How Did the Fake Cult Leader From the Movie Mandy Make a Real Album?
When we meet Jeremiah Sand in Panos Cosmatos’ lurid 2018 horror film Mandy, he’s a withered and tarnished megalomaniac. Sand (played by Linus Roache) helms the Children of the New Dawn, a fictitious New Age cult whose methods of indoctrination involve potent hallucinogenics and the occasional murder. But Sand isn’t just a maniacal, self-appointed prophet: like any evil genius worth his salt, he’s also a failed rockstar. Early in the film, Sand plays one of his songs for the titular Mandy, who has been captured by the cult at the leader’s request. Instead of bowing before him, Mandy laughs at him and his music.
The mocked song is a seven-minute Ren fair hymn called “Amulet of the Weeping Maze.” To compose the track, Cosmatos enlisted a handful of artists: Randall Dunn (who has produced records by Earth, SUNN O))), and Marissa Nadler), Milky Burgess (a guitarist and frequent collaborator of Nadler’s), and Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits. Roache, meanwhile, volunteered to lay down vocals for his character’s song. The recording process was so enjoyable that before long, an idea germinated: What if Jeremiah Sand had continued his musical pursuits? The newly released Lift It Down provides the answer. “Reissued” by Sacred Bones, the album arrived with a pre-fabricated mythology: Jeremiah Sand and his followers seized a recording studio in the mid-1970s, laid down their drug-fueled opus, and left the masters locked in a metal box. After surviving four decades and a fire, Lift It Down was restored for all to hear.
In actuality, Lift It Down is a forged artifact, an album recorded largely because those who created it had so much fun inhabiting its outlandish world. Its makers were joined by a large list of collaborators: Angel Deradoorian, Tad Doyle, Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia, Monika Khot of Zen Mother, and Nadler, who sang on the album’s duet, “Now You Are Mine.” To separate fact from fiction, Pitchfork spoke with Dunn, Burgess, and Roache about their process, Charles Manson, and writing music for a madman.
Pitchfork: How did this project come together?
Randall Dunn: Milky and I worked on the song for the movie, “Amulet of the Weeping Maze.” We did that with Panos in Seattle. And my first encounter with Linus was having him do the vocals for that. He courageously volunteered to do that on the actual song in the film. And then he also did a longer spoken word track that he had written as a character treatment.
Linus Roache: It was like a background biography based on a one-page document that Panos had done, and then I turned it into this ridiculous epic rant.
Dunn: So it just started mostly from that song, and then I talked to Panos about like, “What if we just did a whole record of this character and didn’t let anyone know for a while who did it, or if we just made it look like an actual reissue?” So then Dan Boeckner from Wolf Parade, who had also worked on the lyrics for “Amulet,” came on board.
Can you talk more about filmmaker Panos Cosmatos’ involvement in the project?
Dunn: He would always be there as a silent force in the room to tell us if we’re doing something that should not be done. I said, “Panos we have to do this, and you have to kind of spearhead what we’re allowed to do, what we’re not allowed to do, if we’ve gone too far or not far enough.” And we gathered together at Tad [Doyle]’s Seattle studio. I thought that would be a fun place to do it. I didn’t want to do it in a perfect studio location. I wanted somebody else doing the engineering, ’cause I’m always engineering. I wanted to be a part of the making of it.
I find Panos to be one of my most inspiring collaborators, being able to do stuff with him musically and just talking with him about ideas. He’s very encouraging and this whole thing would not have happened without his blessing and direction.
What was it like writing music from the perspective of this character?
Milky Burgess: I sat with the music a lot and basically woke up with a cult leader mindset. I tried to cut that off around noon. It didn’t work. It still hasn’t worked. I’m still shaking it off. But we brought everything finished to Linus. The music was done in Seattle; we did a lot of demoing there. There were crazed sessions where I was banging doors for percussion and just going nuts, really trying to be in that psychotic, manipulative mindset as an exercise, which was admittedly pretty dangerous to do for a while.
Were you doing any cult research to get into that headspace?
Burgess: We were listening to cult music by Charles Manson and the Process Church and bad folk music. All the hippie jams and the spiritual materialists that like can inspire that kind of activity.
What were some new challenges of approaching music this way?
Dunn: Most of the time, I’m making records and I try to get great performances. And this was really difficult in the sense that I remixed a couple songs twice because they were too good. Also getting into the mindset of the person. We created a fictitious character who engineered the record, and getting into the mind frame of that is also like acting, in the sense that you have to know that they were doing certain drugs, or were in a certain sort of traumatic experience.
Burgess: A lot of [Randall’s] direction to session players that were coming in was fun in that regard. You know, telling people to imagine that they’re on acid and the Space Needle is on fire.
Dunn: When I finished the mixes, I actually took them to another studio and I dropped them all to an old, two-track tape machine and abused the tape a little bit, just dirtied and threw it around. I’d put my hand on the reel and slow it down and touch it a few times. I was thinking, This tape was found in a box after a fire. It can’t be perfect. And then when I handed it to the mastering engineer [I said], “You have to pretend like you’re trying to fix this bad recording.” It was all method right down to the masters.
Linus, what was it like revisiting a character through the form of a record?
Roache: For me, playing the role was actually deeply more challenging than I ever expected. I had to dig into something very deep in myself, and it was very interesting and it used to actually exhaust me. I think it was going up against some sort of very dark force in myself that I was in a way playing with and having to override something in myself to do it.
When it came to the music, it was the opposite. I was just free just to be this crazy narcissist. I wasn’t trying to channel anything other than, “I’m going to be the best bloody rock singer I ever could try to be.” I just was in creative heaven, to be honest.
Can you talk about the final track “Taste the Whip?” It’s really the wacky outlier on the album.
Dunn: Production-wise, there was a lot of talk about Jesus Christ Superstar on that song. The thought was that “Taste the Whip” is going into the late ’70s. Maybe the engineer had just bought some new drum machines and was trying to convince Jeremiah like, “Look, man, you gotta get hip. The kids aren’t going to like the folk stuff.” Jessica Dobson played this very Bowie solo on it. That whole song conceptually is supposed to sound like maybe it was the last one recorded and then they gave up and Jeremiah got mad and may or may not have killed the entire staff of the studio.
Linus, I have to ask: Were you wearing a fringe vest at all times while recording this album?
Dunn: In his mind, he’s always wearing a fringe vest.
Roache: No, I didn’t dress up, but, you know, it was great fun. And my part was actually to go and find that fringe costume and find a wig and get bits of jewelry, and I’d be sending pictures to Panos and trying to imagine what this guy was like before the really seedy version of him that we have in the movie. So it was nice to think of him a little bit more beautified and glowing and not quite so ravaged.
Jeremiah Sand: Lift It Down
$23.00, Rough Trade
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
