Lucifer - Black Mass

Some records sound less like albums than artifacts from a forgotten midnight ritual. Black Mass belongs firmly in that category.

Originally released in 1981, Lucifer’s Black Mass occupies the murky intersection of early electronic music, occult experimentation, and horror soundtrack atmosphere. The project was the work of Canadian electronic musician Mort Garson, whose pioneering use of the Moog synthesizer also produced the cult favorite Mother Earth’s Plantasia. Here, however, the warmth of that record is replaced by something considerably more sinister.

Synthesizers hiss, drone, pulse, and shriek across pieces with titles such as “Solomon’s Ring,” “Incubus,” “Exorcism,” and “Witch Trial,” creating an eerie electronic soundscape that feels strikingly removed from conventional songwriting. Primitive drum-machine rhythms and ominous melodic figures occasionally emerge from the fog, but atmosphere is always the priority. Garson uses the synthesizer almost cinematically, constructing a succession of supernatural scenes rather than traditional compositions.

The result sits somewhere between proto-dark ambient, experimental electronics, library music, and the soundtrack to an imaginary occult film. Heard decades later, Black Mass also feels unexpectedly prescient. Its sinister analog textures anticipate elements of industrial, minimal synth, dark ambient, and the horror-influenced electronic music that would emerge long after its creation.

This 2020 Sacred Bones reissue brings one of Garson’s strangest recordings back to vinyl, giving a once-obscure corner of his electronic catalog a deserved second life.

Black Mass is wonderfully eerie, deeply eccentric, and unmistakably of its era while somehow sounding ahead of it. For listeners interested in the darker roots of electronic music, it’s a fascinating glimpse of just how unsettling a room full of early synthesizers could become.