Die Erde Und Ich Sind Eins – I Am One With The Earth

Released

In the late seventies, Popol Vuh’s leader Florian Fricke developed an interest in breathing therapy. Over the next few years, he’d join the Breathing Therapy Society, form the Working Group For Creative Singing, and develop his own breathing therapy, which he named Alphabet Of The Body. Die Erde Und Ich Sind Eins, a privately pressed LP, is an example of the group singing breath-therapy he’d been exploring, which he described as ‘body-space-music’ (Körperraummusik), featuring twelve voices, and long-standing accompanist Daniel Fichelscher on guitar. It explores some deeply satisfying vectors of drone, the collective’s glottal emanations slow, graceful, and possessed of a mesmerising gait. Its singlemindedness gifts it an elemental force, and it’s a surprisingly gripping listening experience – for its forty minutes, you’re bound to its woozy tonalities, as time ebbs, flows and slows. Truly a psychedelic experience.

Jon Dale