A few years back I finished my first SLP album. At the time I was studying for an exam in Indian studies and I was immersed in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. I channeled or at least tried to channel these readings into a form understandable for me and that is how Slp was born, even if in all of its incompleteness. I have recently resumed reading "religious" topics in particular the work of Csordas, "The Sacred Self" but also the documentary "Jesus Camp". From this "Deliverance of the Self" a second attempt of getting closer or at least of rendering more comprehensible to me the concept of orthodoxy arose. It is the knowledge of Tim Jones' People's Temple and of their tragic end to have fascinated me mostly. It would be simple to run to faith in the extolded moment of current relativism, but it would be a nonsense, there is as much faith today as there was at the time of Russian orthodox icons, and, if monotheism is no longer sufficient, there are other -isms to replace it but its approach is now voluntary and violently desired with pain, which even leads up to the point of giving up life itself, in order to grasp it if only for a moment. I grew up faithless and am unshakeably materialistic. I have no intention of converting myself or to discover anything, convinced that there is nothing to discover if not our own disarming finitude. But there is no God to subdue to, only an immense gravity of faith which man contains in his soul, in the desperate attempt to overcome his finitude and to rise to a totality that only earth and worms can fill. Still, faith cures, hands are placed on the head and the past surfaces and cleans itself from the pain and the spirits which once mentioned let the soul embrace the Lord once again. Communities rise spontaneously in which ethnic groups find themselves in distant lands and with joy sing the nostalgia for a far-off land which will never be bridged. Child preachers are brought up halfway between Asakura Shiro, Christ's reincarnation in feudal Japan, and little survivalists that keep the ONU forces away from their property with God's word. Because the struggle for the earth coincides with that for the heavens as in Palestine and in the cargo cult which bring food for a race in extinction.Wilhelm Reich fought against a UFO, the wise dominate man with satanic rituals, hundreds of cults in the south of the world culminate with crowds that panic and end up in massacres. Exactly as the last love parade and Crowley's abbey, which falls to pieces while the golden background of the icons shine with a dimensionless infinity. Every utopia tragically dies but I lack orthodoxy the fanaticism of who is always right because he has the revelation of a Lord, a prophet to whom a supreme Knowledge has donated an illegible emulator to the human ear in order to bring the soul back towards an embrace eternally grateful of being One and One in All. I envy the child preacher, the reincarnation of Buddha, he who has chosen to extinguish himself and he who explodes in an Iraqi parking lot. As Orion's stars themselves become avant-garde of a reign to come, the reign of our Lord which realizes itself on earth with every miracle, in the tears of a marble Virgin, in the sacred images in a squalid shop in the south of Italy, in the collective weddings and in the tears, tremors and repeated sufferings from incalculable vertigo equal to themselves.
credits
released January 1, 2010
All music by SLP
Mixing by Mister Drey
Cover photo by The People's Temple
Artwork layout by Giancarlo Morieri
Samples from Jesus Camp, Gate of Flesh, and more
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