast, Fiedler recalls that as he and his young peers reached maturity they rebelled against the older generation, who they saw as being stuck within narrow ways of thinking.

"We had longer hair and smoked hashish," he says, laughing. He also recalls the liberating effect of '60s rock and pop music, particularly from England, and the thrill of seeing Jimi Hendrix play at the Star Club in Kiel. "We grew up with this evolution of rock music and a rich and colourful hippie movement," he says. "It was, in many ways, a desperate cry for freedom, certainly here in this country after all the humiliation of wartime."

Fricke had studied piano at Munich Music High School. "It was his intention to go beyond what the pop music was offering," says Fiedler. "What Florian did was a kind of a crossover between timeless classics and the new freedom of pop, rock and jazz."

To add to the newness of his music, Fricke had acquired a Moog III and began working with Fiedler in autumn 1969 on Popol Vuh's debut, Affenstunde, which was released in 1970 and named after a chapter in the Popol Vuh about the rise of humankind. Much of Side One was recorded on a two-track Revox reel-to-reel in a farmhouse near Miesbach in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, which belonged to the family of Fricke's wife, Bettina.

The credits for the album are Fricke on Moog, Holger Trülzsch on percussion and Fiedler on 'Synthesiser mixdown'. So what exactly was his role?

"Every good artist needs a counterweight," says Fiedler. "Florian was the instrumentalist and responsible for composition, but he worked more out of his intuition in terms of getting the sounds from those four black boxes that were in front of him, and I helped him because it was so complex. I did the filtering mostly. You couldn't programme that machine, you had to move the control knobs and put the modules together with cables."

Popol Vuh's Moog music didn't sound like anyone else's - it had a strange eerie tone and there was an undulating, serpentine flow to the melodies pitched somewhere between signalling and singing, its rhythmic complexity enhanced by the use of a sequencer and echo and delay during mixdown sessions.

"It was Florian's idea for a soprano voice [effect] and to get the filtering to take it away from a hard electronic sound, to get more of a human sound. I mean, you could do things with a Moog III that really were painful. That was a problem with that machine, you had to filter to get the sound he envisaged out of it."

Fiedler feels that on the title track of In Den Gärten Pharaos (1971), "We really got that sound to the peak." Side Two of the album is a colossal church organ piece, Vuh, which Fricke recorded in a former monastery church in Baumburg, Bavaria.

Fricke guested playing Moog on Tangerine Dream's 1972 album, Zeit, but Popol Vuh's next album, Hosianna Mantra (1972) featured a predominantly acoustic chamber ensemble of piano, guitar, oboe, tamboura and a real soprano, Korean singer Djong Yan. In situations like these, when Fiedler's technical expertise was not needed, he would continue his career as a film cameraman.

Hosianna Mantra is full of melody, with a radiant sound like light shining through stained glass. It also demonstrated that even in the group's more expansive moments, Fricke was beginning to strive towards a clarity of expression.

Fricke has described his own creative process thus:

"The path to creation is like walking on a small path. It begins without intention, purposeless, yet a goal arises. I say yes and approach the goal. I forget it again, but the goal starts to be more and more alive in me and I move steadily towards it, to receive it. It is me, who is moving. This is my collaboration, my devotion, which fills my person totally with an undivided attention. And I feel the power within, focused on the goal. This is the path to a small path."

Popol Vuh evoked similar atmospheres on Seligpreisung (1973) - the first album featuring guitarist and drummer Danny Fichelscher with Djong Yun singing lyrics derived from the Gospel Of Matthew, also recorded in the church in Baumburg - and on Einsjäger Und Siebenjäger (1974).

The implications of the different religious elements in the title 'Hosianna Mantra' has prompted some to claim that Fricke converted to both Christianity and Hinduism.

"No..." says Fiedler, clearly surprised at the idea. "Fricke never converted to any religion. He was Protestant from his family, but his idea was not to worship from a religious background. He was more interested in how, over the history of mankind, people gathered over religious lifestyles and then created music. And so he studied Buddhism, Hinduism, he also studied the Bible, but he took the Martin Buber translation in Hebrew, which is much more direct and powerful than our German translation of the Latin Bible."

