Sypha presents … Funeral Music For Us All: A Current 93 Day *

It was at Newcastle that Tibet discovered the then recently born industrial music scene, when one of his friends exposed him to Throbbing Gristle, namely the song “Dead on Arrival.” By 1980, along with the music of Throbbing Gristle, Tibet was also listening to Leonard Cohen, Rush, Gregorian Chant music, and, more importantly, Whitehouse and Nurse With Wound, two bands he was pen pals with (the first Nurse With Wound album he got was their fourth one, Insect and Individual Silence, whereas the first Whitehouse album he purchased was Total Sex, which was that group‘s second record). Soon he was collecting any album he could get his hands on from alternative record labels like Industrial Records, United Dairies, and the Come Organisation.
In 1981, Tibet left Newcastle and moved to a squat in London, with a vague idea of studying Tibetan. He began writing to John Balance (who at the time was writing a magazine named Stabmental: this was his pre-Coil days) and the two became friends. Tibet mentioned plans to start his own group, an extreme electronic outfit that would combine the noise of a Whitehouse and a Throbbing Gristle with occult esoterica. He also applied to join the Typhonian O.T.O., a magical organization headed by one of Aleister Crowley’s final students, Kenneth Grant, whose books Tibet was a fan of at the time.

In 1982, David Tibet met Genesis P-Orridge, who proceeded to re-name him “David Tibet” (on account of his fascination with Tibetan Buddhism). It was at this period that Tibet also got involved with Psychic TV, and began working as a music journalist for magazines such as Sounds and Flexi-Pop. After a nine month probationary period, he also joined the Typhonian O.T.O. More importantly, in 1982 he finally got around to forming his band Current 93, which at that period in time included himself, John Balance, and Fritz Haaman. They went into the studio one day and recorded a 12” album which came to be known as LAShTAL (however, the album in question wasn’t released until January 1984). The album was the most overtly occult Current 93 work, directly inspired by Nightside of Eden, the fourth book in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies series, published in 1977. In fact, Grant is even thanked in the liner notes. Today, Tibet dismisses LAShTAL as “witless shamanic posturing.” Indeed, his fascination with Crowley and the occult in general was soon to fade way. For awhile, Tibet considered changing the band name (as he got Current 93 from a Crowley term, the 93rd Current, a phrase often employed by Kenneth Grant and his followers: Tibet merely reversed the term). However, in the end he decided to stick with it.

In 1983, Tibet wrote a much celebrated article about the musical cult surrounding Aleister Crowley for the final issue of Flexi-Pop magazine, said article being entitled “Return of the Beast.” When he sent a copy of the article to Grant, Grant wrote back a letter saying that Tibet should have gotten permission from him first before writing the article. Tibet, incensed, cut his ties with the Typhonian O.T.O. Around this same time he also had a falling out with P-Orridge, John Balance, and the rest of the Psychic TV camp, and decided to strike out on his own. His interest in religion, especially eschatological religion, flared up again, and he began to spend hours at the British Library reading up about the Antichrist (it was at this time that he came across the aforementioned Antichrist in the Middle Ages book by Richard Emmerson). Tibet saw the Antichrist as a marginal figure and decided to do an album about him, in much the same way that industrial bands of the time were co-opting the image of serial killers such as Charles Manson or Peter Kurten. In 1983, Tibet also took part in the notorious Equinox musical event, playing a cover of Charles Manson’s “Cease to Exist” under the band name Dogs Blood Order. It was at this event that he first met Steven Stapleton, and the two eventually became good friends.

Towards the end of 1983, Tibet resurrected the name Current 93, despite the fact he had lost interest in Crowley, as has already been noted. He went into the studio to record his first major album, Nature Unveiled. The album’s title came from the name of the final book written by the Marquis de Sade, which was destroyed after his death (the book’s alternate title, The Days at Florbelle, ended up becoming the name of a Whitehouse track on their 1981 album Buchenwald). The first side of the album was recorded in late 1983, while side two was recorded in early 1984. The album was essentially two long tracks, one on each side of the LP: “Ach Golgotha (Maldoror is Dead)” on side one and “The Mystical Body of Christ in Chorazim (The Great in the Small)” on side two. “Maldoror is Dead” was built around a looped sample of Aleister Crowley chanting “Om” and banging on a drum. Tibet described the track to Steven Stapleton as “like a shadow thrown by a candle onto the wall.” The second track, on the other hand, was more along the lines of an apocalyptic mass. In his interview with Tape Delay, Tibet said, “I always liked the idea of a piece of music that, when the world is being destroyed, would be playing on huge speakers all over the world and it would just collapse to this final fanfare. That was my interpretation of what I would like the music to sound like if I had the choice when we all die.”

“The recorded music on this release concerns itself with the son of Perdition- caput reproborum et caput onnium malorum, id est Antichristus- and his imminent arrival on the stage in which shall be played out the conflict in the Last Times.”

-from the liner notes to the LP of Nature Unveiled

That year, Tibet released not only Nature Unveiled but also Dogs Blood Rising, many songs of which had been recorded during the Nature Unveiled sessions (such as “Christus Christus” and “Jesus Wept”). He also began doing live shows, going on a European tour with Nurse With Wound in late 1984. In those days, Current 93 live shows would often last around 15 minutes, and would involve the band playing over cassettes of Gregorian chants and traditional Japanese music being played simultaneously. During one show in Brussels, Tibet brought a metal crucifix onto the stage, which he proceeded to set on fire before smashing it on the ground and kicking it into the audience.

