Two nuns and a drum machine walk into a recording studio. What happens next isn’t a punch line, but one of the most memorable pieces of musical esoterica to emerge from the pastel haze of the early 1970s.

In 1973, Sister Irene O’Connor, a religious in the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, and her friend Sister Marimil Lobregat spent several weekends at the National Catholic Television Centre in Sydney, Australia, recording a dozen songs that O’Connor had written. The album they cut, Fire of God’s Love, was a strange mix of Christian devotional music, folk pop, children’s songs, and trippy electric organ. It didn’t sound like anything else, and to this day it’s sui generis. It remained a hot commodity among record collectors over the decades because it was weird, charming, and rare.

The record label Freedom to Spend has recently re-issued Fire of God’s Love on vinyl. The re-issue comes with extensive liner notes and an eighteen-page lyric book. Everyone from collectors of devotional music to psych-folk completionists deserves to hear it.

A description on the album’s Bandcamp page calls the album “unconsciously psychedelic,” although I think that gives short shrift to the sisters and the Christian mystic tradition in general. The title of the opening track, “Fire (Luke 12:49),” is unambiguous to anyone who has ears and can crack open a Bible (“I am come to cast fire on the earth; and what will I, but that it be kindled?”).

“Fire” begins by introducing O’Connor’s airy soprano—an instrument to which Lobregat’s production gives an ethereal quality. Then, from the background, a goofy, bouncing electric organ track arrives, like a man in a novelty T-shirt following a woman in a ball gown. Along with the organ comes a drum machine soaked with so much reverb that it sounds like an early Jamaican dub beat, minus the massive bass. Similarly, “Mass—‘Emmanuel,’” one of the other standout tracks on the album, combines O’Connor’s haunting rendition of several liturgies with an organ riff that sounds like a mix of a cha-cha and the original Pac-Man theme music.

This description is not entirely flattering, but the music is enchanting in its way, and certainly more interesting than most of the string-laden schlock that was coming out of professional recording studios in Nashville and Los Angeles at the time. The gulf between the natural beauty of O’Connor’s soprano and the chintzy synth, the sublime and the vulgar, discombobulates the listener and makes one consider everything more carefully. The Surrealists tried to produce this effect with their paintings, seeking a “stupefacient image” that would arrest viewers and cause them to reassess their reality. I suppose the aural equivalent of a melting clock is a Hail Mary sung over an eight-bit arcade mambo.

If you listen carefully, you’ll hear some surprising things. The album reflects O’Connor’s personal journey in the mission field, and it’s also a snapshot of a particularly transformative time in music technology.

O’Connor learned to play guitar while she was teaching kindergartners with learning difficulties in Singapore. After she learned three chords, she would sit in the afternoons singing songs to the children in their native language, Malay, about whatever she happened to see out the window. “Keshukoran,” the last track on the album, is one of the songs she wrote in Singapore. According to a local newspaper clipping collected by Freedom to Spend, it “was written to show the Moslem people with whom Sister Irene worked as a missionary, that she respects their faith and ways.”

O’Connor’s recording career began in 1965 when a parent of one of her students invited her to perform and record a song at the radio station where he worked. She recorded it under the pseudonym Myriam Frances to avoid causing any trouble in her order. “The whole thing was hush-hush,” O’Connor recalled, according to Freedom to Spend. “Nuns didn’t do that kind of thing.” O’Connor, alias Myriam Frances, recorded a number of devotional songs in the late 1960s for the record label Philips.

It was also in Singapore that she met Lobregat, who was on her way to Indonesia. Lobregat had a keen interest in electronic music and audio engineering. When O’Connor moved to Sydney in the early 1970s, they ended up at the same convent together, and the two quickly hatched plans to record the album that would become Fire of God’s Love.

One of the larger trends that contributed to the album’s sound is that advances in recording equipment and synthesizers made it much easier for musicians to cut an album on the cheap with little to no other personnel. Except for one track that included a male tenor, requiring them to recruit Father Des O’Neil, the entire production was a two-nun affair.

O’Connor played all the instruments and sang. The drum machine was generated by the electric organ and played simultaneously by O’Connor, while Lobregat recorded everything live on a four-track reel-to-reel. Some of the effects were almost accidental. The famous reverb effect on “Fire,” for example, was the result of an annoying dog. “Originally the two hoped to get the desired reverb effect on the intro via a bathroom near the studio,” Australia’s A.B.C. Radio National reported in 2013, “but a dog barking next door kept interfering so the haunting vocal was done on a $20 reverb machine.” The production was so thoroughly D.I.Y. that, for the picture of flames on the album cover, the two walked over to the convent’s incinerator and took photographs of a piece of paper that they had doused in kerosene and lit on fire.

For an album by two nuns, the sounds they generated are forward-looking and adventurous. One of the pleasures of the album is hearing the sisters use techniques that other artists across the world were discovering independently or wouldn’t stumble upon until years later. They were working, if indirectly, alongside Kingstown reggae producers, proto-punk bands, and experimental musicians. If you listen to the drum machine, for instance, you can hear the minimalist anti-groove that DEVO would later adopt as its aesthetic—beats so square that they’re cool.

All of the writing about Fire of God’s Love raises the question of how aware the sisters were of the psychedelic currents they were swimming in. One doubts they were trading Grateful Dead tapes in the convent, but of course there was a general surge of interest at the time in spirituality, mysticism, and consciousness. There was something in the air. One contemporary of O’Connor was Judee Sill, a singer-songwriter who released two albums of complex, Bach-influenced folk songs filled with Christian and cosmic imagery. It’s interesting to consider that Sill and O’Connor approached roughly the same musical territory from inverse positions: Sill was a classically trained musician with unorthodox beliefs, while O’Connor had formal religious instruction but was a self-taught musician.

O’Connor stuck to simple forms and traditional hymns that let her voice and faith shine. In one of the more beguiling tracks on the album,“Messe du Saint Esprit,” O’Connor sings in French over a repeating four-chord progression on guitar. Her voice sounds like it’s floating somewhere high above the campfire guitar, making the song feel both pastoral and otherworldly. Several of the tracks are children’s songs, which I will not comment on. As the parent of a toddler, I’m particularly sensitive to the genre—“triggered,” we used to say. But I think the album remained a legendary collector’s item for decades not just because it’s a little weird but also because it’s naïve in the best sense of the word: unaffected, sincere, created without pretense.

O’Connor and Lobregat stopped collaborating after the album, which went out of print in 1976, but O’Connor continued making music. She wrote a musical about the life of Saint Francis of Assisi before turning her attention to writing music to assist in private prayer.

A.B.C. Radio National reported in 2013 that Lobregat, then eighty-four years old, “runs massage therapy for the terminally ill, teaches Tai Chi as well as running weekend retreats on spirituality of the body.”

In 2023, The Economist caught up with O’Connor on the occasion of the digital re-release of Fire of God’s Love, nearly five decades after it went out of print. She had just turned ninety. The magazine reported that she now lives in a retirement home in Sydney and that “some proceeds from the reissue will go towards paying for her care.”

“Speaking to The Economist from a sunlit park bench,” the magazine continued, “Sister Irene was surprised and happy that her distinctive music was being appreciated anew.” When the reissued album finally arrived this past November, Freedom to Spend posted a picture of O’Connor holding a fresh copy of her most famous work and smiling.