Articles

Contents

• Bobby BeauSoleil - Voodoo Shivaya (Peter Thelen)
• Bobby BeauSoleil - Dancing Hearts Afire (Peter Thelen)
• The Saga of a Soundtrack (Michael Moynihan)
• Hymns From The Solar Temple (Dennis Dread)
• Read more articles

​

© 2018 Photo by Nick Syracuse

Bobby BeauSoleil - Voodoo Shivaya

Peter Thelen

Wad breaks and hard knocks, it’s been a long hard road” are the opening lyrics on “Hard Road,” a dark, bluesy number that opens the first disc of this two disc set, lyrics that are coming straight from Bobby Beausoleil's heart. The bulk of the album came together behind prison walls between 2008 and 2015, with some collaboration on a few of the cuts, and then a couple additional years to arrange the release and subsequent distribution. READ MORE

The Saga of a Soundtrack

Michael Moynihan

ith the advent of the conformist nightmare that consumed most of America in the 1950s, something eventually had to break. By the middle of the following decade, it most certainly had—and the shattered evidence was plain to see. Under a California sun, the shards and splinters of what had been a monochrome world now glinted in Technicolor brilliance, dazzling the eyes of those who dared to look toward new frontiers. The old rules were dispensed with, scorned and abandoned as anachronistic restraints. Dividing lines between art and life melted away, and for a few fleeting moments—or even years—anything seemed possible.

Once the dark mirror reflecting status-quo culture had been shattered and the floodgate opened to an alternate stream of consciousness, there was little controlling what came through it. Those hardier souls possessed of stamina and vision could ride the cresting wave and even channel its rushing forces as a means to propel their own creations. But as one wave rolled in, another was right on its heels—sometimes more disorienting than its predecessor. Many who immersed themselves in this tumultuous tide were soon lost at sea or drowned in unfamiliar waters. READ MORE

Hymns From The Solar Temple

Dennis Dread

"But the bridge resounds no less under just you, and you do not have the colour of dead men. Why are you riding here on the road to Hel?"

~Gylfaginning

he 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. In the Old Norse tale concerning Thor's missing hammer, Loki borrows the goddess Freyja's cloak to make haste to the Land of Giants. In an altogether more somber Viking-age dirge involving mistletoe and funeral pyres, Hermod borrows Odin's eight-legged steed to ride into the underworld and request that Hel bid their beloved Shining God's return to the living. The borrowed vehicle is a recurring mythic theme throughout the world, and I am reminded of this archetype as I pull onto Interstate 5, in a van that clearly does not belong to me, heading south toward Interstate 84. READ MORE