Lost Temple is a concept album where every track features recorded speech sampled from the tapes the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected in its investigation of Jonestown following the mass death centered there—starting with the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan of California, which was the focus of their investigation, and the murder of four other people who were traveling with him: three members of the press and a Jonestown defector. Today, Jonestown and the organization that built it, Peoples Temple, are largely remembered through the idiom "drinking the Kool-Aid," but the tapes they left behind reveal something far more complicated, a striving utopian community sometimes justifiably paranoid about external threats and beset from within by an organizational culture of abuse. Lost Temple provides a short glimpse at some of these audiotapes, woven into a musical score with cinematic sensibilities.

Cover credits: Aerial photo of Guyanese jungle produced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Jonestown logo produced by Peoples Temple. Both images were obtained through the Jonestown Institute.

Most vocal material on this album comes from the public archives of the Jonestown Institute.

Released 2021-11-30.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0