Ten occult records

Introduction

Occult, from the Latin occultus, meaning hidden, secret, by definition "that which lies or is kept beyond the ordinary possibilities of intuition, consideration and understanding, unknowable to the human mind". Hence, the science of that which is hidden. A term very often misunderstood, one that for most people conjures up a synonym for magic, the belief that its practitioners are devoted to black magic and that they sit, perhaps accompanied by a black cat, brewing evil potions and invoking Satan.
In reality, the occultist holds a far broader conception of human nature, acknowledging higher forces that remain out of reach for the materialist, who instead bases his existence on matter, on things, and on the quantity of goods he owns.
In the world of music there is a fairly long history stretching back to ancient Greece, when the use of occultism served to induce certain states of mind; there is, for instance, evidence that the ancient Egyptians used it as a healing tool, although unfortunately no musical notation from that time has survived. Rituals of this kind were also depicted on tomb walls and in papyri.

Similar practices were also carried out in Africa, India, South America and within most native cultures (shamanic cultures stretching from Russia to the Americas to the Pacific), all of which had their own peculiar tradition of sacred chant. The threads run from Australian Aboriginal traditions to the Gandharva Veda of eastern India, from Karnatak music to Hawaiian chant, all the way to perhaps the most macabre occult musical tradition of all: Yoruba culture in Africa, which found its expression as Voudon (Voodoo) in Haiti, through the notorious figure of Baron Samedi, capable of raising the dead as "zombies" (there's a fine Wes Craven film, titled "The Serpent and the Rainbow", that deals with and explains this subject very intelligently), and as Santeria throughout the rest of South America.
This tradition later found its way into contemporary culture through jazz, tango, Cuban music and, of course, blues and rock'n'roll.

Among the more contemporary composers influenced in some way by the occult, one could mention Stockhausen, who wrote works about mantras, creation and the archangel Michael. Penderecki composed religious and mystical works, John Cage was directly inspired by Zen and Indian thought on music, while the three minimalists Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are well known for their interest in Indian music, African and Jewish traditions, and Tibetan Buddhism, respectively. A special case, on the other hand, is that of Mike Oldfield with "Tubular Bells": this piece was not initially regarded as "occult", but became so by association, thanks to its inclusion in the soundtrack of William Friedkin's film "The Exorcist", which made it famous worldwide.
Then there's Richard Wagner and his mystical tradition, as in Parsifal, poised between the divine and the human. Glenn Branca too speaks of angels and devils in his Symphonies, and with the album "The Ascension" gives us an apocalyptic sound wrapped in a horror-struck vortex.
Mention must also absolutely be made of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the Russian composer and pianist known for his unusual harmonies and for being the father of futuristic music, through the creation of an optoelectronic machine capable of converting any symbol reproduced on a glass plate into sound (the Soviet ANS synthesizer). A great devotee of theosophy, music and the occult, he managed to formulate his esoteric vision using lights and sonic tones, through another of his inventions: the "light keyboard", fitted with multicoloured speakers so as to assign a tonal value to colour and achieve synchronism between colour and the harmony of the compositions. His work "Mysterium" feels almost like an apocalyptic ritual that could take place in the Himalayas.

In the more strictly rock sphere, there are thousands of examples of artists devoted to the darkest music and themes, one need only think of the dawn of so-called "occult rock" with the essential Black Widow, Coven and Black Sabbath in England, or in Italy with Antonio Bartoccetti's Jacula project.
In this article, however, we will focus on a number of records that are indeed occult, but not strictly traceable to rock or to "linear" forms of music, but rather to more avant-garde, electronic and experimental projects. This is obviously not intended as a definitive or exhaustive guide: just a selection of a few proposals we consider particularly interesting and worthy of rediscovery.

Mort Garson – “Black Mass Lucifer” (1971)

This is the only album composer Mort Garson released under the name Lucifer, on which he again uses Moog, synthesizers and keyboards, but in a decidedly more sinister mood, casting a very dark atmosphere. The artwork of the full length might bring to mind Black Sabbath or Pentagram, with its Luciferian pentagram, but in reality the record's soundscape plunges us into a sinister psychedelic vortex that isn't strictly satanic, as the moniker might suggest, but rather more "creepy", with echoes, at certain points, of "Twilight Zone". It opens with "Ring Of Solomon", an almost space-like piece with oriental influences, which then turns into something more macabre. Other tracks on the record worth noting are the title track "Black Mass", an unsettling tangle of drone sounds, and "The Ride Of Aida (Voodoo)", which conjures the ghosts of New Orleans with its choirs and Afro atmosphere.
We can safely say that "Black Mass Lucifer", besides being a masterpiece, was a source of inspiration for artists such as Coil and Nurse With Wound.

