New Release coming soon! And it's About Cult Life Again...

Before our next release is announced and the name revealed, some context and back ground is in order. I have done a series of posts on Instagram about this, specifically about growing up in a Charismatic Christian church, or as outsider definitely would call it, a cult. I'll share the posts here as well, and probably some more will come. 

Here you go!

Open Your Eyes to the Revelation!

Photo by @jasual_audio_visual

Did you know that Flora was raised in a cult?

"The church I grew up in was part of an American Evangelical Christian movement called The Christian Fellowship Ministries, or Potter's House Christian Fellowship. They emphasized obedience to your pastor, heavy commitment to the church, spreading the word/converting people," gifts of the spirit" like speaking in tongues, and giving your money to the church."

Read more here (the images might be disturbing to some)

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/raised-with-demons-how-the-potter-s-house-church-keeps-its-followers-under-control-20230410-p5cz9n.html

"Obedience was the first and foremost requirement in this church. They didn't even send their young pastor candidates to bible school, but thaught them themselves, pastor to pastor. This way the head of a new church was always subject to his 'mother church'.
Obedience was ensured by requiring heavy attendance from the church members: there were two services on Sunday, one on Wednesday, and there was Saturday 'outreach' and morning prayer meetings.

Shunning, cutting of contact to members who left or somehow rebelled, was also one of the methods of control. Questioning your pastor and things like academic education (which would teach you to question things) were frowned upon.

What I learned through the up-bringing inside this kind of church, was to be obedient in an unhealthy way, and not to question matters of faith.

Coming out of the cult mindset and the process of rejecting the lies was a long journey, taking several years, a few crisis and turning points. Rejecting the lies I was taught and the lies I told my self, was crucial."

And the story of that rejection is the subject of our next song and music video.

Flora

 New Song and Video

We've been silently but relentlessly working on a new track and a musicvideo. The video is now on Youtube and the track on Bandcamp, probably soon on other platforms as well. It's been another unique journey with the music, recording and the process of video making.

Witnesses popped as a mocking, children's tune-like melody into my head, singing "We are God's organisation..." and developed from there, first into lyrics, then on a music sheet. I didn't have a clear picture of the guitars, like I usually do, just the vocals, chords and that it had to have this "tribal" beat, like in many punkish songs. So we processed the structure and basic elements with Kimmo until we had something to present to others, and the whole band took it from there. So the music is made by the whole band rather than just me alone, which is what I'm keen to develop further.

"Witnesses" continues the themes heard in "Crimson Sun". It's about Jehovah's witnessess, pretty directly so. The lyrics and ideas to this and many other songs were formed after my encounter and discussions with the Witnesses, and it was part of my own journey out of religion and faith. These discussions were eye opening, they helped me to see the problems of my own belief system, the religion I had been brought up with, and how cult-like that environment had actually been.

Jehovah's Witnesses are widely recognised as a cult, an organisation formed around an ideology, that attempts to control the lives of it's members on multiple levels. This is nowadays recognised in psychology as well, as more and more cult survivors are speaking out and bringing out their knowledge and experience to that field. If you have ever wondered why e g. Jehovah's Witnesses do what they do, why they dress certain way (they do have rules for that too...) why they make certain life choices other people wouldn't necessarily do, well, it's all because of the control of the ideology they follow. And, I would argue, also peer pressure. How ever peaceful and loving these people are, they are in a cult and in a mental prison. 

You can find out more about in here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-tuAT9_3khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-tuAT9_3k

It's a great channel if you want to find out about more about Jehovah's Witnesses through an ex-member.

"Witnesses" is an attempt to describe the cult mentality and cognitive dissonance the people inside cults have. It's about Jehovah's Witnesses but it really could be about any cult, or anyone under the heavy veil of propaganda, like people in certain states, for example... The thought patters are very similar in any fringe religion and cult. The idea of being the only group that has the truth, that there is no salvation outside that group, the idea that you should give up your time to the organisation, that this life is not important anyway, only the next... 

Another level in the lyrics, which we also incorporated in the video, is the mental gymnastics people in cults constantly have to do to keep their world view and themselves together. All the information from outside, that questions their idelogy, have to be kept at bay or worked around. All the questions that rise up from within have to be locked away and twisted into something that fits the tight box of that ideology. This is why, in cults, outside influence, like TV, social media etc are frowned upon, and regular attendance to the groups meetings is encouraged, even forced. 

And, one more thing, it can be forced. The thought and behaviour control can be enforced. Although cults will love bomb you to get you in, and embrace you and welcome you in their midst, they are also prepared to turn their backs to you, if you don't behave. They will leave you to starve for the love they withheld from you, and die of loneliness. It's not always in the rulebook to shun misbehaving members, but in the case of Jehovah's Witnesses, it's a practice they base on the Bible itself.

Of course, there are people that are happy in these kinds of groups, those that really believe in the cause, some of them maybe seeing the opportunity for power. Others are not happy, and they are the ones leaving. They would rather suffer the shutting out of the group than be in that mental prison. I haven't personally been shut out from a group, (my church was, but that's another story) but I do count myself in as a cult survivor. As that, it is not my intention to just mock cult people, rather, I hope that through this process of making songs about this subject, I'll be able to understand them better and have more compassion. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xqpl3I8HWU

The video was shot  a while ago at a studio after a regular work day, where we recorded most of the instruments too. There are even some additional guitars of mine in there! We also used archive material from Finnish tv archives. They were free to use and we found some material about dancing and women's gymnastics in unison, which really fit to the theme. There are a couple of bits from a women's self defense course. The archive material is from the fifties and sixties, so our final artistic desicion was to turn everything into black and white and add some graininess to the studio bits as well, to fit it with the archive ones. The end result is quite satisfying, in my opinion. Hopefully you have enjoyed it as well!

