Harmonic Hummmmbug

For the past 13 years, the Italian seaport of Bari has been the venue for Time Zones, a festival of music and performance. Arsalan Mohammad watched Krautrock veterans Popul Vuh try their hands at a little mass hallucination.

Under the patronage of soundtrack superstar Ennio Morricone, Bari's Time Zones Festival specialises in bizarre juxtapositions of music and environments. Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nico, Fela Kuti, John Zorn, Peter Hammill, Einsturzende Neubauten and David Sylvian have all played here. Run by a small team of local people, Time Zones always provokes unusual responses from performers and audience. None more so than from Popul Vuh, that legend of seventies German music. Popul Vuh - which comprises Florian Fricke and Frank Fiedler - elected to play in the unlikely setting of Molfetta, a tiny fishing village dominated by a grand Byzantine church in the middle of a maze of cobbled streets. This was to be the site for a giant installation.

Good Rooms One To Five is based on the notion that twentieth-century human beings have lost the ability to access the "hallucinatory centres of the brain". These centres respond to certain specific frequencies (between 2000 and 5000 hz). According to Fricke, a scientist at Princeton University discovered that the sounds of bees and cicadas chirping and buzzing can stimulate these hallucinatory centres. The idea of doing a multimedia event came from Fricke's visit to a Munich installation by London's multimedia group Antirom. Concluding that this was "too cool", he decided to give it a go himself.Since the early Moog-powered days of Popol Vuh, Fricke has been concerned with the effect of sound on perception. Popol Vuh's work from the mid-70s, especially their Werner Herzog soundtracks, saw Fricke combining these interests with a deeply spiritual sensibility. He led Popul Vuh on an erratic and unpredictable career, which included the dubious distinction of inventing New Age music. Vuh's second album In The Garden Of the Pharaohs (1970), predicts the whole ambient genre that Brian Eno went on to define with Here Come The Warm Jets. The Good Rooms project is a continuation of Fricke's exploration of the senses. "Music" he says, "is for me the means of realistically approaching Utopia".

So that evening, the streets of Molfetta were bathed in red and blue light. Above our heads televisions were suspended in wooden scaffolds between the buildings. Lining the route were small speakers emitting insect noises. The main square was bathed in huge projections of honeycombs, larvae and a detail from an ancient Greek fresco depicting Orpheus. In a smaller courtyard, around 50 people stood in a circle holding hands. In the middle, arms aloft, was Florian, his eyes closed. Slowly, he brought his arms down, breathing out. In a low hum, the choir followed him: "HHHHHHMMMMMMMNNN NNNNN". After a few seconds pause, he lifted his hands skywards again."BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!" As people crammed in to have a look, any intentions Florian may have had of creating a spiritually uplifting atmosphere were lost in shouts, laughter and a general movement towards the harbourside bar.

Completely unfazed by this lukewarm response, Popul Vuh are looking forward to continuing their installation work. They plan to cover a Neapolitan cathedral floor with broken glass, steel, concrete and water, then to throw a thousand silver Euros onto the audience from the ceiling. "The Church will be very angry when they hear this," laughs Florian. "This is not just Good Room. It is to be called The Tears Of The Enlightened".