"Return to the Healing Church" by Young Hierophant
New Album Out Now
Good Glass Records has released the Return to the Healing Church by Catholic Acid Dungeon New Age pioneer Young Hierophant. It serves as the culmination of roughly six years of work and is the final Young Hierophant album, closing the chapter on this project. You can listen to and order it here.
Return to the Healing Church is a deep, luscious synthesizer fantasia that plays out like a film itself - there’s a whole story embedded in there that completes the Young Hierophant saga, although probably 5% of this story actually exists outside of my head via song titles, artwork, and album descriptions. Young Hierophant records have depicted the story of a sort of cleric on a pilgrimage through a blackened landscape - white magic doggedly soldiering through hell in search of sanctuary. Real dungeon master shit. For someone with a head full of ideas, I picked the actual least informationally dense medium - instrumental synthesizer music - to capture and communicate this. If that story gets lost in the process, that’s on me.
Here’s some backstory on Young Hierophant, and how we got here.
Listening to the recorded history of synthesizer music had led me to a new appreciation of often-maligned New Age music. The stereotype is elevator music combined with whale songs, or evokes supremely cornball stunts like Yanni live at the Acropolis or John Tesh’s similarly goofy yuppie meditation music. What I found instead was a rich history of electronic new age music that had grown out of Krautrock, the modern classical/minimalist composition world, and even disco and arcade machine music. I found myself listening to and loving Suzanne Ciani, Ray Lynch, Isao Tomita, Tangerine Dream, Kevin Braheny, Popol Vuh, Iasos, Mark Isham - basically anything that ever came out on Windham Hill, Innovative Communication, and other similar labels. There was a direct through line from a lot of critically lauded landmark electronic work to this stuff, and while it carried those traditions it was far more melodic and interesting without sacrificing experimental studio processes and was overwhelmingly made with the most classic synthesizers ever. I also discovered modern musicians exploring this same territory like Emeralds and Spencer Clark, who rapidly became one of my top inspirations with his Monopoly Child Star Searchers project.
This interest in New Age coincided with my own spiritual reawakening; after almost two decades of disinterest, I had begun attending a Catholic church and studying Catholic mystics like Thomas Merton and St. Teresa of Avila. The ritualistic spookiness of the Catholic tradition resonated with me, all visions and stigmata, reliquaries and blood ministration, apocalyptic prophecies and apocryphal mythology. I felt a connection to the Christianity of my youth, but with far more compelling aesthetics and a kind of sense of preserved antiquity hiding in plain sight in the modern world. I visited urban monasteries and new england shrines, lit candles and prayed obscure chaplets and rosaries. And somehow, like everything - it came back to my music.
I had begun to make “Catholic New Age” music in response. I’m not really sure what that meant, other than that it felt both meditative and at times intense; I wanted mystical, liturgical synthesizer hymns that would sound at home in a cathedral on the moon. I did everything possible to make the synthesizers sound ancient, worn, and weathered - I’d intentionally hand dial sounds to be a little out of tune with each other, record them to cassette, micro cassette, and reel-to-reel tapes until they were slightly distorted and sounded old. Nothing shiny and new, no neon - I wanted the dusty synth equivalent of pipe organs in Eastern European ruins. After specializing in drum synthesis and drum machine programming with previous projects, I used almost no drums on this new material, all rhythms coming from baroque, repeating note patterns and counterpoints like Bach jamming with Kraftwerk. I don’t think I realized that I was actually making an album until I was almost done; I kept writing “real” songs that I wasn’t satisfied with the whole time as well as making dancier instrumental music, unsure of which direction I was going. I thought that the “Catholic New Age Stuff” was just exercises; only when I had a full album’s worth did I realize that taking all of the pressure off of myself and just feeling like I was exercising and exploring was what gave me the freedom to actually complete these things. I started collecting these recordings into one place and I quickly realized that I had enough material for an entire full-length already done, and even though I had created that stuff over the course of almost three years, it all had that cohesive sensibility. I don’t remember exactly how I landed on the name Young Hierophant for this project, but I have a few pieces that I know. I had been holding onto the word Hierophant for a long time, ever since I read Mirceal Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, a landmark cultural exegesis of ritual and religion. It was also one of the weirder Tarot cards in the deck, usually represented with a priest or the Pope. With all of this serious, heavy catholic imagery I was working with, I wanted to add a little bit of dissonance to the whole endeavor and add a slightly “off” twist to the whole thing. Putting “Young” in front of Hierophant, almost like it was a rapper name felt like the right splash of absurdity; I wanted people to wonder what on earth was going on here, not necessarily see it as a joke. I’ve always been a big fan of Grant Morrison, the greatest comics writer of the past century, and “Young Hierophant” felt like an absurdist character he might throw into one of his books like Doom Patrol or the Invisibles. Boom, here was my name.
