If Popol Vuh are known for anything, it’s the iconic theme music Fricke wrote for Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre: The Wrath Of God. Fricke and Herzog would work together, sporadically, over the seventies and eighties, and they were a surprising pairing at first, Herzog’s mania an inversion of Fricke’s calm. This, however, was also the collaboration’s superpower. Watching Spanish conquistadors clambering down a mountainside in Peru, an epic vision in itself, accompanied by the rapturous ‘voice organ’ mnemonic of Fricke’s “Aguirre,” is a sight once seen, never forgotten. “Aguirre” shifts slowly, the glorious, spectral choir underpinned by an intensely potent and mournful two-note figure for guitar; from something so simple builds a music that’s incredibly powerful. There are some other lovely songs on this album, but everything’s overshadowed by the variations on the “Aguirre” theme. Gary Lucas once described it as “among the finest film music ever composed” – he wasn’t wrong.

This is Fricke on synth with Daniel Fischelscher on guitar. For Werner Herzog’s early epic, they provide a soundtrack that is both subtle and intense. It also sidesteps into a little bit of pure jam, for Fischelscher’s one songwriting credit, but most of it is fantastically careful sound design and ghost choirs.