Description:	Amazing 4LP box set on the Ajna Offensive
	Format:	LP box set (vinyl)
	Genre(s):	Soundtracks
	Label:	Ajna
	Price:	£47.99
	Availability:	Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry!

5
...according to our Brett on 23 July 2009.

Christ, I think we've chanced upon the occult rock motherload with this deluxe quadruple LP box set featuring the full suite of music ex-Love guitarist Bobby Beausoleil created for Kenneth Anger's classic experimental short Lucifer Rising (after Jimmy Page was sacked from the job for his lack of end product - though the fragments he did record are curios well worth hearing). The pieces eventually chosen for the film are all present and correct: unashamedly proggy, cosmic and sounding as out of time and fashion as you might expect from a guy who recorded them years into a life sentence for a murder he was convicted of in the back end of the 1960s along with other associates of the Manson Family. Those pieces are the most obviously composed and deliberate in the set and they very definitely retain an almost indefinably arcane quality when taken out of the context of the film and while he and his Freedom Orchestra have their musical touchstones, from Ash Ra Tempel (especially in Beausoleil's prominent guitar ruminations) to early 70s Pink Floyd, the overall feel is pretty unique. Having said all that, the real treasure for me is in the recordings which were made available a few years back in a double CD set (a couple of them also on a long out-of-print Qbico LP), with Zeppelin-esque riff jams, bizarre lounge interludes played on 'prison-made' keyboards, jazzier fusion-inflected numbers and more, all shot through with an acid-fried psych-out mentality. Particularly amazing is the first side of the set, recorded in the hallowed Haight-Ashbury of 1967, which showcases his pre-prison band The Magick Powerhouse of Oz running through a staggering jam that's absolutely crammed with atmosphere and foreboding, largely drawn from it's breath-like horn drone rhythms and constant hints of explosion which work up a tension that sustains itself brilliantly for well over twenty minutes. As far as the presentation goes, extensive liner notes and two batshit mental posters are included, with pretty much every part of the packaging adorned with new artwork which mirrors the melting pot of the film itself, dark, mystical, enticing, yet simultaneously completely cheesy and preposterous. That's the beauty of this stuff and this set is certainly a very beautiful thing.

Love this record? Hate it? Tell us.

What their label says...

The
LUCIFER RISING
Suite

A complete anthology of the recordings made for
the Lucifer Rising motion picture soundtrack

by BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL

with
THE FREEDOM ORCHESTRA
and
THE MAGICK POWERHOUSE OF OZ

This fully authorized and definitive release will include:
~Remastered recordings spanning 11 years, from the ’67 recording to the Tracy Prison recordings of ’78.
~4 full-length LPs worth of Lucifer Rising material with half being never-before-heard sessions personally selected by Bobby BeauSoleil.
~9 new pieces of art from Bobby: 8 record sleeve panels and one 2’ x 3’ poster.
~2 posters: one by Bobby BeauSoleil and one by Dennis Dread.
~A much-extended version of the “Fallen Angel Blues” piece by Bobby that originally appeared in the Kenneth Anger DVD set.
~”Hymns to the Solar Temple”- impressions on a visit to Bobby at the Oregon Correctional Facility in Pendleton, Oregon by Dennis Dread.
~”The Saga of a Soundtrack” by Michael Moynihan
~Art from Dennis Dread for the back of the LP box, also to be included as a 2’ x 2’ poster.
~Art from Dennis Dread for the front lid of the box which will provide a window into the works of Bobby’s to be found within.
~Remastered by Robert Ferbrache, well known for his work with Blood Axis, 16 Horsepower and others.

All art has been created specifically for this release.

The music of Lucifer Rising reverberates with all the pathos
and raw emotive energy of an ageless archetype. Like the film
itself, the symbols evoked in sound are at once timeless and
yet strangely born of a very specific time and place, a frozen
moment that has been sealed to us forever. Something emerges
from the grooves of this vinyl collection that we can only hope
to borrow for a short while and ride like a solar disk to places
yet unknown.

