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Click here for Mp3 Audio SamplesArtist: Christus & the Cosmonaughts
Title: From Atop This Hill
Label: Beta-lactam Ring Records
Format: LP
Catalog #: mt078lp
Condition: new
Price: $20.00
| Tracklist Samples | |
| 1 | From Atop This Hill |
| 2 | Modulating Between Faith and Knowledge |
| 3 | No Chance To Dream |
| 4 | Nod if You Were the Last Man Alive. |
| 5 | Surviving the Fanatics |
Available! Edition of 200 copies on 220 gram vinyl and BlRR will have only 60 available for sale as the other copies are reserved for Records are not for Baking subscribers with bonus 12" picture disk. Terra Firma flags. Sky burns electric. Fauna flee for fear. The second coming of Christus is here. 8 new stations of the cross oscillate wildly between bristling electronic noise pyres and sizzling, solemn song-forms. “From Atop This Hill” is a study in the transcendental possibilities of synthesis couched in the form of a mystery play. The jilted narratives just glisten, rich with pulsating electrocycles that alternately coil into instrumental pythons. Form and function fuse in a flux of devotional experimentalism paired with a sort of weird pop. Christus' strangely wrought onomatopoeic lyrics are compelling, wrapped as they are in his classic coldwave croon amid slo-mo motorik surges of minimal wave. Drag thy cross upon yon hill and embrace the passion of the Christus.
Christus & The Cosmonaughts May Well Be: The progressive, psychedelic musical excursions of an ever-changing band of performers fronted by yours truly, Scot Solida. A strange and unique hybrid of live jamming and cut-and-paste techniques form the basis of the songs. From space rock to prog rock to blatant experiments in sound, you will find something new in the sonic explorations of Christus And The Cosmonaughts. To understand the reasons for its existence, we must go back nearly a quarter of a century to the turn of the nineteen-eighties, when a pair of singular events occurred which would shake the very foundations of even the strongest psyche. First, I would face the death of my father, who was brutally murdered at the hands of a gunman, and left to die in a desolate field. I will not go into details here, but if you would like to learn of my very personal feelings regarding the matter, consult the track "Famine" from the extended play recording called The Four Whore's Men. I was plunged into despair and madness, and the results were that I would spend far too many of my formative teen years behind the locked doors of one institution or another. It was an embarrassingly predictable response to a tumultuous and unfathomable event. They never caught the murderer who stole my father's life and my sanity. The other event, which occurred at roughly the same time, but necessarily later, was a performance by a skinny Brit on the television. The fellow was Gary Numan, and I was enthralled by the mysterious sounds he and his band were producing. This began my lifelong love affair with synthesizers, which would become a hobby, then a career. Like so many solitary people, I spent the better part of my years seeking out music and art that I deemed to have been as strange and unusual as I myself was becoming. That art usually had something to do with science fiction or other flights of the imagination. I didn't care for the "real" world with any amount of conviction. I also became obsessive about pursuing the art of synthesis, first with my simple monosynths, and later with more elaborate and sophisticated gear. By the mid part of the decade, I was supporting myself as an illustrator, all the while recording my own (admittedly embryonic) music, and eventually wound up working with a brilliant studio owner called David Nichols, who taught me the finer techniques of engineering. Christus & The Cosmonaughts was born during this time, as an excuse to write and sing my lyrics (usually short stories) and to experiment with the fabric of sound. Fast forward to the present: Christus And The Cosmonaughts now happily resides alongside some of my favorite artists on the utterly superb independent record label called Beta-lactam Ring Records, whose head honcho shares my penchant for elaborate and artistic packaging. For the most recent LP, I have been joined by an extraordinary guitairst and bassist who goes by the unlikely name of Har, the ever-stalwart Ant Graham and 54-year-old Nashville session drummer and Colorado resident Wayne Cunningham. As for myself, I am a professional sound designer and writer. If you use a computer for your music, you have probably read any number of my articles in the UK magazine called Computer Music, or the stateside Grooves magazine. You may even have used my sounds in your software synthesizers (I have patched a great number of them), or dragged one of my loops into an arrangement, via the samples I do under the name The Electronic Garden. I have put many of them to use myself.