At the point where the reactionary spirit against the totalizing trends of the 20th century reached their zenith there was, in the various post-hippy spiritualist movements that sprang up during the 70s, an attempt to find a social and spiritual expression that could open up pockets of social space free of the smothering influence of the new, globalized social atmosphere. Ironically, such a movement, with its focus on syncretizing the common threads of disparate traditions, could only have been the product of such a globalized atmosphere. The early music of Popol Vuh represents one such attempt, a synthesis of the various spiritual currents in vogue at the time into a unified artistic statement, an exploration of currents outside the commercial and alienated, an attempt at expressing direct spiritual experience. While
Hosannah Mantra may have been a more fully fleshed out and coherent expression of their vision,
In Der Garten Pharaos creates a spaced-out, enigmatic mood that, while firmly and charmingly of its time thanks to heavy moog-use, successfully carves out its own niche in the sea of spirit-seers that were trying to find their individual ways amidst the alienation of the 70s.
In Den Garten Pharaos sets the stage coolly, patiently, a quavering, ghostly moog melody gliding over the surface of a flowing stream; the atmosphere sparse, liminal, floating like mist over the first few minutes of the album. Polyrhythmic percussion pounds in the distance, the moog begins to coalesce, become organ-like; the mood throughout is that of peering through mist and spotting glimpses of dancing torch-lights. The piece remains curiously static despite the constant swirl of percussion and synthesizer, a ghostly image is conjured up and repeated endlessly as the moog takes on certain tones of a soprano voice warbling out, the shakers and chimes slowly delineating the piece as distant organ melodies begin to take hold, the mist clearing as spacey synth effects and jazz chords rein in the mysticism, though never completely halting it. We sojourn for a bit under this clear starry sky, the familiar having somehow returned, though transformed by the trip through the mist, the significance of the water’s return representing a recurring fluidity, an eternal return perhaps, or the river continuously transformed.
Less fluid, though no less mystical in its approach is the portentous bombast of Vuh, carried by an organ drone and cymbal swells, choral touches from the synths and shrouded mountain-tops looming directly above. We see here more of the atmosphere that Fricke and company would explore on their soundtrack work with Herzog, as all the grandiosity of this piece takes on a more direct, more cinematic approach. Less a disoriented encounter with ghost-lights in the mist, more anchored by the piercing sharpness of the organ, Vuh drapes itself in a ritualistic regalia as layer upon layer of metal percussion clangs around and above the massive edifice of the organ until it all drops aways to leave the organ alone, revealed, blaring its tones unperturbed by the chaos surrounding it as, one-by-one, the percussion elements return to try to bury the lone voice of the organ in its clangor, to no avail. The end of the piece, like the title track, returns gradually to its former state, but here, the organ, in its persistence throughout the piece, remains essentially untransformed by the storms around it. It’s as though the two sides of the album were expressing two very different ideas, the former the transformational, the fluid, the ungraspable, the other the continuous, an eternal and immutable identity.
Popol Vuh’s music would undergo its own series of transformations after this album with the addition of traditional instruments and more explicitly Christian themes gradually supplanting the amorphous mysticism of their early works. But the foundation of their career-spanning intent is laid out here, their elemental and mystical intentions reified into these profound soundscapes, shrouded in mist and seen only dimly. If a chance ever existed of carving some kind of structure out of the endless blare of the later 20th century, Popol Vuh make a strong case that it was to found through their art, through any art that could express a reality beyond the crass materialism of the times. If this effort doesn’t quite represent the peak of that attempt, it elegantly lays out the groundwork for them to do so, in that sense standing as a not-quite-major classic of its era.
