Agape-Agape Love-Love

It’s easy to overlook Popol Vuh’s Agape-Agape Love-Love – by now, there’s a certain consistency in continuity, and Florian Fricke has established such a singular soundworld that you can fairly easily assume what he’ll be doing on each album. But there are surprises here, including the return, after a decade away, of original guitarist Conny Veit. The tag-team between Veit and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Fichelscher on the album is one of its most compelling elements, but there’s plenty else here too – a fine-tuning of the choral dynamics explored on Agape-Agape’s precursor, Sei Stille, Wisse Ich Bin; some lovely falsetto gliding from vocalist Renate Knaup; and in the closing “Agape-Agape” and “Why do I still sleep”, two of Fricke’s most enduring compositions. Apparently, this album is one of his favourites, and in both its intimacy of performance and its breadth of vision, it’s not too hard to see why.