Hosianna Mantra

Sound DNA

• Rock
• Krautrock

• layered
• meditative
• spiritual

About

Modeled in the style of a Eucharistic liturgical mass, Popol Vuh’s third album bears little resemblance to anything else in the canon of German progressive rock. Forgoing the early electronic experiments of the first two Popol Vuh albums (after which Florian Fricke sold his Moog synthesizer to Klaus Schulze), <i>Hosianna Mantra</i> turned away from the conventions being established by electronic kosmische musicians to instead navigate a then-unchristened worldly space between European classical, pastoral psychedelia, and coming transcultural notions of “world” music. With guitarist Conny Veit, oboist Robert Eliscu, and vocalist Djong Yun joining the group, <i>Hosianna Mantra</i> would establish Fricke’s conceptual direction and key collaborators for his most fertile creative period in the 1970s. Arising from months of open-ended improvisations at Fricke’s home, the pieces have a loose structure centered primarily around Fricke’s piano and Veit’s electric guitar, with the two weaving their instruments together in cascading sound-sheets as Eliscu and Yun soar above them. A member of the Munich Philharmonic and the esteemed early music consort Studio Der frühen Musik, Eliscu deepened the group’s European classical underpinnings, and similarly Yun (the daughter of Korean post-serialist composer Isang Yun) was studying as a soprano with famed German voice teacher Margarethe von Winterfeldt after her father gained asylum in West Berlin following accusations of espionage from the South Korean government. In Yun’s pure, straight-tone voice Fricke heard the empyrean tonality he had been searching for with synthesizers and electronics, and unlike the group’s previous vocalist (Israeli Eurovision star Esther Ofarim), Yun had no objections to singing Christian texts in Latin. As can be seen with the album’s title (a union of the Christian religious exclamation <i>hosianna</i> with the Hindu <i>mantra</i>), Fricke sought a form of spiritual communion that drew from the world’s deepest religious traditions but prodded for an essence beyond them—an outlook that would come to crystallize into the New Age movement in the decade that followed.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits