Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio remixes Popol Vuh's "Nachts: Schnee" from the 1987 soundtrack Cobra Verde, and crafts a piece that balances craving and anguish. Haswell & Hecker undertake the impossible: "Aguirre I" from the 1972 soundtrack Aguirre - The Wrath Of God.
The first few minutes of Aguirre – The Wrath Of God are amongst the most extraordinary in cinema. It is Christmas Day 1560, and after annihilating the Incan Empire, an army of Conquistadors cross the Andes and descend through the clouds in pursuit of El Dorado, the City of Gold. Popol Vuh's extraordinarily beautiful "Aguirre I" imbues the sequence with foreboding, spirituality, and an ethnographic authenticity that is at once fake but totally convincing. Their ethereal music is a vital contrast to the tale and is best heard in its cinematic context. Haswell & Hecker's remix, also extraordinary, has an unwelcome incision of digital din at around the four minute mark that unnecessarily echoes the violence and destruction that will unfold on screen. The Conquistadors' mission, if ever truly a pure evangelical sojourn, becomes engulfed in dehydration, cannibalism, murder, suicide, hallucination, delusions of purity, incestuous desire, insanity and a lust for gold and fame.
Klaus Kinski features in Aguirre, and his cinematic presence carries a potent threat. Mostly he just stares, leans to the right, sways, plots, and orders violence. By the end of the journey he is surrounded by corpses, adrift on a raft; ranting that he will conquer all of South America, marry his own daughter, become immortal, like you do. The descent into madness begins to emerge when a native plays the pan pipes as Kinski turns his back to the camera and squirms uncomfortably. Maybe I was projecting a hatred of pan piping but the scene gave me the feeling that Kinski was pretty close to actually beheading the musician in order to cut off the Peruvian pollution at its immediate source. Amen.
Werner Herzog based Cobra Verde on The Viceroy of Ouidah, by novelist Bruce Chatwin but, as usual, disregarded the source material at will. Mika Vainio's version of Popol Vuh's music fluctuates between sudden metallic surges, cracking pauses, hypnotic waves of static, and silence. Again, the unsettling, scintillating piece probably matches the film’s trek into dangerous territory, led by an increasingly unreliable guide. Cobra Verde was the last collaboration between Herzog and Klaus Kinski who told his director: "We can not go further. I am no more." Four years later, Kinski was dead.
This splendid release is pressed on red vinyl and packaged in a plastic sleeve with a golden sticker.
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