As recently mentioned, I interviewed Laurentius the Profit about her book and album, both titled FUCK LIFE — When On High, for Bandcamp Daily. Our conversation was quite long and went in many directions, not all of which I had space for there. Here are some more excerpts from the interview.
Patti: Can you tell me more about the connection you felt with the cave while living there?
Laurentius: I can approach it from many different angles, like the contrast between the modern world and with AI, or even earlier with social media technology. When I was a kid and the iPhone came out, I felt super disconnected. Capitalism makes me feel so disconnected from being human. But in the cave, it was different. Caves are our first home. The first tomb. I was sleeping next to an open grave. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found hidden in caves. Buddhist texts were hidden in caves. Jesus resurrected in a cave. Muhammad talked to God in a cave. There’s a lot of cave stuff happening in history. Where I was living in Cappadocia was a valley where monks would go to get away from civilization and society. They would climb and carve out the highest, most impossible places to reach. They were trying to meditate. Just live there without seeing anybody. But then they got followers, and the followers would carve out churches underneath them. The monks went there for peace and quiet, but then a community assembled around them.
P: How did you get interested in writing about religion?
L: Well, while I was living in the cave church, I met an archaeologist and we had a lot of discussions. I started to realize how much religion and society are intertwined. The development of religion mirrored the development of society. I’ve always been interested in how the government controls us as human beings. We’ve been spiritually colonized and mind-controlled since society began. Monotheism was just part of that. The system tries to take away our humanity and make us forget who we are. If you live in a city, you can be critical of the system, but you are in the system. If you have walls around you, you are in the system. In the cave, I don’t pay rent. Every single day when I wake up there, I just fuck the system. It’s a hard feeling to describe with words, which is why I had to record the album there. But the authors of religious texts were also trying to describe something that they couldn’t describe. There’s a lot of evil, genocidal bullshit in the Bible, but also there are moments of beauty. It’s a complete representation of humanity: the good, the bad, the ugly. It shows you the whole range of the human being.
P: Your book gets deep into Christianity, but also references other ancient religions and texts. How did you get interested in those?
L: Once I got into the Bible, I could not escape it. Reading it is not enough. You read it, and you have so many questions. I got into Babylonian and Canaanite texts to look for answers. The Bible was written over hundreds of years by many different authors, and it was cherry-picked what stories they wanted to show. Every version of the Bible has different stories and leaves some out, and the translation from an ancient text to a modern one influences it too. You lose a lot. I don’t think I see it totally how it was originally written. I don’t think anybody can. But the more I researched the history of the Bible, I started to see parallels in the texts that came before it. It’s the ripple effect. The stories are just echoes.
P: Can you give me an example of these connections across religions?
L: Ancient Babylonians were really into astrology. They saw astrology more politically, like what the gods were going to do to the kingdom. It was thought that if the gods would attack, they would target the king. So they would take the king from the throne, hide him, and put a fake king on for 100 days. During these 100 days, the gods’ evil would to go to the fake king. At the end of the 100 days, they killed the fake king. This is basically a Jesus-like martyr figure who takes the evil and dies for the people. Another one is Sargon of Akkad, the first known dictator, or at least the first famous one. He founded the Akkadian Empire, which wiped out the Sumerian culture. He has the same origin story as Moses.
P: The protagonist in your book has four names, most of which reference ancient religions. Why so many name changes?
L: I wanted to explore the fluidity of identity. It’s so often used against us. We are just a collection of our experiences and our memories. We’re always changing. But when somebody misidentifies you, particularly if they do it on purpose, that is a special type of cruelty. They just boil you down. The character is called by a number once she gets into the system. She also has some rebirths. The old her is still there but part of it dies.
P: She and the one person she befriends are both musicians. What’s the significance of that?
L: Music is so powerful. There’s a reason why musicians and artists are suppressed in totalitarian governments all over the world. They touch something that they’re not supposed to touch. If you’re a dictator, how do you regulate people and get them to conform to the behavior that you want? In some forms of Christianity you’re not allowed to dance. You’re not allowed to play board games. You’re not supposed to have feelings, desires, or fun. In the book, they’re supposed to sing hymns. They’re supposed to sing for the Lord. They’re not supposed to sing from their hearts. When musicians try to influence society, they get in trouble.
P: The book also includes drawings. What do those contribute to the story?
L: I wanted it to be really first-person perspective. This is what she’s seeing. She doesn’t know if it’s an illusion. They’re Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian reliefs. She doesn’t know what she’s looking at. So instead of saying exactly what she’s looking at, I had to show it. I wanted the reader to experience what she’s discovering, what she’s observing. Maybe they’re hallucinations. I don’t even know if they’re hallucinations.
P: And you made a short film. How does that fit in?
L: The book is dystopian fantasy, but the short film is more documentary. I wanted to show the process and also the landscape that inspired so much of the book. I just wanted to capture it. I was documenting what the cave meant to me and what my life was like.
P: Why did you want to explore so many different mediums?
L: With writing I’m more structured. With music, not at all. And if I try to structure it, it falls apart. It doesn’t work! Music is from my soul. Writing is more from my mind. Drawing is more observing and then connecting to the physical world. I had to make a big project because I’m not satisfied just with one medium. I have to organize my thoughts, and I cannot organize it with just music.
P: What was the recording process like?
L: It was amazing! I had candles all around. I was in an ancient church, drinking some wine. There was a lot of volcanic ash dust, so my throat was dead by the end of it. I could hear my voice and guitar playing with the space. I kept wondering, how many people sung here? I was trying to capture not just the music but the space, the feeling. The cave has it’s own reverb, but then I added even more. I really wanted it to be a reverb soup. If I would do another album, maybe I would go a bit fancier and get some recorded layers in different churches. That would be crazy. Imagine the reverb! It would not have worked for this album, because it wouldn’t fit the story in the book. She is alone. She is just by herself, singing with her guitar. And that’s exactly how I recorded it. I wanted to become the character.
P: How do you write a song?
L: I love improvising. Usually I just come up with some chords and just start improvising immediately. There are some songs where I recorded the first improvisation and I like it more than the final recording. It feels more natural. There’s more emotion. I’m totally into the melody, and then the words come naturally. If I think too much, they become bullshit. So music is just like vomit, basically. Soul vomit.
Laurentius the Profit’s album and book, both titled FUCK LIFE — When On High, can be found on Bandcamp here. A short film about the background of the project is available on YouTube here.
