vainio/haswellThe opening sequence to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre is not something you forget in a hurry. It must have been four years since I saw it, but I can still see as though it were yesterday: the rolling fog, the stone-faced conquistadors, their descent down the mountain into what you already know, just a few seconds into the movie, would be a kind of hell. Leaving aside, for a second, Herzog’s Promethean skills as an artist, these opening frames, it seems, get into your bones largely because of the music. Popol Vuh’s cavernous, immense drone is foreboding, as you would expect, but, pieced together from loops of a choir, it is also possessed of an otherworldly, almost transcendent quality, one that elevates the film into greatness before the conquistadors even reach the river. If there has been a better contribution to a film soundtrack since, or a better collaboration between a filmmaker and musician at the peaks of their respective careers, I haven’t heard it.
Popol Vuh began as an electronic group, making what some consider to be the first New Age/ambient record, Affenstunde, in 1970. Soon after, bandleader Florian Fricke abandoned electronics in favour of a kind of piano-led, spiritual, ethnic folk, becoming, in the process, a progenitor of modern ambient and world music. Popol Vuh, who are often lumped in with Krautrock simply by virtue of making unique music in the ‘70s and being German, made vital, sometimes profound records that, in the 70s at least, bear little trace to the tackiness ambient and world music would often come to embody in the coming decades.
Despite giving away their Moog before 1972’s Hosianna Mantra, Popol Vuh have proved a lasting influence on modern electronic artists of all types. Now seven years since Fricke died and the group disbanded, Mego Editions have brought out a 12” remix of two classic Popol Vuh songs, both of them taken from soundtracks to Herzog films. The first track sees Haswell & Hecker, the collaboration between British electro-noisenik Russell Haswell and German sound artist Florian Hecker, take on ‘Aguirre I’, an act I first saw as sacrilegious, but now, having given the track some time, have since come around to. Hecker & Haswell recast Popol Vuh’s masterwork into something gloomier and less immediate—as a soundtrack, it seems, to darker times. The opening drone is still there, but it seems buried, emerging only after a few minutes, covered in grime and a husk of white noise, beaten but somehow still triumphant. As the track gathers steam, the choral drone becomes static, stuck almost, as Haswell & Hecker fill the foreground with ruined electronics and busy squall, paying homage to one of the band’s greatest moments by toying with its destruction.
The second track works in gentler hues. Mika Vainio, one half of Finnish minimalists Pan Sonic, takes on ‘Nachts: Schnee’, from the soundtrack to Herzog’s Cobra Verde, shifting and clipping the original’s New Agey synth washes into a slow-burning ambient piece, at once hesitant and insistent, with each drone coming and going at volume, seemingly without beginning and end. Vainio’s touch is sure, though, and the lack of constancy he works through his patchwork reconstruction of the original becomes a rhythm in itself. The track’s slowly evolving drones bring to mind the static, spacious works of the Kompakt Pop Ambient series, or Ekkehard Ehlers’ excellent Plays suite: a shifting series of resonant chunks of noise, gently undulating into new shapes and back again, bringing a small piece of the legends’ work into new voice.
:: POPOL VUH: MIKA VAINIO / HASWELL & HECKER REMIXES 12" - Editions Mego 090/Groove Attack
