City of Refuge

Fanfare: On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age features samples of Pause by Stereolab (from their album Transient Random Noise Bursts with Announcements – a title which more nearly describes Fahey’s New Thing than anything by Stereolab).
Chesney Silver, Please Come Home: Contains elements of Worried Blues – is this obsessiveness on the part of Fahey or his discographers?
City of Refuge: Q: What is the City of Refuge?; JF: It was a place my parents took me to when I was a child. It was along the Atlantic Ocean somewhere, and we ran out of food and water and we went into this mysterious city. It was just so weird. There were no people, but there was a big factory. I had a recurrent dream about it that my parents had planned to take me to the city to chop me up and consume me. But the factory communicated with me and warned me what they were planning, and me and the factory consumed my parents instead.; The melody is based on Skip James’ Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.; The title may be lifted from Blind Willie Johnson’s I’m Gonna Run To The City Of Refuge (1930)
Hope Slumbers Eternal: Retitled snippet from The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party (1966) which until then had never been revived in any guise. The effects are similar to those used in The Mill Pond Drowns All Hope (see previous).; Title is understood to refer to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star with whom JF was interested at the time.
On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age: JF: I hate this whole New Age thing. The ethic is summed up by the word “mellow”. I’m very emotional about music and I can’t stand these people finding new ways of making it mellow as a marketing strategy. It’s my reaction against that… I’m a person who sort of sits around watching the decline of western civilisation and I consider all that kind of music central to the decline of western civilisation.