Enrique Abu –Vocals, guitars
Orpheus Kaya –Guitars, backing vocals
Valentinus –Bass, backing vocals
Keshava Blackgarden –Keyboards, backing vocals
Teshub Hoeller –Electronic percussion, backing vocals
Sheik Adi – the drum machine

Original studio version of ‘Magick Mirror,’ recorded during Winter Solstice, 1982. A live version appears on the Ninth Heaven album, ‘Loch Ness Ritual.’

The band dubbed these the ‘Mirror Sessions.’ Enrique, having removed all extraneous furniture and décor from the recording studio, would sanctify the space with hyssop and holy water and seemingly endless litanies and prayers before seating himself before a standing, full-size mirror, the surface of which was painted entirely black. It was during these periods of mystical mirror gazing that Enrique Abu received the material resulting in this single. ‘The West,’ Enrique Abu claimed, was a song of prophecy for those with ears to hear its dire warning.

‘Magick Mirror’ was the only Ninth Heaven track recorded specifically for the Cloakwave documentary film, ‘Atlantis is Burning,’ but was not used.

Enrique Abu: “The film’s director didn’t want it (Magick Mirror). She felt it wasn’t a ‘proper’ Cloakwave tune – whatever that means? We didn’t care. It’s a sh-t documentary anyway.”

Against Enrique’s explicit wishes to the contrary, Czar Lipstick, the band’s manager, would secretly submit other Ninth Heaven tracks for inclusion in ‘Atlantis is Burning’ which did make it into the film.

Produced by The Ninth Heaven and Czar Lipstick at Hex Café Studios.

Is time travel real? Are there alternate dimensions? Heaven Heads say, “YES.”

To know more rb.gy/ucj0ek

THE NINTH HEAVEN DOES [NOT] EXIST

Explore Sacred Realm IX:
www.theninthheaven.com

978-1457528996

3/20/1984 | APOCALYPSE Art & Music Digest | Igor Lovemintz
The Ninth Heaven | Magick Mirror | Review
new age hoaxes, narcissism, and the puerility of AM gothic disco

In my first year as a college radio DJ, I fell victim to the “Play Magick Mirror Nine Times in a Row at Midnight!” hoax –and I paid the price. This juvenile sonic ritual –as the rumor went– promised to create some sort of rift in time/space, thereby loosing a mythical menagerie of blue-skinned elves, sea beasts, unicorns and who knew what else, right into the room through the stereo speakers. Some nonsense about subliminal or back-masked incantations.

It had originated from one fan-submitted article in an underground ‘zine called ‘Doktrine.’ The kid who wrote it claimed that, as a result of performing the ritual, he now owned a midnight-black unicorn which he kept tethered to a rose bush in his backyard. Yeah. Sure...

While the ‘Magick Mirror EP’ had been released two years prior, those of us state-side rarely managed to obtain actual Ninth Heaven vinyl. This only added to the band’s mystique and the rumor mill surrounding them. Out of sheer luck (or fate?), our tiny college station somehow received an original pressing.

I did it on a dare from a caller. The listener calling-in also happened to be my girlfriend who had just dumped me. It was a brutal breakup. I also happened to be tripping on microdots in an effort to escape the pain. Needless to say, I wish I could say the stunt was worth it.

My ex was a major NH fan, heavy into the Telluric Convergence scene, slept with a crystal under her pillow, and held the vague but firm conviction that extraterrestrials would soon be landing en masse in order to relieve the human race of its dominion over a dying Earth. She was the love of my life. Despite I never much cared for the NH’s music, I guess I hoped (in vain) to impress her by suspending disbelief and testing the stupid theory live on air. Bring on the sea monsters! I remind you, I was tripping my face off.

“I am falling into you/ Magick Mirror,” Enrique Abu intoned in that ridiculous trademark croon my ex so adored, as black light posters dripped liquid-neon streams down the studio walls to the never-been-vacuumed carpet, now a murky pond teeming with electric eel-like creatures darting about below my chair. Of course, I was usually high on something during my DJ sets. Such visions didn’t alarm me.

Yet, as I placed the needle back on the starting groove around the third time, I realized what a huge mistake I had made. Not because the station phone was now ringing off the hook with irate complaints, or that the place was suddenly crawling with elves –but because the track, ‘Magick Mirror,’ was utterly insipid.

Ascended Masters, violet flames, pyramid powers, ancient astronauts, unicursal hexagrams. My ex was into all that stuff. Fine, whatever. Her personal bible, however, was a heavily dog-eared paperback of narcissistic meditations titled “Mirror Mysticism” by the quack philosopher, Gustav Scheider (founder of Scheiderianism). My ex would spend days in the mirror, in a stoned trance, tracing those pouty lips and feline eyes of hers with amethyst dust and khol, with that book open before her. It now occurred to me the NH had written this song based on that same damned book. It was a conspiracy!

Then again, maybe the microdots were causing me to perceive meaning in the song that wasn’t really there…? Anyway, it didn’t actually matter, because there was a far more glaring problem with ‘Magick Mirror’ than its suspect lyrics –which may or may not have been specifically about my girlfriend and our relationship issues.

It was f********g disco!

Not even good disco (is there such a thing?), the kind you might hear at the club. No, the song was too damned slow for proper dancing. But ‘Magick Mirror’ is disco nevertheless. The soft, saccharine kind you might hear on AM radio in your mom’s car on the way to the dentist –if that dentist’s office was in a cave lit by lava lamps. And the patients in the waiting room were vampires downed-out on Quaaludes there to have their fangs checked.

"Who listens to this crap?!" I asked myself as the radio equipment melted down around me like candle wax. My ex, that’s who!

Someone yanked me out of the studio well before I got even close to playing ‘Magick Mirror’ the ninth prescribed time. My lip bloodied, I spent the rest of that night on a bench in the park observing two drunken hobos (one of them swearing at the top of his lungs in French) attempt a splashy session of grubby lovemaking in the central fountain.

As the sun came up in violent magenta streaks, the microdots began to fade. Birds began to sing. The howling hobo lovers had either vanished or drowned (c'est la vie). I decided to head for my usual morning cup of coffee and buttered corn muffin at our favorite diner, wondering if my ex would show up to rub my face in the fact I’d just been fired from my first ever paying job for indulging her quackery. She did not.

At any rate... I swear, as my waitress pushed through the kitchen’s swinging doors to fetch more butter for my muffin, a tiny elf with blue skin peeked around her skirt with a disgusted snicker. Verdict? ‘Magick Mirror’ sucked. Even he knew it.