Popol Vuh, "Vuh"

Shopping for music has always been an integral part of travel for me. This goes back to my first trips overseas, to England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1995 and 1998. In those days—and this is still largely true now, with vinyl reissues—US distribution sucked. There were albums you just couldn’t get hold of. Sometimes an entire artist’s catalog was straight-up unavailable. Whereas record shops in the UK were chock-full of LPs that, as far as we were concerned, were only rumored to exist. Promptly upon arrival in London, then, I would charge into Piccadilly Circus to dig into the racks at Tower Records, HMV, and Virgin. Through the rest of the tour, in York, Edinburgh, Manchester, Belfast, Dublin, I sought out branches of the same stores—just to see if they had anything I’d missed in the flagships in Piccadilly.

Twenty years later, I was back in London, and the Virgin and Tower stores were history. HMV had a lone outpost on Oxford Street. It was considerably smaller than I remembered, with the rock section relegated to a cramped upper floor. I did pick up CD copies of Neu! 2 and Echo & the Bunnymen’s Porcupine, among other gems I’d never seen in a Stateside store.  But aside from this last, languishing redoubt of His Master’s Voice, the Grand Record Chains were long gone, casualties of technological disruption. What sense did it make to lease slabs of prime real estate in Central London, to house and sell hard copies of albums that listeners could download directly to their laptops and iPods?

But Japan is another matter altogether. Since we landed in Tokyo two weeks ago, I’ve commented to family and friends that Japan is the Land of Lost Brands. I hadn’t seen a Mister Donut since they bulldozed the one on the corner of North Road and Rte. 422 three decades ago.

Likewise, Lawson.  There was a Lawson convenient store around the corner of my grandparents’ house in the late 1970s, right next to the Steak & Ale restaurant. It’s been easily forty years between Lawson sightings for me, but in Japan they’re one of the Big Three konbini chains, right alongside Seven-Eleven and Family Mart. You can’t go four blocks in Tokyo without walking by a Lawson Station. Talk about a throwback: they have the milk-bottle logo and everything.

Two other long-gone retail chains surviving and thriving in Japan are Tower Records and HMV. Both have managed to bridge the gap between the arrival of iTunes and the revival of vinyl, I suspect because the Japanese never gave up on the compact disc. I lost my mind—and almost my wallet—over the new and used vinyl sections in the Tower and HMV outposts in Shibuya, and for that matter the Disk Union in Shinjuku. But those selections paled in comparison to the CD racks in these Tokyo stores. It’s a weird phenomenon, an entire population clinging to a medium that is largely obsolete everywhere else. To be sure, I could wax eloquent on the merits of the compact disc, which include portability, durability, and ease of song cuing (vs. vinyl) and none of the encumbrances of streaming audio, which requires near-constant Internet access and a subscription commitment that in essence amounts to renting songs, rather than buying them. But The Market could give a crap about my preferences, and as a result it’s all but run the CD into 8-track status in the United States.

A minute ago I found this recent article in The Economist, which reports that 39% of music revenue in Japan is attributable to CD sales, as against 10% worldwide. The article suggests some of this may be due to a reluctance on the part of Japan’s aging population to change formats. More probably, though, the continued popularity of the CD has to do with price controls, streaming restrictions, and record store event promos that call for fans to buy CDs before they can meet the stars. I saw one of these promotions in progress at Tower’s Shinjuku branch on Saturday. The kids sure were amped to meet their purple-haired J-Pop idols, and there were no graybeards in sight.

Whatever the reason, it seems that compact discs kept Tower and HMV alive and well in Japan down through the years—and even opened up market space for native chains like Disk Union. Now these stores are leaping back into the vinyl business with both feet, much like Newbury Comics in New England, but without swiping floor space out from under the CD racks. 

Enter your correspondent.