Current 93 – “Nature Unveiled” (1984)

A landmark of post-industrial esoteric music, which codified a genre later followed by many other artists. Behind it is the creature of David Michael Bunting, aka David Tibet, who split off from Psychic TV in 1982 (the name comes from Aleister Crowley's term "93 Current", 93 representing the current of Thelema) and who would remain the project's only stable member (John Balance and Fritz Catlin also passed through the ranks), even though Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) has a hand in every release. The lyrical themes reflect the author's key preoccupations: death and mysticism, Tibetan Buddhism and Gnosticism; the underlying creed, at least in the early days, seems to be one of pure nihilism: there can be no joy while the world is burning. It would be reductive to cage them within the industrial genre, especially after the first few years of releases — in Current 93, Tibet carries forward the unlistenable extreme noise he forged with Psychic TV, but pushed onto another plane entirely: the occult-esoteric, precisely.
The 1984 debut album consists of two long pieces totalling almost 40 minutes of music, moving through magmatic, obsessive loops and diabolical dirges, jarring percussion, Gregorian chant twisted into apocalyptic electronic manipulations (diabolically orchestrated by Stapleton, with vocal contributions from Annie Anxiety) that pull the listener into a vortex and drag them into Tibet's apocalyptic world.
It opens with "Ache Golgotha (Maldoror Is Dead)", drawing inspiration from Lautréamont's "Les Chants de Maldoror", the French epic poem centred on Maldoror, a misanthropic figure who rejects conventional morality — the embodiment of tormented man rebelling against his creator, God, and killing him, yet still finding no peace, in the darkest strain of nihilism. The obsessive mantra in the track, repeating Crowley's Om, is like a hallucinated, abrasive requiem, best heard on headphones on a rainy night. The second track, titled "The Mystical Body Of Christ In Chorazaim (The Great In The Small)", drags us through monastic chant towards a closing digital shriek.
The ideal soundtrack for the end of the world.

Hexentanz – “Nekrocrafte” (2004)

A project uniting members of Soil Bleed Blacks and Psychonaut 75. Despite the moniker (which translates as "the witches' dance") and the album title, they don't play black metal or doom, but something entirely different, offering a wholly new way of understanding and experiencing the dark arts through music. In fact, the verb "to play" should be taken loosely here, since this is really a ceremonial and ritual soundtrack, built from primitive hypnotic percussion, bells, sticks and the kangling, a wind instrument carved from bone and decorated with embossed metal, used in Tibet during tantric rituals to drive away evil spirits, and compared in Buddhism to the recitation of mantras.
The album could easily serve as a backdrop to a film like "Haxan" (1922) — a genuinely unique occult tribute and one of the most chilling musical explorations of black magic ever recorded.

Gino Pavan/Giorgio Salomon – “Tekeli” (2022)

Tekeli is a scream. A highly distinctive project dedicated, naturally, to H. P. Lovecraft, and specifically to his work "At the Mountains of Madness". The meeting of multi-instrumentalist Gino Pavan, bringing his background in experimental music, and Giorgio Salomon, an explorer of sounds and visions, collector and author of two fascinating books (one, "Acrobati liquidi", surveying musicians from around the world and their unclassifiable records by figures who never found the spotlight, and the other, more recent, "Il canto del vetro", a collection of stories and encounters from across the globe) takes us into a nightmarish parallel world that, starting from the AI-generated cover depicting four Lovecraftian faces, transports us straight to otherworldly shores.
Salomon had already been experimenting with the Revox, a device that allowed him to create cut-ups, adding echoes and varying speeds. Using old recordings reworked through Pavan, the result is the tracks making up this mysterious, one-of-a-kind object, made of 7 pieces suspended between dream and reality. A genuinely deep and evocative experience.
Worth noting are the three different editions released: vinyl, a CD art edition — a true collector's work of art — and a white vinyl, autographed in a run of 25 copies.

Shub Nigurrat – “Les morts vont vite” (1986)

We're still in Lovecraft territory, as is easy to guess from the name chosen by this French outfit, which recalls the eponymous divine creature embodying an uncontrollable drive to reproduce — a true fertility goddess who appears in the form of a goat.
Formed in 1983 and made up of six extraordinary, versatile musicians, the band delivers a dark prog/zeuhl. Their debut album, "Les morts vont vite", is a shadowy masterpiece whose title borrows a line from Bürger's "Lenore", whose macabre tale tells of a young woman confronted by a spectral horseman in a graveyard, straight out of classic gothic tradition.
The sound, as one might expect from all this, is genuinely heavy, sepulchral, obsessive, giving the listener no way out: there is no hope here. The instruments duel with one another, Ann Stewart's howling vocals are almost indecipherable, and the trombone's long notes reverberate through the tracks' slow tempos.
A journey into the abyss, not for everyone.

Third Ear Band – “Alchemy” (1969)

A truly one-of-a-kind ensemble, the Third Ear Band forged a sound we might call "timeless", weaving together textures of viola, cello and oboe into an expressive amalgam that seems to come not from humans but from aliens. A sound built by fusing musical traditions ranging from occult medieval Europe to Indian ragas and Celtic folk, breaking down every possible barrier and exploring thoroughly unusual sonorities in a way that never feels obvious or trite.
The debut album under discussion here abandons any form of classic rock, offering instead a mystical journey that continually challenges the listener and demands their fullest attention. There's a sense of formal freedom and improvisation running through the whole record, woven from the interplay of the instruments used: oboe, tabla, violin, viola, hand drums, and even DJ John Peel playing the Jew's harp on one track. It almost feels like witnessing an ancient pagan ritual. Best listened to start to finish without interruption, letting yourself be carried away by this primordial atmosphere.
Leader Glenn Sweeney once said: "Our rhythms come from all over the planet, we use them to create the music of a new world".
All that's left for us to do is take in the message — perhaps through the third ear.

