What holds you to this music is rarely a riff or a chorus. It is patience: slow modal cycles, drones left to change colour on their own, voices used as another instrument, a hush closer to liturgy than to rock. That taste travels, because the German scene of the early 1970s was full of records built the same way. These six prog rock albums for Popol Vuh fans are each tied to the band by something you can check on a sleeve: a shared player, a shared label year, a guest credit. None of the six is a Popol Vuh record — this page is about where to go next.

Amon Düül II — Wolf City (1972)

The bridge is a person. The drummer and guitarist credited here had already worked with the Munich collective on Carnival in Babylon, and by the following year he was inside Popol Vuh, credited on Seligpreisung and staying on as their guitarist for years. Wolf City was taped at Bavaria Studios in July 1972 and issued by United Artists, and its guest list sets sitar, tabla, tambura and choir organ beside the group’s own violin, saxophone and twin guitars. Classical Music, ranking the collective’s Yeti among the greatest krautrock albums of all time, called it “a sprawling epic that typifies the anarchic brilliance of early krautrock”. The Popol Vuh band file traces the Munich overlap.

Tangerine Dream — Zeit (1972)

The tightest link on the page is printed on the record itself: the keyboard player who founded Popol Vuh guests on Zeit, playing Moog synthesizer on the opening piece, “Birth of Liquid Plejades”, where a quartet of cellists also plays. It is a double album, released on Ohr in August 1972, from the stretch when the Berlin group worked with organ, vibraphone and VCS3 synthesizers. AllMusic calls it the band’s purest expression of “space music”. For a listener crossing into the electronic side of the scene, this is the album with a Popol Vuh signature on it; our guide to Tangerine Dream takes it from there.

Klaus Schulze — Irrlicht (1972)

Here the bridge is the label house. Ohr released this solo debut in August 1972, and the same operation ran Pilz for what it called its more folkish and ethnic releases — Pilz being the imprint that issued Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra that same year. Two records, one company, twelve months. Irrlicht is wordless, and its raw material is documented rather than guessed at: a modified electric organ, a taped rehearsal of a classical orchestra and a damaged amplifier used as a filter. Fact Magazine adds a postscript, reporting that the founder of Popol Vuh, an owner of one of the very first Moog systems, sold that instrument on to the artist credited above by 1975 — after this album, not before. Our guide to Klaus Schulze maps what follows.

Ash Ra Tempel — Join Inn (1973)

Same house, one year on: Join Inn came out on Ohr, recorded at Studio Dierks in the gaps between another artist’s sessions, while Popol Vuh’s Seligpreisung appeared that same year on Kosmische Musik, the other imprint of the same Berlin operation, with both bands on its roster. The album is two side-long tracks played by guitar, bass and a third musician credited with drums, organ and a Synthi A, plus one vocal credit. Classical Music placed the group’s 1971 debut among the greatest krautrock albums of all time. The Ash Ra Tempel band file covers the rest.

Can — Future Days (1973)

The paperwork connects these two before the music does: in 1970 the German arm of Liberty issued both Popol Vuh’s debut Affenstunde and Can’s Soundtracks, so both catalogues began at one address. By August 1973, when Future Days arrived on United Artists, the Cologne group was recording in its own Inner Space Studio at Weilerswist. This one is sung, with a lead vocalist credited throughout and four tracks. NME called it “an immaculate piece of work full of distance and air”. Our guide to Can opens that door properly.

Between — And the Waters Opened (1973)

The oboe is the bridge. The oboist credited on Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung was a core member of this international ensemble, formed in 1970, and ProgArchives’ band biography names him as the musician responsible for the oboe parts in Popol Vuh. On this Vertigo release he is credited with oboe and oboe d’amore and with writing two of the pieces, alongside keyboards, cello, an adapted harp, bamboo flute, percussion and voice — an instrument list close to the Hosianna Mantra credits. ProgArchives describes the group as built on improvisation and instruments from outside European rock. The vinyl was reissued in 2010.

Where to start

The shortest step away from Popol Vuh is And the Waters Opened, which shares a player and an instrument with the albums you know, then Wolf City, which shares a musician and a city. The easiest first listen, in plain structural terms, is Future Days: a singer credited across the album and four defined tracks rather than continuous movements. The two that ask more are Zeit, a double album whose pieces run at side length, and Irrlicht, which has no vocals and was assembled from tape work rather than from a band playing together. To fill the gaps in the source catalogue first, our guide to the essential Popol Vuh records is the companion to this list.

Go deeper

Several of these six have full files here. The Can edition of this series runs the same exercise from the Cologne end of the scene, while the electronic strand continues in the Brian Eno edition and the Vangelis edition, both dealing with music organised by texture rather than by verses. If you would rather move by period than by artist, the decade hub sets the German records beside everything around them, and the whole programme begins at Prog Rock Recommendations: What to Listen to Next.

One note on method: every bridge above is a credit, a label, a studio date or a printed ranking, never a resemblance we thought we heard: this scene made more myth than paperwork. Where a claim could not be checked, it is not on the page. That is also how the books work: Beyond the Rhine, the German volume in the Beyond the Sound series, tells this story at length — communes, labels, studios and the players who moved between them all.

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