Sei Stille, Wisse Ich Bin

Both an oratorium, and the soundtrack to Florian Fricke’s titular directorial debut, an enigmatic – to say the least – film featuring model Veruschka as a bearded prophet, leading followers through the Sinai Desert, Sei Stille, Wisse Ich Bin still feels like one of the great lost Popol Vuh sets. There’s something wild in the way Fricke brings the choir of the Bavarian State Opera in with massed chants, and then drops them amidst a ghosted landscape of thunderous percussion; in many ways, it feels like the culmination of the devotional, amorphous spiritualism that he’d been exploring over the past decade. He recycles some earlier material here, tracks from Herz Aus Glas, for example, reappearing with dizzying choral swarms swooping across the songs’ surfaces. Repetition in the music and Fricke’s never going to lose it – this is one of his masterpieces.