Red Temple Spirits - In the Temple of Californian Trance

The few people who noticed Red Temple Spirits at the time of their debut – the double LP Dancing To Restore An Eclipsed Moon came out in 1988 in just 500 copies – were marked for life by the music that poured out of the grooves of that vinyl: a strange blend that seemed to invoke early Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground of “White Light/ White Heat” and the Cure of “Pornography”. All of it under the banner of a tribal psychedelia, dense and full-bodied, yet at the same time rich with long atmospheric passages, coloured by the sounds of flutes, bells, birdsong and trickling water. Across the two LPs there are eleven compositions: eight on the first record and just three, very long ones, on the second, including a cover of "Nile Song" by Pink Floyd.

The album opens with the shamanic "Exorcism/Waiting For the Sun", and Red Temple Spirits immediately declare their creed: a psychedelic intro of electric and acoustic noise is swallowed up by the powerful advance of the drums and a dark, full-bodied bassline, while the voice looms over everything as if officiating a rite. An arpeggiated guitar introduces "Liquid Temple", the most "pop" track on the whole collection, in which you can sense Red Temple Spirits' kinship with the scene that also gave birth to Jane's Addiction. "Dark Spirits" climbs the spirals of a direct, biting psychedelic rock, while "Bear Cave" slows the pace and plunges the atmosphere into the darkness of night. The second side opens with "Dreaming Ending", a delirium of powerful new wave streaked with lush psychedelia: the bass pulses incessantly beneath the slicing guitars and howling vocals, while a flute hints at ancestral melodies. It's again a dark, desert-dry bassline that opens the following "Electric Flowers", a magnetic, enveloping ballad. Spirals of psychedelia wrap around the rock atmosphere of "Moonlight", before the gentle trance redolent of Popol Vuh on "Where Merlin Played" brings the first of the two records to a close in the best possible way.

The second record, in fact, is an EP of just under half an hour of music, but its content is so incendiary that it can in no way be considered secondary. The third side of the album makes room for a scorching cover of "Nile Song", written by Roger Waters back when Pink Floyd was still his band, and a hypnotic ballad built entirely on slicing guitars and the classic straight rhythms of new wave, "Lost In Dreaming". The album's grand finale, however, belongs to the sprawling "Light Of Christ/ This Hollow Ground", an anthem to desolation that, fifteen years on, remains undiminished in its power, an incredible mix of Velvet Underground, Faust, Sonic Youth, Fields Of The Nephilim and Loop.

Red Temple Spirits had learned the art of transforming punk energy into a more desert-like form of rock from Savage Republic, but their psychedelic vision made them unique even among their peers. Their singer, William Faircolth, had already given a taste of his fearsome abilities in Ministry Of Love, a psychedelic punk trio that in 1987 had released an EP, Wide Awake And Dreaming, for the small Underworld Record label. He came from England and had personally lived through the colourful years of the psychedelic revolution, bringing with him into the "materialist" Los Angeles of the Eighties all that baggage of romantic mysticism. Alongside Faircolth in Red Temple Spirits were bassist Dino Paredes, already a member of Psi-Com, the band in which Perry Farrell sang before forming Jane's Addiction, guitarist Dallas Taylor and drummer Thomas Pierik. Only the healthy madness of a figure like Bruce Licher (leader of Savage Republic, and above all the deus ex machina of all the labels orbiting around the Independent Project imprint) could have taken notice of a band like Red Temple Spirits. It would then be an IPR sister label, Nate Starkman & Son, that signed the band, who - treating commercial potential as the least of their concerns - were determined at all costs to release a "double" debut.

After a single, "New Lands", released in 1989 and containing recordings predating their debut, the second and final Red Temple Spirits record was released only in Europe, by the Belgian label Fundamental, in 1989: If Tomorrow I Were Leaving For Lhasa, I Wouldn't Stay A Minute More is a more direct album than its predecessor, with tighter songs and compositions that are perhaps less memorable. Still present, though, are peaks of sheer greatness such as the ballad "Soft Machine" and, once again, a Pink Floyd cover, "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun". What remains is a love of mystery and a contemplation of the beauty of life even in the face of despair.

The band's appearances on compilations were also few, aside from those cassettes that Independent Project Records used to sell through its mail order. Worth remembering is also the tribute to Savage Republic and the whole Los Angeles scene born out of that experience, which the Rome-based Viva Records put together with the live anthologies "Viva Las Vegas I & II". Red Temple Spirits' last recording is a track, "The Alchemist's Stone", which appeared on a 1991 album (double vinyl, cd single) recorded during radio shows, called "Taste Test #1" and released on New Alliance Records. After that, nothing. No further news of the band's members has ever surfaced.

In the meantime, however, the praiseworthy French label Infrastition – under license from the American Independent Project – has decided to reissue the band's complete works in the unmissable double release Red Temple Spirits – The Complete Recordings.

Word of mouth alone was enough to spread the name of Red Temple Spirits. An underground cult that, over the years, has slowly kept growing. Lost amid gothic-rock discographies, forgotten by encyclopedias of "new" psychedelia, Red Temple Spirits demand their rightful place within the history of rock.

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