Fire of God’s Love (Vinyl) - By: Sister Irene O’connor - Model Number: FTS034LP

Description

Fire of God™s Love is the legendary 1973 album by Australian nun Sister Irene O™Connor”a sincere, soulful,
and unconsciously psychedelic song sequence devoted to self-reflection and awakening the spirit within. A collection of original folk spirituals written by and channelled through O™Connor with guitar, electric organ, drum machine and her angelic voice, the album was recorded and mixed in an astonishingly futuristic fashion by fellow nun and recording engineer Sister Marimil Lobregat. Freedom To Spend offers the first authorized reissue of this holy grail since 1976; the album restored and remastered with care and consideration from the best available sources.
As a young Roman Catholic nun in the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary order, Sister Irene™s forays into music began in 1953 when she moved from Sydney to a convent in Singapore and began teaching children with learning difficulties. Acquiring an acoustic guitar andlearning three simple chords, Irene™s songs blossomed with the children™s enthusiasm. Serendipitously, a parent of one student worked at a commercial radio station in Singapore, and Irene was invited to the station to perform and record in its studio. She went along, wearing her habit and carrying her guitar, and cut her first original song there in 1965. Under the pseudonym Myiriam Frances, to maintain anonymity within her order (Nuns didn™t do that kind of thing, noted O™Connor), Phillips released a series
of Sister Irene™s records at the tail end of the 1960s.
It was at the convent in Singapore that Sister Irene met Sister Marimil Lobregat, a fellow Franciscan nun
who moved to the island from the Philippines in the early 1960s. More than a decade later, as if by divine intervention, they reconnected at another convent at Point Piper in Sydney. Marimil, also a musician and sound
enthusiast, worked at the Catholic Radio and Television Centre in Homebush, in western Sydney, as an audio and
visual technician. Sister Irene, faithfully honing her musical craft, and Sister Marimil hatched a plan to meet at the
centre over a series of Sunday afternoons, and create the songs that would become Fire of God™s Love.
The songs of Fire of God™s Love are sung in an angelic soprano by Sister Irene (with lyrics spanning English, Latin, and Malay) and produced by Sister Marimil, recorded on a Teac 3340S 4-track reel-to-reel. Marimil was instrumental in conjuring the uncanny otherworldliness that permeates the album. The crystalline fabric of Sister Irene™s voice is held exquisitely in a shimmering mosaic of reverb and analog synthesizer hum, while momentously ringing out like a bell in the darkness, projecting until truth or the divine appears. Themes such as mercy, grace, light, and mystery are punctuated by a gentle acoustic guitar strum and eternal piano notes spinning slowly on vibrating thread.

Label
FTS

Tracks & Genre

SOUTHBOUND