The premise is almost enough to make you wince. Picture it: An electronic band at the vanguard of technology and sound—anchored by an enigmatic hunk married to the woman who produced their earliest albums—offloads his machines to meditate on a few very obvious Biblical passages. He and his friends move not only to the piano (he was, rumor had it, once a prodigy) and electric guitar but also a clutch of relatively esoteric instruments, at least as far as rock goes—tambura, oboe, violin, even a harpsichord.
Their dreamy songs are long, interwoven, and repetitive, invoking a cathedral walled with mirrors. The band is German, while its singer is a South Korean soprano, a refugee whose father was recently kidnapped by his native country on suspicions of espionage. What’s more, this new project took its name from key concepts in Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, fitting for a band that took its own handle from a sacred Mayan text that the aforementioned hunk saw as a skeleton key for a life of discovery. A tad heavy-handed, huh?
Half a century ago, though, ideas of “world music,” conscious cross-cultural collaboration, and ethereal rock renderings of sacred religious texts barely existed, let alone enough to elicit exhausted groans. On Hosianna Mantra, Popol Vuh helped invent them all.
The West German band had been floating amid the strong currents of the international psychedelic movement, still taking shape by the early 1970s. From the Haight-Ashbury afterglow to the Tropicália buzz of Brazil, from the radical progg of Sweden to the anarchic underground of Japan, disconnected pockets of musicians around the world were collectively sounding out tides of political unrest and personal liberation. Germany was an essential locus of this activity, of course—the magnetic repetition of Kraftwerk, the lysergic trances of Ash Ra Tempel and Neu!, the barely controlled chaos of Can. Vivid dioramas of synthesizers and percussion, Popol Vuh’s first two albums—1970’s Affenstunde and 1971’s In den Gärten Pharaos—made them contemporaries with many groups from their country and abroad.
But Hosianna Mantra seemed to emerge from a different world altogether, a place where pondering wisdom, truth, and beauty were the real reasons to exist, not just something rock’n’roll kids did in the hazy hours after the party had ended. Hosianna Mantra’s graceful tones, slow motion, and gentle arc were not alien to Popol Vuh’s domestic kosmische scenes or to the global psychedelic puzzle; they were, however, mostly the stuff of prologue, epilogue, or interstitial bits that tied together records that ultimately turned toward rock.
For Florian Fricke and the motley coterie he assembled to make Hosianna Mantra after months of improvisation, those sounds—astral piano and droning tambura, ululating vocals and labyrinthine guitar—were everything. No drums, no bass, no conventional song structures: Hosianna Mantra was a 40-minute contemplation of the cosmos and cosmic love, couched in words and sounds that explicitly linked it to humanity’s grandest and most consistent way of considering meaning, religion. The ostensible polytheism conveyed by the name and the concept were only ways to realize how little we actually know, and how much we wager through mere survival. These are complicated hymns. Hosianna Mantra remains one of the most enchanting, beautiful, and ambiguous albums to emerge from that era of wide-open exploration. Few rock documents of early ’70s counterculture are as emotionally multivalent as this one, poised forever on neighboring thresholds of faith and fear.
Born in Germany near the brutal end of World War II, Fricke was the son of an opera singer who had musical ambitions for his kid. Fricke began studying classical piano when he was 11, then enrolled prematurely in an arts high school. He was a wunderkind, his friend Werner Herzog once said, who had to quit playing because of tendinitis in his forearms. He wanted to compose, anyway. And after stints in film criticism, music journalism, and a short-lived band with bassist and soon-to-be ECM mastermind Manfred Eicher, he finally found his method: a massive Moog synthesizer.
When Fricke obtained his Moog in 1969, the instrument was the frontier, a portal into the unknown. Wendy Carlos had just released Switched-On Bach in the U.S., so the behemoth carried an intractable whiff of novelty. Fricke didn’t have an instruction manual for the machine that had cost him 65,000 marks of his inheritance, and there were reportedly just two in Germany—Fricke’s and that of his neighbor, a youth orchestra conductor named Eberhard Schoener, who went on to make many deeply corny records.
Fricke obsessed over the Moog, turning its knobs and adjusting its cables for most hours of the day and night as he began realizing the potential of what Bettina von Waldthausen, his future wife, called his “electronic wonder-machine.” A piano seemed limited; this seemed limitless. “This was a fantastic way into my inside consciousness, to express what I was hearing within myself,” Fricke told Gerhard Augustin, the beneficent record label executive who became Popol Vuh’s producer and champion. “I always had this great desire to find an instrument that could express a human voice.”
He wasn’t, though, some solitary madman, sequestered with his machine and shunning the rest of the world. Fricke always distanced himself from the German scene of the early ’70s, but he also welcomed collaboration, often playing with new people just to see where they might venture. Blissed out and stoned or flying through an acid trip, he plunged into the technological void alongside Frank Fiedler, a filmmaker whom Fricke had befriended on shoots, and Holger Trülzsch, a painter and artist who was happy to pass hours with the quartet (including von Waldthausen) by playing percussion. Their first record, 1970’s equally hypnotic and haunting Affenstunde, stemmed from their conversations and was composed in real time. Sometimes savage with distortion or as busy as a city street, 1971’s more deliberate In Den Gärten Pharaos still felt communal, friends learning together as they went. “You lived in it,” Fiedler remembered of those formative spells.
