Current 93

David Tibet was perhaps the macabre priest of the most imposing occult rituals in the history of rock music. A member of Nurse With Wound and of Psychic TV, in 1982 he founded Current 93, a collective inspired to guru Aleister Crowley's ceremonies of sexual magic ("The 93rd Current" is the definition of the Thelema cult). His main collaborators were Steve Stapleton ( Nurse With Wound , John Balance (Coil), and Fritz Haaman (23 Skidoo).

The suites compiled on the cassette Live At Bar Maldoror (Laylah, 1983) costitute an early sinister peak of Current 93's satanic saga. The 19-minute Alone Into The Alone keeps mixing and remixing infernal screaming and thundering electronics, distorted and reverbed through galactic space, occasionally reminiscent of Diamanda Galas and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The 23-minute Only Shadows Of Hooks is a darker and more static piece that pivots around a loop of monk-like vocals.

At the same time Current 93 released the EP Ekki Er Allt Gull and the cassette of his friend Tiny Tim. The EP Lashtal (Laylah, 1983), dedicated to the experiments that Crawley performed in Sicily, was a sort of ideological manifesto.

Nature Unveiled (Laylah, 1984) is the quintessential black mass of Current 93, an album that would remain a reference standard for the future of esoteric music. The 25-minute Ach Golgota opens with a monk choir and then rapidly dissolves into warped spacetime. Tibet coins an electronic music for otherworldly voices in which electronic dissonance fuses mantra-like, Gregorian-like and theatrical invocations. The 20-minute The Mystical Body Of Christ In Chorazaim opens with symphonic and choral music. Here the voices accumulate and prevail over the invocations, and the sense of the electronic poem is a macabre journey through a hell overflowing with damned souls, These two lengthy pieces constitute an infernal hymn to the Anti-Christ, to universal perdition and to a sacrilegeous apocalypse; an ode to eternal grief; a musical fresco of the universal judgment.

Tibet further delved into vocal experimentation on Dogs Blood Rising (Laylah, 1985). Christus Christus is another vortex a` la Diamanda Galas, while the 15-minute Falling Back In Fields Of Rape uses musique concrete as a counterpoint to Tibet's expressionist kammerspiel. The infernal liturgy ventures into the dark and angst-filled caverns of the 14-minute Raio No Terrasu (the peak of pathos), evoking a population of damned, priests, demons and prophets and children, all of them deformed and disfigured by the reverbs and the electronic noise.

Tibet also recorded concerts under the moniker Dogs Blood Order, as documented on 93 Presents Dogs Blood Order (Durtro, 1997).

Amidst so many sensationalist naive works, it is to Tibet that we owe the discovery of electronic music as a language of the occult.

Current 93's arrangements started becoming luxuriant, and less poignant, with Killkillkilly, off the EP Nightmare Culture (Layla, 1986), and with the two suites of In Menstrual Night (United Dairies, 1986), basically a collaboration with Steve Stapleton. The cacophonous Sucking Up Souls has no music as such: just operatic soprano, cryptic female prayers, children's nursery rhymes, whispers, etc. The percussive To Feed The Moon sounds like a child's remix of a Talking Heads hit.

Dawn (Mimort, 1987) was a sterile summary of loop and collage techniques. It includes an 18-minute version of Maldoror Is Dead and a rather trivial 14-minute Great Black Time (a festival of church bells that is slowly transformed into the extremely dissonant background for a girl singing in a medieval style and for an old Mamas & Papas hit).

A new phase de facto began with Imperium (Maldoror, 1987), a collection of sepulchral elegies recited against the usual noise-infernal background. Imperium is a 22-minute hissed poem in four movements that is permeated with the lugubrious themes of medieval Christianity and is decorated with audio icons (flutes, lutes), of the Renaissance (first movement), languid cosmic electronics (second movement), distorted drones (third movement) and just acoustic guitar (fourth movement). There is very little to redeem the rest: the ten-minute Locust wastes a synthetic disco beat; the nine-minute Or only features some tenuous metallic keyboards and sparse booming percussion; and the seven-minute Alone only has a heartbeat of synthesizers. The skeletal arrangements are too little to balance the verbose and un-musical super-ego of Tibet.

