ANT0N LAVEY - THE SATAN1C MASS (1968)

The High Priest of the Church of Satan leads this mass in San Francisco on a September Friday the 13th, III Annos Satanas. It's a live recording, and carries the faults of its production. But underneath the unrelenting didactic poetry of the sermon (with, it would seem, its fairly quotidian Libertarian message), is some innovative orchestration and electronic-aided vespers sonority. Like all sermons, this is performance art. The album documents this orgy of propaganda, its fervor of raving nonsense.

This album kicks off a few odes to the dark majesties--a well-rendered dreamworld within our already baroque religious cultural narratives.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law..."