Flora

                                    

               Crimson Sun 

It's been a month already since the release of our first single of the coming second album. It feels like an eternity, just because of the sheer amount of work and things that have been happening, and because social media has the tendency of warping your sense of time. If you don't post for a few days the thing you did post just gets sucked into the void and it's just like it never existed. Unless the thing goes viral or something, which I think hasn't really happened for us yet. 

Still, the single has been well received and there has been some plays on net radios and interest from magazines. In fact, I just finished answering questions to an interview. One of the things that came up, is the subject of Crimson Sun, and the symbolism in it. I realize I didn't really open it up in the media release, let alone here, because I still wanted to keep a thin veil of mystery to it. But, I figured now would be as good a time as any. It's also perhaps time to start opening up about the general themes and the background of the second album. It's going to be a full series, many posts, so I hope you'll enjoy the ride. I think I will.

One of the reasons we decided to go with Crimson Sun and release it first was because it's themes fell quite neatly as a continuance of the last songs on our first album, thematically, but perhaps musically as well. The theme in Good People was the hypocrisy of human kind, the self-anointing of all of us who think we're good people. 

In Siouxsie on the Beach the theme was the end of the world as we know it, like it had already happened, and how we did nothing about it. To be perfectly clear, it's about climate change and destruction of nature, in which we, the good people, contribute to the most and are not doing enough about. In this I am pretty judgmental, and fully aware of that, but I do count myself into the lot, being a first world inhabitant myself. However, the point of view in both of these songs is lamentation, not that much pointing of fingers, and maybe a somewhat cynical approach. The same approach is present in Crimson Sun. 

In the verses are presented all hopes that we have for the future, all wars being ended, all pain and suffering ending, all that. It's also something many religions and cults promise will happen in the next world, or after death. Towards the end of the verse the question is raised: Why is it not so? Or the attempt to convince oneself: It must be so. And in the chorus the idea of Good People is again present in different words: We hope for a bright future, but keep blaming others for our mistakes, we bathe in the blood of scape goats, but the sun is setting already. Then of course the question comes to mind, who is this "We" the song is describing? Because surely not all people think this way?

The lyrics of Crimson Sun originate in a lengthy exchange I had with my aquaintance, a Jehovah's Wittness. This was a few years ago, before Hateful Chains was formed, at a time when I was in the process of growing out of my Christian faith and organised religion altogether. I lived alone in a new apartment as I was recently divorced, and the doorbell rang. It was them, Jehovah's wittnesses, whom I had always turned away with some excuse, or just taken their leaflets and wished them a happy day, the leaflet ending up in the bin. But now I had nothing to do and felt like I could take the challenge of debating a person from a different sect of faith than me, and enjoy the exchange. 

It turned out to be not very enjoyable, because the Jehovah's Wittnesses have a strict program for their interaction with the people they're trying to recruit and turn into followers. The person who contacted me at first never came alone, she always had another woman with her, and they basically wanted to go through a "program" of explaining their beliefs and persuading me to join. I was looking for a reason to end these programmed "bible studies" and finally it came in the form of a belief I just couldn't accept.

 Among the many wacky and distorted (at that point, in my view, distorted, because I could not yet see the oddities of my christian faith) beliefs, one was just too unjust for my taste: That communion, was not for everybody in the congregation, but only for a select group that counted themselves as one of the chosen. It was something that was against everything I had been taught about the core beliefs of Christianity and made me very angry. So, I stopped the meetings and stopped communication with these people altogether. 

After this episode I had the need to find out, what kind of belief system it actually was, that made people hold on to such strange views and go to such lengths as even refusing blood transfusions and shunning their family members. What better source of that information than the people that used to believe, but have walked away? And to say that Youtube and all of internet was full of them would be an understatement. It seems I hit a time when loads of people had decided to share the story of their "awakening" on the web at the same time. It was a gold mine, not only of information, but also inspiration.

At this time, many lyrics of the forth coming second album came into existence. Some were born out of the process of my own journey, some from the frustration and outright fury, when I found out about the serious injustices and beliefs and systems that hurt people, present in the cults I was looking into. Most of these are about the Jehovah's Wittnesses. Sometimes a song is an end product of a lengthy thought process, and seems to just pop out of nowhere, but when looking back, you understand it was there all along, brewing inside your head. And Crimson Sun is a song like that.

I cooked it up when playing just something on a piano and waiting for my vocal student to come to class. Chorus came first, just had to write it down. And then I made a verse. Chords and melodies at the same time, all just happening so smoothly. The best part, (in my opinion) in which I put my thoughts on the Witnesses in, was the middle eight, where I describe them as carrion birds, picking the bones of the dead. Who else believes that after Armageddon, they will be the ones that survive and will build a new world, be the kings of the corpse mountains? Quite literally, really. But, of course we all wish that things were better, and that the world would some day be a blessing to all of us, not just a select few. So, the last verse is just that, a tiny hope, not much more, that it would be possible. Most of the time it's just too hard to really believe in it.

So, this was the first writing, disclosing the stories and background behind the songs we are currently recording. I'll be writing much more on the subject and the matters of faith from the perspective of one who has walked away, as it has really been a source of inspiration on songwriting and a force of change in my life.

Love, Flora