The 1987-88 releases are confused and amateurish. The artist seems to be drunk with his own doctrine while unable of articulate it in music. Christ And The Pale Queens Mighty In Sorrow (Maldoror, 1988) included the nine-minute recitation with piano Forever Changing (one of the most tedious recitations of the era) and The Ballad of the Pale Christ (a simple guitar-based folk rant). David Tibel clearly overestimated the value of his lyrics. These lengthy pieces were repetitive like medieval Inquisition torture. Their only reason to exist was the lyrics. The setting and the progress of the 20-minute Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Their Sorrow could be intriguing if it didn't last so long, because this time Tibet's pointless recitation floats in a cloud of otherworldly female voices while gentle electronic whistles battle horrible industrial clangor. The CD version includes the single with the ten-minute Breath And Pain Of God (1988), a much more haunting piece: subliminal electronic drones, distant nun-like singing, fluctuating bass lines, bells and rattles, The Mighty in Sorrow appended to the CD is merely an 18-minute repetition of the same chord (over and over again).
The single Crowleymass (Layla) sounds like a sarcastic parody of the followers of the prophet set to a cabaret-ish synth-pop style. The blaspheme EP Happy Birthday Pigface Christus is released as a Christmas record.

Swastikas For Noddy (Laylah, 1987) completed the regression towards the brief song format, despite the fact that the guests included HoH (Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson, ex Psychic TV) and Boyd Rice (aka Non). Oh Coal Black Smith sounds like an amateurish imitation of Nick Cave's sermons. Tibet wears the hat of the pub folksinger in Black Flowers Please and Stair Song, boasting an emphasis to rival David Peel's, a style that peaks with the eight-minute demented singalong Beausoleil. There is a lot more singing, and it is often inspired by religious chants of various cultures (Benediction, Blessing, Panzer Rune).

Abandoning the horror overtones of his "industrial" phase, Tibet underwent a cathartic process that harked back to the pagan roots of his land. The mini-album Earth Covers Earth (United Dairies, 1988 - Free Porcupine Society, 2005), the second installment of Tibet's "apocalyptic folk", featuring the guitars of Tony Wakeford (Sol Invictus) and Douglas P (Death In June), as well as the occasional vocals of Rose MacDowell, conjured folk-rock ballads sung as if the end of the world was rapidly approaching: Rome for Douglas P, Hourglass for Diana (yet another recitation with guitar and violin, that the violin crescendo almost makes listenable), and especially the oneiric Earth Covers Earth. The CD version adds She Is Dead And All Fall Down, another amazingly static litany, the paradisiac The Blue Gates Of Death - Before And Beyond Them, whose main accompaniment is a girl's singalong, and the fearful 20-minute musique-concrete poem The Dreammoves Of The Sleeping King (finally some action),

The two works of apocalyptic folk bridged the (apparently dramatic) gap between the exoteric commune of the 1980s and the hippy commune of the 1960s (foremost among them, the Incredible String Band), and, musically, bridged the gap between electronic industrial music of the 1980s and chamber folk music of the 1960s.

Once the project moved away from the magical atmospheres of the early days, Current 93 were little more than the vehicle for the acoustic pagan folk of David Tibet, with the music mostly composed by Michael Cashmore of Nature And Organisation.

After a hiatus of three years, nonetheless filled with bootlegs, compilations and live albums, in 1991 Tibet increased the number of Scandinavian collaborators (besides HoH) on Island (United Diaries, 1991), a euphoric endorsement of mainstream production methods that Tibet attempted to wed with his dreamy folk music. The fusion of tribal drumming, floating strings and interlocking female chants in Falling evoked a marriage of Peter Gabriel and Nick Cave. The hypnotic and lulling The Dream Of A Shadow Of Smoke boasts a tinkling arrangement from which an elegant female choir soars (possibly the most melodic moment of his career). The delicate neoclassical madrigal Fields Of Rape boasts pure suspense and ecstasy (possibly the most touching moment of his career). The shimmering keyboards, plantive violin and the multitracked voices of Oh Merry-Go-Round pen a moving requiem. Tibet's theater sounds far more assured and gripping here: he recites his visions in the glacial dissonant soundscape of Lament For My Suzanne, amid the emphatic orchestral and choral sounds of Passing Horses over the agonizing drones and rumbles of Anyway People Die, over the polyrhythmic tribal beats and minimalist keyboards of The Fall Of Christopher Robin. Then out of the blue Tibet jumps on a disco stage for the seven-minute Crowleymass Unveiled, which belongs to synth-pop of the 1980s, and even launches in the exotic lounge dance of Paperback Honey. By the end of the album, Tibet has become a real bard, not just a (mediocre) actor: Fields Of Rape and Oh Merry-Go-Round rank with the best songs of any genre in that year.

