AFFENSTUNDE

POPOL VUH was one of Germany's most successful Krautrock acts lead by the creative leadership of Florian Fricke. Formed in 1969 by Fricke, Frank Fiedler, Bettinea Fricke and Holger Trülzsch, the project was really a collective with rotating members that came and went over the years with on Fricke at the helm changing the project's stylistic approach from album to album. While famous for incorporating ethnic world music into lush thematic collages that resulted in a few film soundtracks, POPOL VUH (named after the famous ancient Mayan texts) began as one of the very first moog based space music albums in the vein of what Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze would make a career out of.

AFFENSTUNDE (in English "monkey hour") was released in 1970, the same year as Tangerine Dream's debut "Electronic Meditation" but while Edgar Froese and company were at the point of flirting with totally cosmic chaos in sound with more emphasis on detachment and escapism in an experimental rock context, POPOL VUH on the other hand had already developed one of the earliest ambient electronic albums that focused on the expansive qualities of the moog synthesizer taking the Krautrock scene out of the heavy psych blues based guitar rock of the 60s and propelling the scene into the distant realms of outer space. Although not usually credited as such, AFFENSTUNDE nonetheless provided a blueprint for many other similarly minded German acts to latch onto.

While Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Igor Wakhévitch and many others would soon make entire careers out of these spaced out journeys into the moog zone, it was really POPOL VUH that started the whole thing before completely abandoning these sounds in order to focus on more organic instrumentation with heavy influences from world music genera. Despite the rich expansive sounds that are experienced on AFFENSTUNDE, in reality all sounds were created on a single 4-module moog synthesizer accompanied by fiery ethnic percussion that included both Indian tablas and Middle Eastern rhythmic percussive drive long before Agitation Free adopted the same hybridization effect.

Although AFFENSTUNDE is broken up into four tracks (a fifth bonus track that fits in quite well is added on the 2004 remaster edition), in reality this is a single spaced out journey that starts out by breaking free of Earth's gravitational pull and provides a soundscape that focuses on bizarre quantum sounding oscillations, strange electronic bloops and bleeps that randomly phase in and out and spaced out atmospheric backdrops that imitate solar winds and heavenly ambience. The original album featured the three part "Ich Mache Einen Spiegel" (I make a mirror) for side A and the 19 minute title track for side B. The album created a bizarre contradiction with ambient sounds that emanated the cold vacuous regions of deep space but reeled in the detachment with heavy doses of randomly displayed ethnic percussion with begin on the "Dream Part 5" (there are no parts 1-3, it all starts with Part 4.)

Basically the "Dream Part 4" is exclusively space ambience and is followed by "Dream Part 5" which is exclusively tribal percussion circles. "Dream Part 49" reverts back to space ambience only makes it all even weirder, more detached and more representative of the deepest recesses of outer space. Like a trip around Pluto perhaps! The grand finale is the side long title track which fuses the two disparate styles together in a stream of consciousness that extends to the 19 minute mark and features the space rock interacting with the tribal percussion. This sequence is perhaps some of the strangest and most forward thinking creative outburst in all of the early Krautrock scene. While it would've been easy to simply feature tribal drumming behind a wall of ambient sound, Fricke was a genius in how he melded the two polar opposites together in a manner that changed the entire effect of both.

This one doesn't seem to get a lot of love as most POPOL VUH fans tend to get to this debut release well after they have become familiar with the more melodic and organic albums that dominated the 70s. AFFENSTUNDE is the anomaly of the POLPOL VUH canon but for those seeking the furthest out there Krautrock trips then this one is surely one for the essential list as it encapsulates everything that makes such music so wildly dynamic. The album is paced well and allows the emotive reactions to ratchet up until climaxes and then moves on as not to become repetitive and redundant. This style of music is subtle and complex but quite rewarding for those who crave a complete disregard for music tradition and like the Star Trek series that ended only the year prior, showcases that pioneering spirit that proves that music could still venture forth into arenas where no human being has gone before. Love this one!