Dazzled by the bright lights of Shibuya—Tokyo’s Times Square analog, but with a shitload of Lamborghinis, apparently …

… I turned a corner last week into the Tower flagship store.  Nine floors of music, launched a mere four years before Tower Records America went under, and still kicking ass in Tokyo three decades later.  I mean, for crying out loud it has a Condé Nast Traveler writeup.  Lila and I surged up the several escalators, past diagonally arranged portraits of J- and K-Pop acts and leather-clad Måneskin members.  None of this decor was especially promising, but when I arrived at the Tower Vinyl section on Level 6, it was bursting at the seams with Records I Had To Have, either because I’d been despairing of ever finding them (Irrlicht by Klaus Schulze and R.E.M.’s Reckoning) or because they were so goddam cheap (reissues of Television’s Marquee Moon and Blur’s Parklife for ¥2200 and ¥3000, respectively!).  They even had a 2024 reissue of Ultravox!’s punk album Ha! Ha! Ha!, which has been on my shopping list for months.  See “Saturday Night in the City of the Dead.”

My take-home from Tower was enough for me to declare Tokyo a record collector’s paradise. But I hadn’t even tapped out Shibuya. The HMV around the corner carried copies of Amon Düül II’s Yeti and Faust’s So Far, which I already own but have never seen out in the wild: i.e., I had to order my copies. An indie store at the top of a high-rise shopping center right outside Shibuya Station shares a floor with a One Piece memorabilia shop. One Piece is to Florian as, I dunno, Star Wars or Tarantino movies were to me at his age, so we made two stops in that building on either side of our excursion down south to Osaka. That indie shop had its own copy of Irrlicht—I saw three copies total on my trip, having struck out all over the US looking for it—along with a banged-up vintage copy of Faust’s self-titled record, The Faust Tapes, and what appeared to be original releases of self-titled Ash Ra Tempel and Public Image Limited’s Metal Box, the latter in its round metal-box trade dress. I passed on all of these, for different reasons: had reissues, copies were pricey, etc.¹ Still, just holding them in my hands felt miraculous.

I had cleaned up in Shibuya, and I was concerned that I might have some trouble transporting my accumulated stack of vinyl back home. (At this moment my new records are stowed against the side wall of the overhead bin, so that at least 10% of my consciousness at any given moment on this flight is assigned to worrying that the luggage up there may shift during the flight, as they say, and ding up my haul.) Accordingly, I decided I would suspend my record-shopping, subject to one final stop up the road at the Disk Union store in Shinjuku. And of course I walked in and found Popol Vuh’s In den Gärten Pharaos just hanging loose in the racks, casual and all, like I hadn’t given up hope I’d ever get hold of a copy without dropping three digits and mail-ordering it from Discogs.

You have got to be kidding me.

Carla and I talked about this album in a Krautrock episode several months ago. It was one of two Popol Vuh releases we covered, and we very much preferred this one over the other record, Hosianna Mantra. Popol Vuh were, for all intents and purposes, Florian Fricke. Other musicians passed through and contributed, but the group was Fricke’s concept and his baby. Fricke was a classically-trained pianist, the child of upper middle-class musicians. For a period of time he was a film critic for Der Spiegel, and in this capacity he met a young Werner Herzog in the late 1960s. After appearing briefly in Herzog’s 1968 directorial debut Signs of Life banging out a Chopin etude on the piano, Fricke went on to soundtrack several Herzog films, including Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982).

Popol Vuh is celebrated for releasing some of the first original records featuring a Moog III synthesizer. The Moog III was a massive, temperamental, and very expensive piece of equipment, and aside from Wendy Carlos, who contented herself with recording synthy renditions of Bach and Beethoven pieces in her Switched On … series, few artists had the combination of skill, patience, and commitment to put the device front-and-center on a long-player. Simon & Garfunkel played around with one on Bookends, sure, but as always acoustic guitars led the charge there. John Lennon and the Rolling Stones dropped considerable cash for Moogs, but Lennon returned his in short order, and the Stones ultimately sold theirs to Hansa Studios in Berlin. Florian Fricke owned the second Moog III ever sold into Germany—the first being Lennon’s secondhand synth, which Bob Moog had flipped to Eberhard Schoener, Fricke’s neighbor in Stadlberg. Gripped by the prospect of constructing sounds from scratch, Fricke had to buy his own, and he did.

