Aguirre

Official Review

Recorded by Florian Fricke for the soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Aguirre is technically Popol Vuh's third album but marks a sharp break from the first two, which were still built around the modular Moog. Fricke largely abandons electronic instrumentation in favor of the choir organ, a hybrid between pipe organ and Mellotron that produces a sound suspended between the sacred and the artificial, alongside treated electric guitar and wordless voices. The album opens with "Ave (Introitus)," built on a repeated organ pattern that recalls both sacred music and contemporary American minimalism, despite having no direct relationship to that scene. "Aguirre I" introduces Daniel Fichelscher's electric guitar in a slow, almost liturgical phrasing that in the film accompanies images of the fog-wrapped Andes; "Aguirre II" is a more dissonant variation on it, while "Vergegnung" closes the record by returning to the opening choral register. The relationship between music and image in Herzog's film is distinctive: the soundtrack establishes an autonomous emotional register, almost indifferent to the mounting madness of Klaus Kinski's character. It's music that observes rather than narrates, and it works just as well detached from the film, as shown by its independent life on record. We won't force a connection to the site's dossiers here: the theme of altered landscape running through several of our theoretical references (J.G. Ballard above all) typically concerns built, technological, urban landscape — while Aguirre works with a natural landscape, the Amazon rainforest, filtered through a European colonial imaginary. It's an adjacent thematic territory but a distinct one, and we'd rather leave it that way than pull it into a frame it doesn't precisely belong to. It remains a foundational record for an entire strand of meditative soundtrack music — from Vangelis to certain contemporary ambient production — and one of the rare cases where a film's score ended up outlasting the film itself in lasting influence.