Runaway Totem – “Creators” (2023)

Riva del Garda, a magical place at the northern tip of the lake, where legends abound of witches — the "nereidi" — of monsters that have found refuge in the various lakes, and of pagan ruins. It's here that we also find a very particular musical soul, one that has given rise to at least three great bands: Men of Lake, Universal Totem Orchestra, and the aforementioned Runaway Totem, led by Roberto Gottardi. The latter were among the first bands to be produced and distributed in the 1990s by Genoa's Black Widow Records (a historic and hugely important label, not just on the Italian scene) and to present an innovative sound, influenced by zeuhl (Magma above all) as well as by many other cosmic sounds, delivered in a highly original form. The album under review here is the recent "Creators", an occult summa of all of leader Gottardi's thinking: split into two parts ("Creators" and "Red Star"), it immerses us in an ethereal, suspended, alien sound, like a magmatic lake of otherworldly matter, ranging from the most experimental kosmische musik to jazz, through to hypnotic tribalism. The concept deals with lost memories and alien manipulations, closing with a "new" human being, still connected to their original essence.
Roberto Gottardi is joined by the Intergalactic Totem Orchestra (in honour of Sun Ra), namely figures such as the late Nik Turner (Hawkwind), David Jackson (Van der Graaf Generator) and Martin Grice, among others. All in service of Music with a capital M, the kind that comes from the heart and, why not, from other planets too.

Roland Frangipane & Don Cherry – “The Holy Mountain” (Jodorowsky soundtrack) (1973)

Alejandro Jodorowsky, an artist of a thousand faces, endowed with a wild, excessive mind put to work across different projects and media — literature, cinema, theatre — through a life devoted to shamanism, metaphysical cultures, alchemy and tarot: in the world of film he moved through western, science fiction and fantasy in a wildly exhibitionist, transgressive way. Here we look at the soundtrack to his masterpiece "The Holy Mountain" (1973), which bewitched generations of viewers with its countercultural messages, its absurdity thrown straight in the audience's face, and its dense occult symbolism.
What the Chilean director wanted to achieve with this soundtrack was something that went beyond mere entertainment — a sound that came from the soul, from the depths. Once the musicians were chosen — free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry (already a collaborator of John Coltrane and Sun Ra) and multi-instrumentalist/arranger Ronald Frangipane (keyboardist for films such as "Midnight Cowboy") — their sensibilities merged into a magma of spiritual jazz, primordial tribalism, sound effects and psychedelic rock, all held together within an ambient-like backdrop. Jodorowsky himself contributed to the music by producing noises: for instance, in the scene where thieves attack the masters, the director started hitting the piano with a chamber pot! Don Cherry composed the music while watching the film unfold. In total there are 24 tracks, all thoroughly hallucinatory.
A small curiosity: George Harrison wanted a part in the film (as one of the thieves), but there was a scene he refused to do (one of the thieves baring his backside to a hippopotamus); Jodorowsky told him it would nevertheless be a great thing, a great lesson for humanity, if he could set his ego aside and show his rear end. In the end, nothing came of it.

Cabaret Voltaire – “Drinking Gasoline” (1985)

Industrial legends Cabaret Voltaire undoubtedly fused electronic dance music with rather dark influences, touching on subliminal messages, various forms of manipulation, Dadaism, Charles Manson and even the writer William Burroughs, all in an attempt to depict the raw reality of Sheffield, their hometown. Their fusion of funk, psychedelia, punk, world music and synths led them to forge an original sound that was hard to pin down at the time. On this EP, Cabaret Voltaire are at their peak: across the four tracks, you get a real sense of their outlook and their way of composing through chaotic, sonic cut-ups. Every bit as essential as the listening experience is watching the accompanying videos, previously released only on VHS tapes (and now available in a CD/DVD edition).

John Zorn Chaos Magick – “Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted” (2021)

The word "magick", spelled with a final K, already hints at where John Zorn is heading with this musical project. We're in the territory of magical practices based on the ideas of Austin Osman Spare (an artist held in high regard by avant-garde intellectuals, opposed to moralism, notable for a highly personal style of magic) who went on to influence Aleister Crowley, among others. Here the musician brings together Brian Marsella on electric piano, John Medeski on organ, Kenny Grohowski on drums and congas, and Matt Hollenberg on electric guitar for a semi-improvised album that blends funk, classical, metal and other sounds into a dramatic, deep narrative built from abstract compositions. Spare's influence, both through his black-and-white paintings and his writings, seeps into the sounds performed by the group, though it remains hard to pin down exactly what specifically influenced John Zorn (who, let's remember, has always been an occultism enthusiast). Notably, he himself barely plays on this full length: his role here is more that of producer/organizer/writer.

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