Lucifer, Arisen

The soundtrack took three years to finish. The Freedom Orchestra's members kept getting paroled or transferred to other prisons. There were other problems, too. The prison convulsed in a series of riots, during which the inmates were locked in their cells and denied access to the music room. Finally BeauSoleil was granted permission to move some of the equipment into his cell. He edited the tapes using a razor blade.

It starts in a broiling, roiling, cosmic fugue, windlike blasts from a synthesizer, an anxious chorus of strings, then a Middle Eastern-sounding bass riff in a minor key. The listener feels as if he's suddenly been cast alone into a vast inhospitable landscape that's about to be obliterated by a natural disaster. Then suddenly the noise cuts out, and a lone trumpet begins to play the Lucifer Rising theme -- a melancholy reverie with echoes of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western scores.

The soundtrack winds its way through desolate atonal reverberations on synthesizers and organs that collect into beautiful, sad, music box-like melodies. It erupts in a Pink Floyd-esque guitar jam with clashing cymbals. This becomes a repetitive dirge of cascading notes from an organ and trumpet. The last part of the composition sounds like supernatural circus music that starts out deranged and wicked and ends triumphantly amid the crash of waves. The Lucifer Rising soundtrack is troubled, passionate, and grieving. Its power is greater knowing that BeauSoleil created it on such crude equipment, in prison.

When the Lucifer Rising film debuted, BeauSoleil's musical odyssey seemed to come to an anticlimactic end. During a modest run of mostly art museums and film schools, the movie and soundtrack received little attention. A Canadian label, Lethal Records ("I didn't much like the name," gripes BeauSoleil), pressed 1,000 records that quickly fell out of circulation. There was a single review in an obscure newspaper in Canada.

BeauSoleil had one last contact with Anger after the film's release. The director came to visit him, looking dapper in a gray corduroy three-piece suit.

"There was never any other Lucifer, you know," he told BeauSoleil.

But their relationship remained tortured. Shortly thereafter, BeauSoleil stumbled upon a magazine article in which Anger again accused BeauSoleil of stealing the original Lucifer Rising footage.

"There was never any film to steal, except for the footage that wound up in Invocation [of My Demon Brother]," says BeauSoleil angrily. "But he kept telling that lie so often, I think he started to believe it."

As he entered middle age, BeauSoleil took comfort where he could find it. In 1980, he married in order to enjoy the conjugal visits then afforded lifers. He quickly realized he'd made a mistake and had the marriage annulled. He married again in 1982, to a woman named Barbara, who had written him a letter after seeing a television segment about BeauSoleil's music program at Dueul. After surviving his near-death stabbing that same year, he is still happily married to Barb, a belly dance teacher and graphic designer who lives in Salem, Ore.

With the advent of the Internet, BeauSoleil began selling CDs of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack, along with a few pieces he recorded later, from a Web site Barb helped him create. He didn't sell very many. He did, however, get a lot of e-mails asking him about Manson.

Then, in 2000, BeauSoleil was contacted by a DVD producer who wanted to interview him for a compilation of Anger films. Though the film part of the project stalled, one of the producers struck a deal with BeauSoleil to release the Lucifer Rising soundtrack on his music label, Arcanum Records. This past summer a remastered double CD of the soundtrack, paired with recovered bootleg recordings of the Orkustra and the Magick Powerhouse of Oz, hit national record stores.

"There are so many archival projects being reissued and dug up, and a lot of them don't deliver," says Bob Mehr, music critic at the Chicago Reader and contributor to Mojo magazine. "This one is one instance of a pretty evocative piece of music. ... It was a project that had been festering in BeauSoleil's head for a long time, and it definitely shows."

Dave Tompkins, a critic at the Village Voice, declared, "It's nuts! It's evil in parts, but it's not just pure evil, where you're limited to that one emotion or feeling. It's also like walking down autumn roads, alone. That kind of vibe."

Vice magazine proclaimed Lucifer Rising "the reissue of the year" and called it "a scary and loose free rock soundtrack."

A British music magazine, The Wire, described the soundtrack as "a wide-ranging hybrid of Prog rock, hippie jam, shimmering Terry Riley-esque keyboards, and bombastic swellings ... a cloudy musical mystery grown organically from simple sources." It went on to say that the CD proved that "wherever fate led him, BeauSoleil's creative powers persisted."

Jay Babcock, editor of the Los Angeles music magazine Arthur, writes in an e-mail that the CD is an office favorite. "It's the dark clouds," writes Babcock, "plus the silver lining."