Thunder Perfect Mind (Durtro, 1992 - Jnana, 2005), featuring Stapleton but not HoH, and beginning the collaboration with Michael Cashmore of Nature And Organisation, contains humbler tunes inspired by ancient styles: the medieval-inspired The Descent Of Long Satan And Babylon, the baroque and dancing A Song For Douglas After He's Dead, the gentle ancestral A Sadness Song, and the angelic polka-like When The May Rain Comes. Some of them are now "too" humble: Tibet sings (as opposed to reciting) but there is too little to sustain the atmosphere (just acoustic guitar and a few seconds of orchestral instruments). The bard is anthemic in In The Heart Of The Wood And What I Found There, one of the shortest songs and probably the best. He returns to his demonic pub-inspired recitation only in the nine-minute All The Stars Are Dead Now (overlong and verbose like its predecessors of previous years). The 16-minute Hitler As Kalki for guitar, violin and flute ideally belongs to another album: a raga-folk-jazz-rock jam that blurs the border between Neil Young and It's A Beautiful Day.
The lyrics shy away from the extreme occultism of Current 93's beginnings and reach out for a confused Christian heretic ideology but ultimately a more positive vision of the world.

Emblems (Durtro, 1993) is a career anthology.

Tibet gave a follow-up to Thunder with Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre (Durtro, 1994), but this one is dominated by elegies that have no singing and virtually no music development, just tedious recitation against a backdrop of faux Renaissance music (Steven And I In The Field Of Stars, the seven-minute The Teeth Of The Winds Of The Sea). A denser arrangement and a hint of chanting surface in Moonlight You Will Say and The Great, Bloody And Bruised Veil Of The World but it's way too little. At the other end of the spectrum, the seven-minute The Cloud Of Unknowing virtually abolishes the accompaniment, leaving only a trace of droning electronics and tinkling instruments.

The mini-album Lucifer Over London (Durtro, 1994) was the first work to betray a bit of anger and passion, while returning to infernal themes.

The Fire of the Mind (Durtro, 1994) is soundtrack music for James Low's recitations.

The mini-album Where The Long Shadows Fall (Durtro, 1995), containing the haunting 19-minute Where The Long Shadows Fall for looped female chants and sparse guitar chords (ruined by Tibet's usual recitation), was the beginning of the trilogy of Inmost Light. Its second part was the album All The Pretty Little Horses (Durtro, 1996), that leveraged his confused career by bringing together his experience with both avantgarde music and chamber folk music, with Michael Cashmore composing most of the music. All The Pretty Little Horsies and The Bloodbells Chime basically offer a more evocative and touching version of the spoken-word elegies of Of Ruine. The street folksinger resurfaces briefly in This Carnival Is Dead And Gone. Unfortunately, the eight-minute The Frolic is more of Of Ruine's tedious ruotine. Only the eight-minute Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil abandons all pretensions and delves into a demonic whirlwind of droning noise and mangled voices. A zenith of pathos is achieved in the nine-minute The Inmost Light Itself that substitutes musique concrete (mainly a collage of children's voices) for the Renaissance music of Ruine, and whose finale is truly harrowing (the children are enveloped and taken away by a wind of otherworldly chants).

The mediocre mini-album The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (Durtro, 1996) closed the trilogy.

The triple-CD Inmost Light Trilogy (Jnana, 2006) collects the entire trilogy: Where The Long Shadows Fall, All The Pretty Little Horses, The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home.

In A Foreign Town In A Foreign Land (Durtro, 1997) is the soundtrack for the lyrics of Thomas Ligotti. The four extended pieces display Tibet's most subliminal skills.

Tibet has become a sophisticated chansonnier and proves his subtlety first on the EP A Gothic Love Song (Durtro, 1998) and then on the album Soft Black Stars (Durtro, 1998), a cycle of piano lieder (mostly spoken-word) accompanied by strings and winds, perhaps his most minimal work. The author of the music was actually long-time collaborator Michael Cashmore.

Calling For Vanished Faces (Durtro, 1999) is a double-disc career retrospective.

Sleep Has His House (Durtro, 2000) includes Tibet's tribute to his late father, the requiem Sleep Has His House, which is just 24 minutes of tragic drones, looped over and over again, with some dejected mumbling by Tibet. Alas, the rest of the collection is devoted to Tibet's favorite format: monotonous (and often pompous) spoken-word art with Renaissance-style accompaniment. The only piece worth mentioning is the eight-minute The Magical Bird In The Magical Woods because of its surreal instrumental coda. (To prove the sincerity of his grief, Tibet released the album as a limited-edition, super-expensive, colored-vynil collectors' version...)