But Popol Vuh's music does seem religious at times.

"Yes, it seems..." Fiedler replies. "But if you also take the movie music, you get another picture of Florian's intentions."

Two of the soundtrack albums that Popol Vuh made for Herzog that are included in the current box set are Aguirre (1975) and Nosferatu (1978). The former is characterised by Fricke's use of the instrument he called the "choir organ", a Mellotron-like device that utilised taped recordings of voices. Its unearthly sound contributes to the unforgettable opening sequence of Aguirre: Wrath Of God, in which hundreds of conquistadors snake down a steep mountain pass. There are a number of variations on this opening theme, some with percussion and some with pulsing Moog, and although the album is padded out with some earlier outtakes and a lengthy, eerie Moog piece Vergegenwärtigung, none of which are used in the film, it's still a coherent collection.

Nosferatu features the ghostly ritual chorales of On The Way, which Herzog used in the film to chilling effect. Again, the album is a mix of previously released and new recordings, haunting folk-like and Eastern-sounding pieces featuring the sitar and tamboura, Eno-ish still-lifes and some uncanny electronic pieces. Fiedler recalls Moog sessions in the mid-'70s in Fricke's house in Munich for the soundtrack when he and Fricke experimented with deep bass frequencies to underpin the instruments.

Did Herzog have any input into this soundtrack music?

"He didn't," Fiedler replies. "He liked Florian's compositions so much because they fitted his intention in telling a story. He didn't check [the tape], he just came and he took it and got it to the editing table."

Popol Vuh continued supplying music for Herzog until Cobra Verde in 1987 and released new music until 1999, some of which explored Fricke's fascination with chants, breathing techniques and overtone singing, including Agape-Agape/Love-Love (1983) with Renate Knaup of Amon Düül II as one of the vocalists. Fricke also recorded the multi-vocal I Am One With The Earth, a limited pressing solo album recorded in an old basilica in 1983.

In 1995 Fiedler and Fricke branched out, making a movie, Kailash: Pilgrimage To The Throne Of Gods, about the sacred Tibetan mountain, which eventually came out as a DVD, a soundtrack CD and a CD of unheard piano tracks in 2015. Some of this material was reworked for Shepherd's Symphony, which also featuring Guido Hieronymus on keyboards and guitar (1997) and moved towards ambient trance. In that year Popol Vuh also produced A Train Through Time, based on a drum sample of Danny Fichelscher which appears as a bonus track on Affenstunde.

Shortly before Fricke's death at the age of fifty-seven, he and Fiedler had made a multimedia operatic production called Messa Di Orfeo, which was performed in Southern Italy at the Time Zones Music Festival, firstly at Molfetta in 1998 and then the following year. "We performed in the old Rocca Malatestiana fortress in Fano with a thirty-piece choir and a gigantic movie projection," Fiedler says. Sadly, that was to be their last collaboration.

Fiedler supervises the Popol Vuh tape archive, and as well as BMG releasing the remastered albums there will be a Popol Vuh anthology including unreleased material and a release of "new Popol Vuh mixdowns in collaboration with some electronic musicians".

There is also a work in progress, now nearing completion, designed to help keep his friend's name alive.

"There are piano tracks and Moog III tracks that I gave to Guido and he composed for them," Fiedler explains. "His wife, Biljana Pais, wrote lyrics and she has a fantastic gospel voice, and so we suddenly had a project: the name is Popol Vuh Beyond and the title is Requiem For Florian. It has been an interesting experience to see it grow."

Der Backkatalog der Krautrock- und Elektronik-Pioniere Popol Vuh wurde von BMG in Zusammenarbeit mit den Popol Vuh-Mitgliedern Frank Fiedler und Guido Hieronymus aufwändig remastert. Die Essential Album Collection wird nun in mehreren Teilen neu auf CD und LP veröffentlicht. Der leider viel zu früh verstorbene Florian Fricke prägte die Geschichte von Popol Vuh entscheidend, als die Formation die Musik für einige Filme seines Freundes, des Filmregisseurs Werner Herzog, komponerte und damit große Erfolge feierte. Es ist wichtig, dass die Musik von Popol Vuh in neuem Glanz erstrahlen kann und mehrere Generationen von interessierten Musikhöhern wieder neu begeistern wird. Tim Stecher hatte die Gelegenheit, mit Gründungsmitglied Frank Fiedler über die Geschichte von Popol Vuh, die Essential Album Collection und weitere Projekte zu sprechen.

