POLLpul Vuh

I have too many gaps in my collection to really make an informed decision but right now it's gonna be Das Hohelied Salomos (xp!) or Aguirre probably. Maybe it's time to pick up Seligpreisung and Einsjäger Siebenjäger and see if they blow my mind.

Those are both mindblowers, so probably!

I just listened to Heart of Glass, and it's pretty awesome.

W/r/t fischelsher... J. Mascis started out in drums as well.

Kinda like PV the less chord changes there are (my preference is for none tbh) and more droney/ mantric (is that a word?) the music, so my fave period is 1976-81, that covers the amazing sort of raga rock of "Letzte Tage" and "Herz aus Glas" and the phenomenal pholk rock of "Bruder" and "Tantric Songs". "Sei Still" is something else altogether, it just isn't like anything else (a bit like "Aguirre" in that regard). It's unfortunate that "Agape" is produced in such a flat way as it could easily have stretched my fave period out to 1983.

Beginning to think "Singet, denn der Gesang vertreibt die Wölfe" is my ultimate PV track, even though Florian Fricke isn't even on it!

My people

Vuh Tang Clan

When I say Vuh
you say Tang

Affen in the back
ready to attack

In Den Gärten Shaolin

Ok so I obtained flacs of the Spalax version of Nosferatu today and am listening to them at the snowy bus stop now. In the other thread I mentioned that the spv reissue of this sounded distorted to me but I didn't have the Spalax to compare. Now I do: the Spalax sounds great, miles better than the spv. So my running tally of vuh discs to "accept only Spalax" is Nosferatu and LT-LN. Have yet to hear the spv of einsjager to compare to Spalax. While most of the spv I've heard are fine, none of them are improvements over Spalax editions.

Also this (Nosferatu OST) is such a bizarre three headed PV item. You've got eastwest chamber vuh, haunted electronics florian, and majestically strumming Danny all on one platter.

I might guess that after bruder des schattens was scrapped for the film, fricke went ahead and stitched the new OST together from odds and sods? Or even bibs and bobs?

How do the Wah Wah vinyl reissues rate, sound wise? I just ordered a few and may get some more.

anyone here actually read the popol vuh book? you know, the mayan one?

― tylerw

I've read the book, but outside of a handful of songs I've only heard the band's soundtrack albums. What's a good starting point for their other work?

You should hear Heart of Glass or Eins/Siebenjager imo. I think you'd like the Fichelscher-heavy stuff.

Also I think the sound on the reissued LPs is pretty great, but I'm so accustomed to listening via headphones that it was nice to just hear the records being played in a room.

Thanks, milady. Will start with those two.

I guess one of those is a soundtrack album but you should listen to it again.

can someone explain to me the appeal of this band?
is there a chance for a person who don't like Ambient to like them?

There's a sampler from the spv reissues ineptly titled "70s Progressive Rock" maybe that's a good taster.

Xpost yes indeed just try the ones LL just named

is there a chance for a person who don't like Ambient to like them?

yes, because many of their records are not "ambient" -- try anything between 73 and 76 -- i think someone looking for not-ambient PV could find a lot to like in there

again, one of the things that i like most about this band is their use of rhythm even when the rhythmic elements aren't foregrounded. it's difficult (impossible for me) to ignore the role of rhythm in PV, even when it's very very very slow.

thanks!
xpost

also Letzte Tage, Letzte Nächte: i heard Last Days Last Nights which sounds like Amon Dull only spacier

Anyone who likes the Fichelscher years and hasn't heard Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee needs to listen to it immediately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4USsLGeadwg

About 15 or 20 years ago a bought a big pile of PVuh CDs off a friend (for £2 each!), so I can never remember which album is which as I heard them all at the same time. I just think of them in the same way I think of 1970s Miles Davis, as basically one long song spread over 15 albums or so.

nosferatu is really boring, post-that is especially dire, check out "sei still wisse ich bin" if you don't believe

― the late great, Tuesday, December 31, 2013 3:11 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

voted "sei still wisse ich bin"

― Eats like Elvis, shits like De Niro (Tom D.), Friday, January 3, 2014 4:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Me too!

That was on Klaus Schulze's label and ran at 45rpm, my copy of it was a terrible pressing iirc.

Hey just wanna say thanks folks, all recs noted and welcome!

from my little knowledge, i'll vote to Letze Tage:

awesome album that takes the Ash Ra Temple/Amon Duul thing into a new level of proto-dream goth pop.
(Einsjäger & Siebenjäger is too proggy to my taste and i'm not an ambient fan)

Voted Sei Still, too! It's the most otherworldly to my ears and I think the choral stuff + massive digital reverb is a positive addition to the overall PV aesthetic. Einsjager and Letze Tage came close, though.

I listen to a ton of Popol Vuh and would love to take more of an active role in this thread, but thinking about their music for me is like trying to recall a dream. I remember experiencing it but beyond the vague feel of it I can't really describe what happened.

Actually I mostly listen to them lying in bed so that might be the reason.

haha

that's what i meant about the headphones vs LPs -- listening to this music in a room with people other than myself present is a pretty new phenomenon.

kind of shocked how little love Hosianna Mantra is getting. Heart of Glass is my second favorite so I get where you all are coming from, but HM is so incredibly beautiful.

i agree. it was the second album of theirs i heard after garten and remains one of my favorites.

I voted Hosianna!

Um, any love for Yoga? I must give it a second listen one of these days (note: the first listen was decades ago).

Listening to a lot of these again, I like Seligpreisung a little less than I remembered and Einsjäger & Siebenjäger a lot more than I remembered.

i've never heard yoga.

Quoting from an interview Fricke gave to Eurock.com: "YOGA is an unauthorized release. Some Indian musicians visited me in my studio, and somebody else took the tapes and sold them under the name of Popol Vuh, but it had nothing to do with Popol Vuh, really. I'm playing harmonium, and organ. I think it was released in Italy."

Maybe this is off topic (this being a poll, and there being a s/d thread already), but is there any decent (non-web) literature out there on this band? I know there are a few Fricke anecdotes in the Herzog book, and I'm sure Cope talks about Popol Vuh in Krautrocksampler (which I've never actually read), but has there ever been a sort of Our Band Could Be Your Life kinda thing about this scene?

There's this, about which I know nothing:

http://www.amazon.com/Krautrock-Cosmic-Rock-Its-Legacy/dp/1906155666/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389139516&sr=8-1&keywords=krautrock

i still haven't gotten over the cover art for the second album

Aside from reviews of some of their albums there isn't much about Popol Vuh in Cope's book.

There are so damnably few resources on PV and Fricke. Maybe in German...?

For about a decade when the CDs were expensive and hard to get (in the nineties up to file sharing) my PV bible was the little write ups of all the discs in the (print) forced exposure catalog.

I memorized those and dreamed of what the music would sound like.

Not exactly non-web literature, but this is worth a read : http://www.furious.com/perfect/populvuh.html

I remember our v. own Tom D doing an excellent Popul Vuh alb rundown somewhere on this board

Feel like a bit of an outlier on this thread, in that while I like most of the PV recs I've heard, Einsjäger & Siebenjäger is by some distance my fave - such an uplifting rec

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

btw if anyone is still looking for copies of those Wah Wah reissues, Fusetron just listed a few!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Winner is sorta shocking here! The rest makes sense except for 0 votes for Seligpreisung and Cobra Verde.