Tibet finally returned to the malefic grandeur of Nature Unveiled with his soundtrack for the Faust (Durtro, 2000). The 36-minute piece is basically a two-part collage of electronically-treated voices, a welcome change from Tibet's tedious recitations. No Renaissance music, no rhythm, just voices floating weight-less in space.

The single I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000) contains the 22-minute I Have a Special Plan for This World and the 19-minute Excerpts from Bungalow Tapes, and, again, seems to long for the dark-ambient phase of Current 93.

Tibet summarized his career with a gigantic collage of all of the Current 93 albums, The Great In The Small (Durtro, 2001), certainly a first (albeit a grotesque one) in the history of music.

Tibet almost died in the summer of 2000 and Bright Yellow Moon (Durtro, 2001), officially a collaboration between Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, was meant to be the "soundtrack" of that experience. Stapleton's hell seems to prevail over Tibet's purgatory in expressinistic collages like Mothering Sunday (possibly the standout) while Tibet pours his heart in the lunar ballads Nichts, Butterfly Drops and Walking Like Shadow. The collaboration is most awe-inspiring in the solemn requiem Disintegrate Blur 36 Page 03 (17 minutes), but the album overflows with filler and half-baked ideas. Tibet's apocalyptic folk is a bit of a jinx: as soon as he begins strumming his guitar and uttering pretentious (and terribly banal) lyrics in his drowsy (and terribly limited) voice, you know that the fun is over.

All Dolled Up and Cats Drunk On Copper are live albums.

In A Foreign Town In A Foreign Land (Durtro, 1997) is basically the soundtrack to a novella by horror writer Thomas Ligotti and marks a return to the bleak noise of early Current 93 albums.

The 40-minute suite Ares And Telos appeared on a split album with Nurse With Wound (Durtro, 2002).

A Little Menstrual Night Music (United Durtro, 2003) is a remix of In Menstrual Night.

Halo (Durtro, 2004) is a live album.

How He Loved The Moon (Beta-Lactam Ring, 2005) was introduced as a tribute to Coil's John Balance, although it simply contains four remixes of In Menstrual Night.

The double-cd How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon (Durtro Jhana, 2005) documents live performances.

Judas As Black Moth (Castle, 2005) is a double-disc anthology of the "chamber" decade 1995-2004.

The first truly serious album by Current 93 since 2000, Black Ships Ate The Sky (Durtro, 2006) is built around eight versions of Charles Wesley's hymn Idumea (1763), each delivered by a different singer (Cosey Fanni Tutti, Will Oldham, Antony, Shirley Collins, Marc Almond, etc). Tibet's arrangements employ guitar (Michael Cashmore, Ben Chasny), cello (John Contreras), viola (William Breeze), harp, piano (Antony), harmonium and electronic keyboards; a display of lush orchestration not witnessed since the early 1990s. Marc Almond's Idum is reminiscent of spiritual songs, Will Oldham's Idum sounds like a requiem (almost a cappella), etc. The other songs of this sprawling album introduce quite a bit of variety. The apocalyptic tone of Tibet's sermons is diluted effectively in the psychedelic crescendo of Black Ships In The Sky, in the tragic ceremonial music of This Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich (one of the few occasions in which his passion for Renaissance music paid off), and especially in the quasi-metal maelstrom of Black Ships Ate The Sky (totally inusual in his career). It swings like a ghost trapped in an intermediate dimension between the charming eden of Bind Your Tortoise Mouth and the noisy purgatory of Vauvauvau (Black Ships in their Harbours).

The EP Inerrant Rays Of Infallible Sun (Neurot, 2006 - Durtro, 2006) is a split with stoner-metal group Om.

Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain (Dutro, 2009) represented a sudden incursion into rock music by a musician who had rarely displayed any appreciation for the history of the genre. Flanked by an army of collaborators (Steve Stapleton, Michael Cashmore, James Blackshaw, Rickie Lee Jones, Andrew W.K. Chavez's Matt Sweeney, harpist Baby Dee), Tibet metamorphed into a rocker. The influence of Black Ship Ate The Sky is evident on the thundering eight-minute Invocation Of Almost the ten-minute Not Because The Fox Barks, and the eight-minute On Docetic Mountain (although the latter merely replaced Renaissance music with heavy-metal guitars but retained the tedious recitation of Of Ruine). Alas, he is no Lou Reed and no Neil Young.