Mit The Essential Album Collection Vol.1 liegt eine erste Sammlung von fünf Popol Vuh-Alben in remasterter Form mit jeweils ein bis zwei Bonustracks und neu gestalteten Booklets vor. Wie kam es zu dem Projekt, den Katalog von Popol Vuh zu überarbeiten?

- Wie ich feststellen könnte, wird das Werk von Florian Fricke doch bei vielen, besonders den Kennern und auch international, hoch geschätzt. Ihm wohnen offenbar zeitlose ästhetische Qualitäten inne. Dieser Klang betört einfach. Und auch bei so einem Mediengiganten wie BMG scheint man das Potential dieses Werkes gesehen zu haben.

Welche Studioalben werden bei der Essential Album Collection Vol.1 enthalten sein?

- In den Gärten Pharaos, Seligpreisung, Das Hohelied Salomos, Letzte Tage – Letzte Nächte, Brüder des Schattens, Söhne des Lichts und Die Nacht der Seele.

Sie waren neben Florian Fricke zwar ein langjähriges Mitglied von Popol Vuh, waren aber nur an einem Teil der Studioalben musikalisch beteiligt. An welchen Produktionen haben Sie neben den ersten Alben aktiv mitgewirkt?

- Wenn ich mich recht erinnere, an Affenstunde, In den Gärten Pharaos, Das Hohelied Salomos, Agape-Agape, Die Erde Und Ich Seind Eins, For You And Me, Florian Fricke Spielt Mozart, City Raga, Sing For Song Drives Away The Wolves, Shepherd’s Symphony und Messa Di Orfeo. Nach Florians Tod in Zusammenarbeit  mit seinem Sohn Johannes Fricke-Waldthausen noch an Popol Vuh Revisited & Remixed und Kailash: Pilgrimage To The Throne Of Gods (CD & gleichnamige Film-DVD). Und natürlich an der Popol Vuh-Gesamtherausgabe Anfang des Jahrtausends bei SPV und jetzt mit einigen Neuerungen bei BMG.

Wie würden Sie die sehr unterschiedlichen Alben Affenstunde, Hosianna Mantra, Einsjäger & Siebenjäger, Aguirre und Nosferatu jeweils in wenigen Worten beschreiben?

- Ich mache einen Spiegel, Kyrie Eleison – Allmächtiger, erbarme dich… Kampfkunst – Flügel vs. E-Gitarre….. Abbild verstiegenen Wahns… Poetischer Blutsauger ….

War das Phänomen und Potential der Musik von Popol Vuh erkennbar, als Sie mit Florian Fricke zusammenkamen und mit Affenstunde ein Debütalbum aufnahmen, mit dem ganz neue, freie, verspielt-betörende Klangwelten entwickelt wurden?

- Na, wir wussten schon, dass wir was drauf hatten. Fragte sich nur, wie weit es ging. Das Album Affenstunde und auch In Den Gärten Pharaos sind ja heute noch eine musikalische Herausforderung erster Güte und haben eine ganz eigene Schönheit. Das hat ja keiner je wieder so gemacht, das war ein einmaliger Höhenflug. Wenn man so will, die Verwirklichung unserer Sehnsucht nach Licht und Weite.

Wie erklären Sie sich den Erfolg von Popol Vuh und die Tatsache, dass die Band heute als Klang-Pionier der Elektronik- und Krautrock-Musik gillt, die eine Vielzahl von Musikern der letzten 30 bis 40 Jahre in deren Entwicklungen maßgeblich geprägt hat?

