I previewed Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks

On this day in 2011, I previewed the forthcoming release of Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks via my website.

When I was approached to do a soundtrack for Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, he had a half-hour edit of the first part and I suggested that he should come to my house in Plumpton and set up a playback system in my studio for his 35mm film. As it was running, I started introducing my recorded music, instrument by instrument.

The glue between music and images was superb; it seemed as though they were running in sync, even though they were two separate entities that had been brought together.

I continued working on the soundtrack, doubled it in length and delivered it over to Kenneth Anger. He initially included it on a partial cut of the film that was shown at film festivals and various other events. Then it got bootlegged. I decided to release the work that I had created for this project in March 2012.

When I was going through my Led Zeppelin quarter-inch tapes, I came across a very early mix of the soundtrack, the piece I played initially to Kenneth Anger. I included it on the deluxe version of Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks so that people could experience the kind of dense music and textures I was making at home in the Seventies that didn’t have anything to do immediately with Led Zeppelin, but were all part of the great experiment.

I used the Mellotron, an Arp Odyssey synthesizer, and the Guild 12-string acoustic, which goes underneath the melody that sounds like the horns of Jericho. In the middle section, there is also some bowed guitar done on the sunburst Stratocaster and some phased chanting. I wanted to feature the tanpura and the tabla, both of which I bought on my first visit to India in 1967. I hadn’t just bought them for effect, I wanted them to be working instruments.