Rare tape edition, original. Within the canon of adventurous music that emerged across Germany between the late 1960s and 1980s, most commonly referred to as krautrock or kosmische, few artists loom larger than Florian Fricke. The founder of the legendary project Popol Vuh, Fricke played a foundational role in the development of a realm of creative sonority that would eventually morph into ambient electronic music, bridging the possibilities presented by newly synthesizers like the Moog, with mystical ideas and elements drawn from experimental music and the avant-garde. Fascinatingly, by the mid-1970s, the artist abandoned electronics, moving almost totally into the acoustic realm, while continuously seeking higher meaning through sound. Among the rarest and most definitive expressions of this journey is Fricke’s debut solo LP, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins - I Am One With the Earth”, an astounding and groundbreaking gesture of large ensemble vocal Minimalism, privately issued as the lone release on his own Lorck Publication München imprint in 1983. As an incredible stroke of luck, we’ve been able to obtain a limited number of archive copies of the original pressing of this masterstroke of mystical drone. It’s a rare chance to obtain one of the seminal and rarest works of late kosmische, by one of the great architects of the form.

The cosmic journey of Florian Fricke (1944 – 2001) through the realms of creativity and sound was among the most fascinating to occur within Germany during the post-war period. Conservatory trained in piano and composition, during his late teens Fricke became deeply engaged with the ideas and output of the musical avant-garde, eventually leading to his founding of the legendary group Popol Vuh alongside Frank Fiedler and Holger Trülzsch. His early work in Popol Vuh, played on one of the earliest Moog synthesizers, in addition to his contribution to Tangerine Dream’s “Zeit” in 1972, led to him being credited as a pioneer in electronic music, but his immersion in the field was relatively short lived. By Popol Vuh’s third LP, “Hosianna Mantra”, electronics had all but disappeared, beginning a deep dedication to acoustic instrumentation that would define the remainder of his career.

Fricke’s creative, political, and spiritual journeys were closely interlinked. Beginning as a devoted Marxist, he eventually came to see himself as an "anti-capitalist, universalist, and anti-consumerist variant of Christianity". These ideas and this quest helped guiding his work over the coming decades within Popol Vuh, including numerous celebrated soundtracks for the films of his long-time friend Werner Herzog - “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, “Herz Aus Glas”, “Nosferatu”, “Cobra Verde”, etc. - and the slim body of solo work that he produced, including his remarkable debut solo LP, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins - I Am One With the Earth”, privately issued as the lone release on his own Lorck Publication München imprint in 1983.

Comprising three fairly long form compositions - “Gruppenseufzen Zur Versöhnung Der Erde Mit Dem Menschen”, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins”, and “Song of the Earth” - the album is an astounding and groundbreaking gesture of large ensemble vocal Minimalism, drawing upon Eastern traditions like Buddhist chant, to produce immersive, resonant sonic fields. Falling in close alignment with projects like Prima Materia, and certain roughly contemporaneous work by artists like Somei Satoh, Michael Vetter, Yoshi Wada, Pauline Oliveros, and Toshi Tsuchitori, which embraced the use of human voice as a generator on lone tones and drones, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins - I Am One With the Earth” features the sparse guitar interventions of Fricke’s Popol Vuh partner Daniel Fichelsher, but is otherwise entirely made up of the vocals of Anni Morris Wieland, Bettina Fricke Waldthausend, Dieter Prym, Florian Fricke, Friedemann Berger, Friedemann Wieland, Gisela Von Doering, Ingeborg Jahnke, Jan Lorck-Shjmerning, Jana Faust, Karl F. Weber and Klaudia Wieland.

Feeling uncannily spacial and displaced at the same time, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins - I Am One With the Earth” feels far more like a communal work than almost any other similar gesture produced in the west, seemingly capturing a group journey toward some form of higher meaning through sound. Reflecting on the album’s process, Fricke stated: «You could label it as 'body-space-music' (Körperraummusik) where you sing inside the body and take it in such a way that every cell in the body, from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head, starts to vibrate. In order to be able to realise this I have experimented to find where speech resonates in the body. The consonants vibrate at the body walls, the bones and flesh, and the vowels fill the body spaces. And that sounds like a gong-concert: it also has a great therapeutic effect.»

Raw and unfiltered, maximising the human process and effect, “Die Erde und Ich Sind Eins - I Am One With the Earth” is a profound piece of work, each of its voices gathering and shifting within a gentle ambient storm, placing its complex tonal intersections and distances as one of the most crucial and sinfully overlooked works within the second wave of Minimalism unfolding during the early 1980s. Sadly, like so many privately issued LPs, it never reached the audiences or critical response that it rightfully deserved, before being discovered, a generation later, within the krautrock revival which pushed demand for its astounding sounds toward the heavens. With this in hand, we’re absolutely thrilled to have been able to get our hands on a limited number of archive copies of the original pressing on Lorck Publication München. Needless to say, this is a rare event that won’t last long. This one is just about as essential as they come for any fan of krautrock / kosmische, experimental vocal music, minimalism, and ambient music at large. More than 40 years on, immersion into the album’s two sides is as transcendent as sonic experiences come.