Fricke committed himself fully to learning the Tao of the Modular Synthesizer, and Popol Vuh’s first record Affenstunde, the Aguirre soundtrack, and In den Gärten Pharaos were the fruits of that labor. Then suddenly, after Pharaos, Fricke decided that the Moog was a soulless instrument and gave it up forever, selling his model—at a considerable discount, we understand—to Klaus Schulze, earlier of Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream, and lately the force behind the Irrlicht record I found scattered all over Japan. Going forward, Fricke determined that he would only use traditional instruments in Popol Vuh’s music, with some allowances made for contributions of electric guitar. Popol Vuh, which Fricke had named after a sacred Mayan text, would be his vehicle for accessing a unique and eclectic brand of spiritual, arguably religious music.

At this point I should say, if I haven’t already, that I’m about the least spiritual person I know. I find and take joy in and from material things, almost exclusively. Last month I told a client and friend about our plans to travel to Japan, and I mentioned we’d be staying in Osaka for several days, making day trips by train into Kyoto. Osaka is nothing, he declared, with a wave of his hand. Just another city. You should spend your nights in Kyoto. He raved about the shrines and temples there, the holy places and historical grounds, and how they acted upon and affected him, spiritually. I didn’t doubt that everything he said was true, and it all sounded great to me. I got online and reserved tickets to visit two of the particular sites he mentioned.

The first site² was Kokedera, known in English as the Moss Temple.  The grounds here date from the 800s, although there were “renovations” five centuries later.  The garden space is stunningly beautiful, carpeted in some 120 different varieties of moss.  To access the garden, you are required to visit the shrine and copy out a Buddhist prayer in Japanese calligraphy.  I was very excited to do this.  I had prepared myself to access the quiet of the space, to take care in my transcription, in the hope that I might separate my mind from the Matrix-like cascade of data that has me thinking all the time about the Guardians’ pitching rotation, the Presidential election, record store inventories, and God knows what else.  I set myself up criss-cross applesauce in the main space of the temple, facing the Buddha, while Kate and the kids sat down at tables behind me.

Less than five minutes later I was finished and was back standing up, rubbing my knees, thinking Great!  What’s next?  Florian took another forty-five minutes with his transcription, and although Kate and Lila finished well before he did, they certainly didn’t race to the finish like I apparently had.  Let me be clear: I never intended to fast-track my period of serene contemplation.  I just did, because my brain craves intellectual stimulus like the thunder needs the rain, like the needle needs a vein, like a runaway train (Apple Music, Spotify).  I’m 100% open to the prospect of a spiritual awakening, but let’s get a move on, People, because I’ve got like five minutes max before I need to check my email again.

All this to say that my susceptibility to spiritual growth and experience has always been de minimis, and recent events underscore the truth of that.  Except that music does tap into some spiritual side of me, in that it acts upon me in a way that engenders powerful emotions I can’t rationally explain. I suppose love has a similar effect—the warm and tender feelings I have for my family³ and dear friends—but there is at least an obvious scientific explanation, sounding in anthropology, for the bonds we form with one another as human beings. It is an evolutionary advantage to enter into relationships with others who can ensure that we survive and reproduce. Much as I like to think that God can be found in love, there’s at least a plausible case to be made that it’s in fact nothing more than biochemistry.

Contrast music. What Darwinian benefit is conferred by a love for music? And if we can’t think of one, is music, and for that matter the arts more broadly, our reason for being—precisely because it serves no end other than itself?

But I may or may not be getting afield of what I mean to cover here, which is “Vuh” (Apple Music, Spotify), the 20-minute opus that fills the entirety of Side B of my newest buy on vinyl, Popol Vuh’s In den Gärten Pharaos. I wrote earlier that Pharaos was one of Fricke’s Moog albums, but that’s only partly true. The title track on Side A is all about the synth, with Fricke’s then-bandmate Holger Trülzsch providing support on the bongos. “In den Gärten Pharaos” (Apple Music, Spotify) is trippy and interesting, in that it doesn’t have that sparkly, shimmering sound we tend to associate with electronic music. This is probably because Fricke’s synthesis predated that sound. The tones on this track are instead twangy, muted, and hollow—haunting in their emptiness, and Fricke can be forgiven for reflecting on this work and deciding that the Moog had no soul.