 

“There is but one surviving recording of my initial work on the
Lucifer Rising soundtrack. It was recorded in August of 1967
in a former Haight-Ashbury movie theater that had recently been
renamed the Straight Theater.”

Robert Kenneth Beausoleil was born under the sign
of the scorpion on November 6th, 1947 in Santa Barbara,
California. Roughly translated, Beausoleil means “Beautiful Sun”
and Bobby has seized this meaning in more recent years by
capitalizing the ‘s’ for emphasis. The name itself betrays certain
artistic and spiritual coordinates.

At the age of 16, he packed his
guitar and headed south for Los Angeles where he quickly
became entrenched in the colorful Hollywood music scene.
He played guitar for several garage acts, including a brief stint with Arthur
Lee and The Grass Roots. Still too young to play the adults only
circuit, BeauSoleil was soon let go. As would prove to
be the case throughout his life, BeauSoleil’s brief impression
was lasting and Arthur Lee soon re-christened his band Love,
reputedly a winking homage to the young runaway’s romantic
proclivities. Bandless but unbroken, BeauSoleil soon headed
for higher ground and landed in Haight Ashbury just prior to
his 18th birthday. Marching into the thriving psychedelic street
revolution, BeauSoleil formed an artrock band, The Orkustra,
and began gigging regularly at Be-In events throughout the city.
It was during this time, just months before the onset of the
Summer of Love, that underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger
discovered BeauSoleil during a psychedelic arts festival called
The Invisible Circus. Anger immediately cast the handsome
musician as the lead man and fallen angel archetype in his latest
celluloid ritual, Lucifer Rising. With typical melodramatic pomp,
Anger approached BeauSoleil in a parking lot after the festival,
declaring, “You are Lucifer!” BeauSoleil agreed to play the part
under the condition that he would also compose the film’s
soundtrack.

 

“The story has been told of how our first collaborative
attempt to make Lucifer Rising had come apart, coincident
with the implosion of the San Francisco love movement that
ceremoniously climaxed with the Death of Hippy funeral
march down Haight Street in the fall of ’67. There were
hard feelings and finger-pointings, too much of that, when
the undertaking had for the most part collapsed under the
weight of its own innocently bold premise.
Kenneth went to New York to lick his wounds. I
returned to Los Angeles where I notoriously took a wrong
turn, made a tragic blunder and wound up in prison for killing
a man – yet another sixties casualty of sorts. I was down,
devastated, in the darkest place imaginable, but I was not
dead... dreams remained.”

Caged first in San Quentin and later in Tracy State Prison,
BeauSoleil’s creative impulses could not be squelched despite
his repressive surroundings. With diligence he was able to
set up an inmate music program at the latter institution in
the early 1970s. Through all these years, Lucifer Rising still
persistently occupied his thoughts. As he explained: “At some
point I had heard that [Kenneth] was again getting ready to
do Lucifer Rising. It was still his pet project and he was getting
ready to finish it... I decided I’d talk to him about it, because
I’d always felt, ever since our parting of the ways in 1967, that
this was unfinished business. I still believed in the concept as
it had originally been described to me: heralding the dawn of
a new age, ritualizing that process, the mythological aspects
and all of that. It spoke to me; it resonated with me. I wanted
to complete the project as I felt it was unfinished, and I don’t
like loose ends.”

 

“Now, for the first time, all of the music composed for the
soundtrack project has been compiled into a single public
release. The Lucifer Rising Suite begins with the 1967 version
of the soundtrack and continues through a logical sequence
of the recordings made in the years spanning 1976-79. With
respect to the latter, the original master tapes were mined
for music that had not been heard by anyone in nearly
three decades. The newly unearthed recordings were then
restored, cleaned up and combined with those previously
released to make the anthology as complete as possible.

“The compositions that comprise the Suite are
sequenced in an order that tells a story, after a fashion. It
is a story that may be impossible to tell in a strictly literary
manner, one that – like a mirror’s reflection into another – is
both personal and allegorical.”