Baalstorm Sing Omega (Coptic Cat, 2010), The third part of the trilogy that began with Black Ships Ate the Sky, features Eliot Bates (oud, erbane and daf), James Blackshaw (12-string, slide and electric guitars, glockenspiel and voice), John Contreras (cello), Baby Dee (piano and Hammond organ), Andrew Liles (guitar, bass and electronics), Alex Nielson (drums and percussion), and sounds like a collective meditation on religious themes. It is perhaps more important who doesn't feature on this album: Cashmore, who had been the main composer for almost 20 years. The sound is completely different from its predecessor: instead of hard rock, Current 93 returns to its pagan-folk phase, notably with the mellow acid-folk lullaby Passenger Aleph in Name and the agonizing neoclassical lied with strings I Dreamt I Was Aeon. His stream of consciousness is rarely interesting. Moderate exceptions are the more theatrical pieces, such as December 1971, I Dance Narcoleptic (with fairground organ, circus drums, thunder and found voices), and especially Baalstorm! Baalstorm!.

Haunted Waves Moving Graves (2010) contains two childish sound collages: the 37-minute She Is Naked Like The Water and the 34-minute The Sound Of The Storm Was Spears. Self-parody?

His passion for ancient heretic Christian mythology permeated Honeysuckle Aeons (Coptic Cat, 2011), a skeletal work a` la Soft Black Stars that, unfortunately, focused mostly on Tibet's rants and not enough on the (more intriguing) accompaniment of theremin (Armen Ra) and piano/organ (Baby Dee). Eliot Bates plays oud, bendir and erbane in Cuckoo and Lily. Michael Cashmore and Steven Stapleton were sorely missed. His singing is a poor imitation of Comus' vocalist Roger Wootton, and his spoken vocals are so overtly melodramatic to sound like self-parody.

Hypnagogue (2013) and My Name Is Nearly All That's Left (2014) are spoken-word albums.

I Am the Last of All the Field That Fell - A Channel double (Spheres, 2014) featured These New Puritans' Jack Barnett on organ, James Blackshaw on bass, Ossian Brown on hurdy-gurdy, Nick Cave and Antony on vocals, Dutch classical pianist Reinier van Houdt on piano, Tony McPhee on guitar, Comus' Jon Seagroatt on bass clarinet and flute, Carl Stokes on percussion, John Zorn on saxophone, etc. Rarely as such an assortment of talents been wasted for the sake of turning into music such rambling and monotonous recitation (not really singing). At times, the awkward mix of instrumental accompaniment is so little cohesive to suspect that it was recorded in different places at different times. The Invisible Church has the quality of a late-night jazz lounge and I Remember The Berlin Boys has the marching flavor of a smoky German cabaret of the 1920s. The nine-minute Those Flowers Grew pares the crescendo of his declamation with martial piano, drumming tension, distorted guitar, dissonant saxophone. One wishes that Tibet would shut up so we could focus oin the female backing vocals, anemic piano and guitar feedback of Kings And Things, or on the piano work of the bare With The Dromedaries, or on the contrast between pastoral flute and gargantuan guitar in The Heart Full Of Eyes. The eight-minute And Onto PickNickMagick, designed as a harrowing kammerspiel, is the worst offender, with little piano and guitar to justify the endless narration. Even Nick Cave's recitation in I Could Not Shift the Shadow gets in the way of a subdued piano and saxophone duet. When Antony Hegarty intones the Renaissance-style piano madrigal Mourned Winter Then, it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Tibet returned to the dark-ambient style of old Current 93 albums when he released an anthology of horror stories and composed a sort of soundtrack for it: The Moons at Your Door (2015) and then The Stars on Their Horsies (2018) are sound collages that wed musique concrete and ambient music.

Alasdair Roberts (Appendix Out), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) Michael York (bagpipes, whistle, duduk, bells), Andrew Liles (electric guitar and electronics), Reinier Van Houdt (electric piano, synth and bass), Rita Knuistingh Neven (piano and organ) and Aloma Ruiz Boada (violin) helped Tibet to shape The Light Is Leaving Us All (The Spheres, 2018), a collection of simple songs of pagan folk, some inspired by medieval dances (The Policeman Is Dead) and some by Celtic folk (The Kettle's On). In order to enjoy the hypnotic tinkling of xylophone of 30 Red Houses, we have to tolerate an endless amount of silly music. As usual, there is too much recitation and too little music.

Mirror Emperor (2018) was a collaboration with Zu.

Tibet remixed some of Current 93 music to create the soundtrack to one of his art installations, Invocations of Almost (2019), another venture into dark ambient music.