»Popol Vuh don’t get enough love,« Krautrock devotee Michael Gira once remarked in an interview. And indeed, for several years they even served as a kind of house band for filmmaker Werner Herzog, contributing soundtracks to several of his films. Now the label Cherry Red has come to its senses and is reissuing the works of the Munich-based group led by Florian Fricke. In den Gärten Pharaos (1971) stands as proof that sacred music need not sound like church hymns.
The title piece, which fills the record’s first side, blends psychedelically layered Moog and Fender Rhodes tones with calmly ecstatic percussion and occasional field recordings of gently running water. The three musicians immerse themselves in a mood that feels above all peaceful. Fresh, in the most literal sense of the word, might be the best way to describe it.
»Vuh«, on the second side, may more readily evoke sacred spaces — though only because an organ, specifically the one from the Stiftskirche Baumburg, provides the drone around which synthesiser, cymbals and percussion gather. The latter, however, changes the piece’s character completely: this dense exercise unfolds like a tribal mantra, a wild spiritual trip worthy of all the love it can get.
