![]() The Eurodisco/Europop/proto-Eurotrance he set in motion in the 1970s was evident from the album's cheesy first single, "74 Is the New 24", which didn't bode well for his return. Names like Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears were mentioned as his post-Summer muses, and the septuagenarian name-dropped EDM grandchildren like Avicii and Calvin Harris in interviews. Naturally, news of a new album soon followed. ![]() The man hadn't produced much music of his own since the pomp of the 1990 FIFA World Cup theme, but the Giorgio Renaissance was nigh. Perversely, what the remixes lack- risk, pomposity, refinement, transformative power- is everything Popol Vuh's original recordings feed off to find their mettle.Earlier that same week, Giorgio could be heard recounting the beatific click of the Moog synthesizer on a newly released LP that would become one of the biggest albums of the year, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. Thomas Fehlmann's version of "Schnee" works better, with its piston-like rhythm veering closer to Fricke's world. 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. 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. The second disc is an uneven selection of prosaic remixes, with few highlights. 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. Lurching from the ambient precursor "Ich Mache Einen Spiegel" to the sweeping drift of the Cobra Verde soundtrack feels messy and unfocused. It's difficult to listen to Popol Vuh's career broken down in this way, dislocated from the strange trajectory they followed. 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. Instead, a couple of superior cuts from the soundtrack to Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre are among the highlights. But there are so many sides to Popol Vuh that it's no surprise some are missing on this release. 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. "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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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.įricke'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. "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. ![]() The synergy between Herzog and Fricke comes from a place where malevolence, beauty, and eminence are vying for equal space. 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. 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. ![]()
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