Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor (BOOK + FLEXI)

Order now to secure a limited-edition flexi-disc recording of Satie’s “Leit-motiv du Panthée” performed, as intended, as an accompaniment to a reading of Joséphin Péladan’s Le Panthée. This flexi-disc special is only available via the FTK webshop. In 1892, Erik Satie was at a crossroads. Despite having already composed some of the finest works ever written for piano, the 26-year-old was still penniless and unappreciated. His artistic ethos—a paradoxical mix of reactionary Medievalism and avant-garde absurdism—could find no quarter in fin-de-siècle Paris. And so, with his musical aspirations dashed and nowhere left to turn, Satie would turn to himself. His subsequent revolt was as shocking as it was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Satie announced himself to be “the Parcener,” the head of a new religious order. It was, in fact, a church of his own founding—The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Transforming his dilapidated apartment into an “Abbatial Church,” Sati