"The Music From and Inspired By..." Reversed

Last evening when working with my screenwriting partner Alphonzo Stein I for the first time got the opportunity to describe the ending to one of my favorite films, Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass, which I will not spoil right now. Either way, it is maybe the most powerful end I've seen in cinema. The topic came up as I played the Popol Vuh album of the same name (albeit in French (and German to clarify?)), which has a lot of the same power as the film itself.

The music, however is hardly included in the film itself which, is more dominated musically by classical, however in the essay that Herzog wrote for the liner notes of the Popol Vuh reissues he discusses the level of inspiration he took from his closest friend Florian Ficke's music, all of which had been composed and recorded before the production of the films he scored (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and Cobra Verde).

Popol Vuh was one of the first krautrock groups to heavily use the Moog, but they moved further into world music in some of their later work. This album and it's building instrumentals not unlike followers Sigur Rós could only be described as "transcendent."



















Florian Ficke on the set of Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser