First fully produced,
official album by
Canadian band
The Tea Party. Released in
1993 under
record label EMI. The
first edition of the
album included a
ticket that would act as a
pass to any
Tea Party headlining concert.
Subsequent editions changed the
cover art only slightly, and had the album
remastered at a different
studio. The
remastered editions sound near
sonicly identical to the first edition, though
completists will want to find the first edition for
reasons beyond
sound.
The
album name gains
inspiration from the
book of the same name, a
manuscript on late
sixteenth-century alchemy (see below). The album's
content varies in focus from
theology and
politics, to
drugs and
paganism. The
cover art itself consists of the
solis tree being circled by
ravens, and
leaning towards a
sea of
the elements:
fire,
water,
earth and
sky. The
sun acts as the major
backdrop, as the
title itself
translates into "
The Splendor of the Sun"
Track Listing:
A
sixteenth century text concerning
alchemy. The
manuscript was
beautifully illuminated, and
incorporated 22 detailed
images, set in
ornamental borders and
niches. The
illustrations were
symbolic in nature and showed such
themes as alchemical
death and
rebirth, and the
planets. The
Splendor Solis is
associated with
Salomon Trismosin, though it is not
known for fact or not if he was the actual
author.
The best known
copy of the
manuscript is kept in the
British Library, and dated
1582. The oldest known copy
resides in the
Prussian State Museum in
Berlin and is dated
1532. Museums in
Kassel,
Paris and
Nuremberg also house copies.