Flip the record, though, and you get “Vuh.” Cue Terry Gilliam’s animated foot to drop on the platter: And now for something completely different … There is Moogwork on “Vuh,” for sure, and still more bongo drumming from Trülzsch. But the principal instrument here is a pipe organ: namely, the medieval organ in the Stiftskirche St. Margareta in Baumberg, Germany. And Fricke is playing the hell out of these keys: long smears of chords, stretching into perpetuity, six to ten fingers slammed down at a time. Augmented by sticks-and-mallets cymbal flourishes and synthesizer tracks that rise and fall in the mix, this organ is potent—very nearly overwhelming. When I listen to this, I feel I am experiencing the Burkean Sublime (see “Im Süden”/ “Hard Coming Love”), or at least coming close.

I’ve always had a weakness for the organ. Back when Kate and I were planning our wedding, a minister asked why we were so concerned to be married in a church, given our lack of any religious affiliation. I want there to be an organ, I blurted out, and Kate kicked me under the table. Shallow as that answer may have sounded in the moment, upon reflection I’m able to assign some amount of depth to it. If love and music are the two singular powers in my life that can bring me peace, fill me with wonder, and at times leave me helpless on the floor, then the most obvious and sensible way to celebrate love is through music.  And not just music, but music on steroids, such as you might make on a centuries-old pipe organ.

Fricke saw this opportunity, too. I don’t know what spurred him to Baumberg, specifically, or what he had to tell the priest there to get access to the Stiftskirche organ, but he made the trip and was convincing enough. The end result was astonishing, truly a work that gives glory to God—or God to glory. And it’s not hard to see how the power of that age-old instrument turned him against Bob Moog’s concatenated install of oscillators, gates, knobs, and keys.

With “Vuh” Florian Fricke literally pulled out all the stops. Honeymooning on my purchase of the record, and briefly separated from the rest of my family, who had decided not to visit yet another record store with me and instead had gone back to the hotel, I walked the streets of Shibuya to the station Saturday night, through the turnstiles and down to the JR platform listening to “Vuh” at max volume on my headphones.  This most spiritual of songs—for me, anyway—soundtracking the most materialistic of settings.  As I walked, I took in the giant flashing screens, the glittering lights, the hordes of people streaming down the sidewalks into the Scramble Crossing.  In the moment, Popol Vuh scrubbed away the ad messaging and consumerism and tourist appeals, so that I could only see light on darkness, a gathering of energy, and above all, life.

Powerful stuff, for sure. Now let’s go check the baseball scores.

1. My friend Shaun (see “Golden Slumbers”/ “Carry That Weight”/ “The End”) is borderline obsessed with Metal Box; if I’d had $250+ to spend on that copy, I’d have bought it for him. Looking back, maybe I should have anyway.

2. The second site was the Imperial Villa at Katsura, a sixteenth-century complex built by some prince or another to take his relaxation and tea away from the noise and bustle of town, and to host and impress visiting dignitaries. By some accident in the planning here—I take full responsibility—we were attached to a Japanese-language tour. The docents compensated us with headsets that would provide explanations in English of what we were seeing. You know the drill: When you see a sign with a number of it, enter the corresponding number into the device and press Play. The dude in our headsets summed up each stop in fewer than 100 words. By contrast, the live tour guide embarked on unintelligible ten-minute disquisitions that elicited oohs and aahs from the visitors who understood Japanese. Through all this exhaustive description the temperature was well over 35 degrees Celsius, and the sun was battering us nearly to death. I can speak confidently for my wife and children, in addition to myself, when I say that we couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the Imperial Villa and grab some cold drinks.

3. Literally right as I was typing the word family, Florian, who is seated on the plane just in front of me, dropped his seatback about 40 degrees from vertical and very nearly crushed my laptop. Nothing’s changed: I still love him, only slightly, only slightly less than I used to (Apple Music, Spotify).