Boiling down the work of any group that spanned three decades is never going to be easy. For German avant gardists Popol Vuh, it's practically impossible. The band was founded by Florian Fricke in 1969 and largely remained his vision throughout, albeit with useful accomplices picked up along the way. Popol Vuh are often slotted into krautrock/kosmische musik categories, but their work also variously edged close to prog, new age, and ambient. They are perhaps best known for providing the soundtracks to many of Werner Herzog's feature films, and this year the SPV label put out a box set gathering some of those. "Florian was always able to create music I feel helps audiences visualize something hidden in the images onscreen, and in our own souls too," said the director in Herzog on Herzog. Here, SPV again pays tribute to Fricke on the 10th anniversary of his death, gathering strains of the band's original recordings and completing the package with a disc of remixes.
This is the kind of release that will have longstanding Popol Vuh followers raising an eyebrow at what's not included-- the monolithic drone piece "Vuh" from In den Gärten Pharaos is missing, and there's nothing from the classic 1972 release Hosianna Mantra. It's heavy on the soundtrack work and sequenced in non-chronological order, beginning with the stirring "Aguirre I - Lacrima Di Rei" from Herzog's 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The synergy between Herzog and Fricke comes from a place where malevolence, beauty, and eminence are vying for equal space. "Aguirre I" features peals of artificial choir sound, played by Fricke on a mellotron-like device called a "choir organ" that triggered tiny loops of field recordings. It's a colossal sound that feels both daunting and alluring, something to fear and rejoice in at the same time, where the real and the unreal seem to seep into one another.
Fricke's Aguirre soundtrack is among the best work he produced in his career, but there's such scope to the Popol Vuh sound that it scarcely matters that the bar is raised so high so early. The lengthy title track from the band's debut record Affenstunde (1970) documents Fricke's fascination with folksy percussion and the mantra-like possibilities that emerged from sustaining single notes on a Moog. That space between artifice and actuality is where Popol Vuh's music finds its muscle, adding to the feeling of something arching across ancient and contemporary worlds, with Fricke jostling between earthy textures and the inter-planetary visions of his krautrock contemporaries. "Affenstunde" is paired with the similarly epic "In den Gärten Pharaos" on Revisited & Remixed, which forms another placid divide between pulsing synth noise, primitive hand percussion, balmy Rhodes-like plinking, and sounds extracted from the natural world.
It might have been better to follow "Affenstunde" with the much darker "Vuh" instead of "In den Gärten Pharaos", just to show off the great surge of energy they were capable of summoning. But there are so many sides to Popol Vuh that it's no surprise some are missing on this release. Instead, a couple of superior cuts from the soundtrack to Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre are among the highlights. Here Fricke again explores the dichotomy between the real and the unreal and the primitive and the present, through throaty voice manipulations, contemplative acoustic plucking, raga-like drones, and playful baroque arrangements. It's difficult to listen to Popol Vuh's career broken down in this way, dislocated from the strange trajectory they followed. Lurching from the ambient precursor "Ich Mache Einen Spiegel" to the sweeping drift of the Cobra Verde soundtrack feels messy and unfocused. Instead, this record is best seen as a jumping off point for the uninitiated, a way to point travelers in the right direction instead of a singular piece in its own right.
The second disc is an uneven selection of prosaic remixes, with few highlights. Haswell & Hecker's reworking of "Aguirre I/II" taps into that extraordinary otherworldly quality of the original piece, building it into a towering wall of shifting noise then shattering it apart as though they've taken a hammer to glass. Elsewhere, too many of the artists sound like they're attempting to assimilate sounds into their own catalogs: Mouse on Mars' version of "Through Pain to Heaven" is an incongruously heavy handed club jam, while Stereolab's take on "Hosianna Mantra" papers over all the peculiar elements that make Popol Vuh such an alluring listen. Thomas Fehlmann's version of "Schnee" works better, with its piston-like rhythm veering closer to Fricke's world. Perversely, what the remixes lack-- risk, pomposity, refinement, transformative power-- is everything Popol Vuh's original recordings feed off to find their mettle.
