This album is some kind of a mystery and miracle, the latter due to the fact that except for some mixdown copies all the mastertapes have been erased for reuse soon after the recordings were finished for the studio went bankrupt and the material had been sold. In a miraculous way this album came to see the light as a reissue in 1999 and now, some forty years after the initial recording sessions, this music manages to enchant me in its entirety and I am left sedated, unable and unwilling to resist this temptation. The artist I write about here is Perry Leopold, an ambitious musician from the Philadelphia (USA) area who played in rock bands in the 60s and got to release his first acid folk masterpiece “Experiments in metaphysics” back in 1970, a rather twisted effort which strummed past the mainstream success back in its days. From 1971 to 1973 Perry worked on his opus magnum which should have been “Christian Lucifer”, an even more sophisticated and melodic album, still drenched colors man actually should not see and executed with a sense of progressiveness that was mainly associated with the rock scene in Europe. Perry Leopold created this album nearly all alone with a good hand in writing melodies of an unearthly, mythical beauty that he connected with cantilevered instrumental passages in which he piles layers of acoustic guitars, cellos, bells, strings, flutes and a few analogue keyboards and organs upon each other to achieve harmony structures of utter complexity in which the listener could get lost like he was trying to find a non existing path to escape a jungle. The whole piece of sound art, despite the overall accessible approach, bears a deeply spiritual atmosphere and sets your soul in a quiet and peaceful mood. Highly recommended to fans of progressive and symphonic folk and singer / songwriter artists of the ancient days like THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND, DULCIMER and NICK DRAKE but also of contemporary psychedelic folksters like IN GOWAN RING or BIRCH BOOK.