I self-released the first Young Hierophant album The Night Office in spring of 2016 and quickly sold out of all of my hand-dubbed and decorated cassette copies. It sold more digitally after that, and made a few hundred bucks - the most I’d made on my own music ever.
A lot happened between that record and the present. I ended up in the hospital with a scary, spontaneous heart problem that really turned my whole world upside down. I had a beautiful daughter. I started Good Glass Records to release other people’s music. Then the entire world went to hell. I began working on this album immediately after the first one, but the first recorded piece on it dates back to 2018, shortly after the The Thin Place EP that followed The Night Office. I played a lot of live shows under the Young Hierophant name, which began to reveal some of the limitations of the identity. Some of these shows were full modular mass with incense and candles and very on brand, while others were brand new jacking acid house tracks like when I opened for Xeno and Oaklander. I’ve always been a jack of all trades, making tons of different types of music, but I can’t afford to have 20 pseudonyms and hope that any audience out there will follow along like there isn’t a massive attention economy with the attention span of a gnat. I’m not RDJ in ‘94. So I stretched the name to its limits with Hi-NRG Italo remixes , deep house cuts , using the name for “dude with a guitar” music Songs: Ohia-style [mercifully no published evidence remains of this], etc. But all the while I was working on this album which was slavishly dedicated to the original vision, with all of its intentional limitations and thematic focus.
I had a clear vision for the record but by the time I forced myself to call cut for good in early ‘24, I had recorded around 7 hours of music all intended for it. This is an absurd amount - ridiculous, unfocused, and self-indulgent. Figuring out how to edit it all down to something coherent that fit my vision for the story and the album was a huge challenge. I hate editing. I’m a working parent who has to find and steal time for my creative work, and it’s always more fun to make something new, to jam, to explore, to play. Editing and finishing this record felt like editing a feature length film - I didn’t just want an incoherent mixtape of six years’ worth of work. I was delighted to find that so many pieces recorded years apart, with different processes and different instruments were able to come together to not only sound better than their individual parts, but to sound as though they were intentionally written together as one song. There are some real Frankenstein patchworks in here - one choice minute from the middle of a 20-minute exploratory “live in the room” jam recorded to stereo tape in 2018 with no clocking somehow nestles into and links up with the final two minutes of an intricately sequenced and “composed” digitally multitracked song from 2023 like they were always destined to be together. Kismet. Two completely different analog sequencer- and shift register-driven wanks years apart lock into each other without the need for time correction or flexing audio? Magic. A multitude of different songs, pieces, modalities, explorations, etc. all patchworked together, blended, faded, spliced, transitioned, crossfaded, and mixed into something that feels intentional, coherent, composed, and focused. I’ll never intentionally work this way again, but I’m proud of the results.
So, why’s it the end for Young Hierophant? Well, everything has changed since 2016. I’m no longer young, and the name feels like a bit of a farce at this point, like when Sonic Youth got old. There has been an absolute explosion of online dungeon synth music from incredible labels like Heimat Der Katastrophe who commit to the bit and theme with more mono-focus than I was ever capable of; there has to also be room in my creative output for making and releasing jacking acid, choppy jungle, tough guy handbag house, scrappy minimal synth tapes, throwback braindance, misguided footwork, and yes, “croaking dude with a guitar” stuff as well. With Return to the Healing Church, this story feels complete. Our pilgrim’s progress has taken him not only through the blasted lands but to his destination of Halidom on High, which, based on the final song title (above earth’s lamentation) isn’t even on this planet. Thank you to all who have joined me on this quest and who have supported YH through the years.