Jeremiah Sands: the music of a psychotic and psychedelic cult leader
It’s a story that sounds stranger than fiction. Sometime in the 1970s, a deranged cult leader called Jeremiah Sands brings his brainwashed followers out into the Californian desert. There, he locks them in a recording studio, and together, they record what will become his possessed psychedelic masterpiece. But as the cult breaks down around him in a haze of drug-addled madness, the leader and his trusty lieutenant flee in the middle of the night.
Before they depart, however, they have one piece of business to clear up. They hastily make their way to the studio where the album was recorded. At gunpoint, they force the studio owner to lock the master tapes away and instruct him that they should only be opened when they return. They’re never seen again.
Then, in 2018, the very same recording studio burned to the ground during a wave of Californian wildfires. Amazingly, a box was discovered in the wreckage. It contained the 50-year-old recording, dedicated artwork, and even a short film detailing the album’s crazy production. In 2020, the lost record finally saw the light of day. It was re-pressed on purple vinyl and released to rapturous critical acclaim. This is the story of Lift It Down: the lost psychedelic masterpiece by deranged visionary Jeremiah Sands.
Except it would be, but the whole story is a piece of fiction based on the 2018 horror film Mandy. In the film, Sand is a failed folk-rock musician whose attempts at stardom went nowhere. He goes on to found a cult called the Children of the New Dawn, whom he brings with him to California. Played by actor Linus Roache, he gradually becomes obsessed with Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), the girlfriend of protagonist Red Miller (Nicolas Cage).
Sand quickly became a cult character in horror film circles, which led to the record label Sacred Bones releasing his ‘lost’ album Lift It Down in 2020. Sacred Bones – known for their horror-adjacent releases – presented the record as if it were a lost relic from the 1970s, complete with crackling sounds and signs of analogue imperfections. The label are very much committed to the whole charade. We don’t actually know who is singing these songs, and they even included 1,600 words of liner notes from Genesis P-Orridge, in which he delves deeper into the fleshed-out backstory of Sand and his followers.
“This project becomes the central focus of the Children,” he writes about the inception of the album. “His lieutenant Brother Swann overhears that there is a small recording studio just North of the city. He arrives one day at the reception with a large gym bag full of cash and instructs the owner to cancel all sessions on the books. The studio will now focus on one thing and one thing only: helping Jeremiah realize his vision.”
Though Mandy is a serious and pretty creepy horror film, Lift It Down doesn’t come across quite so seriously without that context. Musically, it’s a cheesy take on 1970s psychedelic folk and rock music. The tracks are made to feel like eerie hymns with cultish chanting, strange spoken word passages and haunting melodies. Sand’s lyrics are comically narcissistic, as he chants about his otherworldly powers and unyielding control over his followers.
While Lift It Down can sometimes feel like a pretty on-the-nose pisstake of ’70s cults and psych-folk, it’s nothing if not fun. And in 2024, when much of pop music is altogether a little too serious and self-important, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