With the Moog, Fricke had always wanted to find something akin to a human voice and push it into unexpected contexts; on “Vuh,” Pharaos’ colossal second side, an entire choir seemed to spill out of a synthesized church organ. But in 1971, he found the actual voice he wanted. While Fricke was still finishing Pharaos, a 20-year-old South Korean singer he’d heard mentioned wandered into his house in Munich. It was Djong Yun.
Fricke, a lifelong classical student who had teased Herzog for how little music the young filmmaker knew, almost certainly appreciated her father, composer Isang Yun. The elder Yun was an acolyte of that moment’s avant-garde with a keen interest in fusing Eastern and Western sounds, and he had become international news in 1967 when South Korea kidnapped him and his wife. Igor Stravinsky even led the charge to free him. Yun became a German citizen in 1971, the same year he received a major commission for the Olympic Games in Munich and the same year his daughter ambled into Fricke’s art.
Thanks to Augustin, the record-label impresario and Popol Vuh enthusiast, Fricke had recently met Conny Veit, a svelte Stuttgart guitarist whose own band, Gila, made blown-out psychedelic rock. Veit had been stopping by to improvise for hours with Fricke, just as Fiedler and Trülzsch had once done with the Moog. Back on piano now, he and Veit wove in and out of graceful melodies, their instruments curling together like smoke rings. Yun simply started singing alone, following their leads and, as Fricke would sometimes joke, obsessively combing her hair so as to feel more inspired. Fricke had discarded the synthesizer because, as von Waldthausen remembered, it was “against the natural flow of the heartbeat.” Yun and Veit helped guide him back toward his pulse.
Hosianna Mantra is best experienced like a sunset, so that you stand still within it and let it simply surround you. Though the early ’70s were a golden moment for the full-length album, few records of the time work so well as a cohesive piece: Eight tracks nodding to one another not just with a knotted mood of uplift and worry but also with themes, tones, and patterns that feel as unified as an impressionist’s landscape painting. Fricke was the classical piano kid drawn toward composition; Hosianna Mantra was built by improvisation, but the finished work is almost seamless.
Such a synoptic appreciation, though, is too simple for Hosianna Mantra, as reductive as hearing A Love Supreme and labeling it a mere prayer. The how is essential. Around the time Fricke met both Veit and Yung, a friend gave him a copy of the Hebrew Bible as translated by Martin Buber, the polarizing existential philosopher. Buber had finished his volume only a decade earlier, following more than 30 years of work. His goal was less a direct translation than one that got to the spirit of the stories, or, as one scholar put it, explored “Jewish creativity in a German context.”
In subsequent decades, Fricke would reject religion during interviews. (“They do not allow this free thinking,” he said in a 1993 radio chat. “With the exception of Buddhism. But I’m not a Buddhist.”) Still, he was enchanted and inspired by Buber’s translation, by the power of the text’s characters and circumstances. “The Bible became life for me,” he said soon after Hosianna Mantra was released.
After a preamble that suggests rubbing sleep from one’s eyes at day’s dawn, Fricke’s chunky piano and Veit’s laser-thin guitar push and pull in different directions during “Ah!” When Yun arrives during “Kyrie,” she pleads for mercy with a voice so generous and soft it suggests charity incarnate. As Fricke and Veit tumble into a mess of fractious notes above a tambura’s hum, she hovers around them like calm air, restoring the order that gently pulls them toward the first side’s finale, “Hosianna Mantra.”
The title track is 10 minutes of pure pleasure, Yun repeating prayers as Fricke, Veit, and oboist Robert Eliscu dive like swans and rise like rockets. They trade riffs and lines, exchanging bits of melody like a jam band that’s been at work for three decades, not six months. (Veit, mind you, is a ringer for Jerry Garcia here.) Fricke often talked about Hosianna Mantra as a mass, especially the first side; this is the blessing, then, the final word to disciples as they head out into the world. I find it impossible to hear without feeling lighter, as if some unspoken load has been lifted—perhaps not a burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea, but its own little miracle, nevertheless.
If the album’s first half is about redemption and release from earthly struggle, the second half is about human reality, about the toil of existence and the quest to continue in spite of it. Fricke labeled this side of Hosianna Mantra a love song for his wife, Bettina von Waldthausen; much later, she called the album “his first devotion to the female voice, absolutely pure and magic.” Half a century later, it sounds to me like an expression of the impermanence of everything—relationships, voices, our understanding of God.
It’s tempting to hear Side B as a continuation of Side A, the pillowtop acoustics now augmented by florid 12-string and oboe that’s suddenly more fanciful. But following the pastoral frivolity of “Abschied,” “Segnung” seems to rise from a primordial web of tambura and phantom guitar licks. Yun drifts back in on a very cold violin breeze, tentatively sharing the blessing of Deuteronomy—“You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country,” and so on—as if she’s unsure that any of this is actually credible, let alone good.
