Affenstunde

On the debut Popol Vuh album, leader Florian Fricke gets deep inside the guts of his newly-acquired Moog synthesizer, only the second to be owned in Germany. You can hear that he’s teasing out the possibilities of the instrument and trying to connect it with his nascent personal musical ‘vision’ — though the three-part “Ich Mache Einen Spiegel Dream” starts with twittering birds and splashes of water, which suggests proto-New Age soundscaping, Fricke’s works are more austere, more intent on a precise articulation of what these new electronic tonalities mean for his compositional logic. They’re not quite drony, and they hint at melody without really fleshing out those lines clearly; it’s music of a between-space. Holger Trülzsch’s phalanx of hand percussion bundles into earshot on occasion, punctuating Fricke’s explorations with clattering, percolating waves of rhythm.