[review]
The Orient and the West making love. That’s the most powerful image emerging from HOSIANNA MANTRA, the masterpiece by German band Popol Vuh, led by musician Florian Fricke. After his trip to Orient, Fricke decided to merge all those lands’ spirituality with Western classical and rock music through his emotional and “visual” expertise (Werner Herzog was one of his best friends, and Fricke himself made soundtracks for the German movie director). The album’s music relates not only to Eastern spirituality, but to the Western one and Paganism too: different cultures, past and future, the sacred and the profane, blend themselves into each other, marking a path full of hope for all world’s people. The title itself is a tribute to all cultures, even those who can appear opposite. Far away from being overwhelmed by the musical experimentation of those years (above all, the almost continual use of Moog synthesizer), HOSIANNA MANTRA achieves a unique balance in Twentieth Century Music, using with skill and erudition several instruments like oboe, piano, tamboura, guitars and so on. Kyrie, Segnung, and the title-track itself, are laical liturgies, celebrations of the Earth and its strange inhabitants. Differently from the other Kosmische Musik works (above all the magniloquent Klaus Schulze’s IRRLICHT), the human being emerging from HOSIANNA MANTRA seems to abandon his Teutonic fight against the Universe and to achieve a communion with it. That’s why, when soprano Djon Yun repeats the word “hosianna”, the sky of Music seems to clear up in the touching embrace of all musical instruments.
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