-  ‘Erfolg’ is ein großes Wort. Für Florian zum Beispiel bedeutete es zwar einigen Ruhm, aber viel zu wenig Geld, um sich wirklich frei bewegen zu können. Und auch ich habe doch nur überlebt, weil ich als Kameramann recht gut Geld verdienen konnte. Besonders für Florian war es kein einfacher Weg. Popol Vuh ist vor allem Florians Einfallsreichtum zu verdanken und seine Liebe zur Klanggestaltung. Ich meine, wir haben Dostojewski und Govinda gelesen, haben mit unseren Frauen die Welt bereist und dabei diese Klänge auf Schallträgern festgehalten. Wohl im Ganzen etwas, das man ‘erfüllt’ nennen kann. Gut, diese Klänge gingen tatsächlich auch um die ganze Welt. War wohl was dran…

Einze Zitat in dem Biografie-Teil der neuen, informativen CD-Booklets hat mich besonders beeindrückt: “Popol Vuh are the greatest idols that I ever had and will ever have”, Michal Cretu. 1992. Was bedeutet Ihnen ein derartiges Zitat?

- Das ist wirklich ganz lieb von Michael..

Die Schaffung der wunderbaren Soundtracks für Filmwerke von Werner Herzog wie zum Beispiel für Aguirre und Nosferatu waren weitere Highlights in der musikalischen Vita von popol VUh. Wie kam es zu den Porjekten und wie verlief die Zusammenarbeit?

- Man muss wissen, dass sich Werner und Florian schon aus ihrer Jugenzeit kannten. Florian hat schon die ersten Filmstolperer von Werner mitgemacht. Da waren sie 17, 18 jahre alt. Sie waren ohne späteren Ruhm schon befreundet. Und so hatte jeder immer Kenntnis vom künstlerischen Werdegang des anderen. Darüber hinaus verstanden sich die beiden eben auch über ihre Auffassung von künstlerischen Ästhetik, ihrem Medien-Feeling, und so war es fast natürlich, dass Ihre Werke verschmolzen.

Was waren aus Ihrer Sicht die späten Höhepunkte in der Diskographie von Popol Vuh?

- Eigentlich sehe ich da nur Messa di Orfeo. Diese Klangskulptur mag nicht so ganz einfach zugänglich sein, hat aber für mein Gefühl eine besondere Art seelischer Tiefenfärbung, wobei ein Bogen zu unseren ersten beiden LPs entstand.

Mit Florian Fricke, der 2001 leider viel zu früh verstarb, ging auch die Geschichte von Popol Vuh zu Ende. Sind Sie weiterhin musikalisch aktiv?

- Allein schon meine Filmarbeit ist immer mit viel Musik verbunden. Ich habe jetzt aber mit Guido Hieronymus der unsere Studioarbeit ja seit Ende der achtziger Jahre begleitete, eine ganz eigene Musik-Idee verwirklicht. Wir nannten es ‘Popol Vuh Beyond – A Requiem for Florian’. Wir spielen mit dem Verstorbenen. Mit Florian Klavier- und Synthie-Tracks sind ganz neue Klänge entstanden, eine neue, vibrierende Weltmusik. Man wird sehen..

Gibt es nach der Veröffentlichung der überarbeiteten Studioalben von Popol Vuh noch weitere musikalische Schätze aus dem Wirkungskreis von Popol Vuh, auf die wir uns freuen können?

- Nun, dies war The Essential Album Collection Vol.1 was, wie oben erwähnt, ja erkennen lässt, dass da noch etwas nachkommt. Und zwar Vol.2 und Vol.3, die Essenz, weitere Meisterstücke… Das wird Herbst 2019 und Frühling 2020 sein. Besonders in der letzten Staffel wird auch einiges neue Material dabei sein. Junge Elektroniker spielen gerne mit Extrakten alter Popol Vuh 24-Spur-Studiotracks. Auch wenn ganz andere musikalische Vorstellungen herrschen, bleibt ein Zusammenwirken mit Florians Musikauffassung offenbar auch für diese Jüngeren interessant und bringt etwas. Und dann Florian hat an die zweihundert Musikstücke komponiert und veröffentlicht. Uns schwebt da eine Art Anthologie der allerschönsten Kompositionen vor. Vielleicht im Zusammenhang mit bisher unveröffentlichten Klavier-Schwärmereien Florian: Das ist noch nich endgültig.