In 1985, Current 93 released their third album, Live at Bar Maldoror, which was not a live album at all but rather a large collage piece composed of samples from the first two Current albums, just mixed-up and reassembled by Stapleton into something new. It was released on Tibet’s own label, Mi-Mort. However, Tibet found himself slowly getting bored with creating long collages of noise and tape loops. He discovered the album Forever Changes by Love and became obsessed with it. He also began reading up on macabre nursery rhymes, the menstrual cycle, and the Moon in general. These obsessions surfaced in the 1986 album In Menstrual Night, which many Current 93 fans consider to be one of the finest of the loops-based albums put forth by the Current. In Menstrual Night also marked the first appearance of Rose McDowall doing vocals on a Current 93 album. Tibet described the album thusly at the time: “In Menstrual Night is based on nightmares, on little girl’s voices, on acid, on wondering where dreams go when they die. it should be listened to at 2:00 in the morning for optimum effect. It’s the work that I’m most happy with so far.”
In 1986, Tibet became fed up with London and moved to Nepal, but returned back after a short while. That year he recorded what he considered his first “pop” tune, the blasphemous “Happy Birthday Pigface Christus,” with guitar by Douglas Pearce. At the time, it was the most musically conventional Current 93 song yet released, and showcased Tibet’s emerging skills as a vocalist. Around the same time, though, he also did an album named Dawn, yet another apocalypse-based album containing two epic-length tape-loop based tracks, this time released on his new label, entitled Maldodor. Ashamed at his laziness (as the album was recorded in a day, and even Stapleton didn‘t want his name attached to the album), Tibet decided the time had come to move into a new musical direction.

1987 was, by all accounts, a strange year for Tibet. He moved into a flat owned by Freya Aswynn and began studying Norse mythology, runes and the Eddas. He was also doing lots of speed cut with acid at this point, which culminated in a bizarre vision of a crucified Noddy. To quote David Tibet:

“It really impressed me, as you would expect. The next day I just went mad for buying Noddy. Before I’d seen him crucified I wasn’t any more interested in him than any other kid who’s read Noddy as a child. I was taking such a huge amount of speed at the time that I had a massive amount of energy, so I just started hovering around and would come back with binliners full of anything Noddy on. Rugs, mugs, jugs, didn’t matter, bought it all, to the extent that I started wandering round London wearing a red Noddy hat with a bell on the end. Which was probably not a good move in terms of fashion… I was very keen on Noddy. For me, Noddy was the total epitome of innocent childhood. What would be the most unsuitable thing you could give to Noddy for a present? I felt probably swastikas. It then became Swastikas for Goddy on some releases because I started thinking that Noddy was- er, I was taking a lot of speed at the time- that Noddy was in fact a Gnostic icon. This was round about the same time I became interested in Punch and Judy and was seriously thinking it might be worth… I mean, I probably wasn’t well at the time mentally, but having decided that Noddy is a gnostic deity, then it’s a small step to thinking that I might as well worship Punch and Judy. Having been obsessed by Christ for so long, and since Noddy had appeared in the sky crucified, and since Christ was God, therefore Noddy was also God, so he was a Goddy. My mind started going into other ramifications- a whole puppet theology.”

By this point, many people in the British music industry had begun to wonder if Tibet was losing it. This view wasn’t changed with the release of Swastikas for Noddy in 1988 (though it was recorded around September 1987, or maybe 1986, I‘m not sure). At the time, many of England’s underground music community thought of it as a joke, declaring it to sound like Simon and Garfunkel (though it’s worth noting that Tibet had covered two Simon and Garfunkel songs a few years previously, on the final track of Dogs Blood Rising). “I thought they were all fools. They were so stuck in a world where the only thing that mattered were tape loops and 20 minute pieces of music with Manson and Crowley references, a world in which there was no humour. They thought it was a comedy record, whereas I thought it was a record with black humour in it,” Tibet stated. Released during a period in which many industrial bands were moving towards more dance-orientated music, Swastikas for Noddy was an utterly unfashionable album, and perhaps the most conventional sounding Current 93 album up to that point (it was even referred to as “the pop album” or the pop version of In Menstrual Night). Featuring covers of songs like “Since Yesterday” (Strawberry Switchblade) and “This Ain’t the Summer of Love” (Blue Oyster Cult), it also had classic original tracks like the epic “Beausoleil” and “Coal Black Smith.” While working on this album, Tibet discovered music like The Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins, which influenced the new sound.

Shortly after the completion of the Noddy album Current 93 recorded the Imperium album. My thoughts in regards to Imperium are too complex to cover in this summary. I will provide a lengthy analysis of it following the end of this summary.

In 1988, Current 93 continued moving into a folk direction. That year, the band released Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow, probably the band’s most rock-orientated album at that point. It featured songs whose lyrics were taken from the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. That same year the band did perhaps their folksiest album, Earth Covers Earth. With lyrics inspired by not only 17th century metaphysical poets (such as Henry King and John Hall) but also by films like The Wicker Man and albums like Comus’ 1971 album First Utterance, this album is perhaps most famous for its cover art: influenced by the cover of The Incredible String Band’s 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, it featured a portrait of what was at that point Current 93’s line-up: David Tibet, Tony Wakeford, John Balance, Douglas Pearce, Steven Stapleton, Rose McDowall, and so on.

Tibet spent the first half of 1989 living in Japan, where he began to get ideas for future albums. He also started a new label to replace Maldoror: Dutro, which was derived from dur.khrod, a Tibetan word for cemetery, but also symbolizing the nexus between this world and the next. Tibet planned for Dutro to release not only Current 93 albums but also albums by other fringe musicians and outsider artists. Around that same time, he became acquainted with the guitarist Michael Cashmore, who would go on to eventually replace Douglas Pearce as Current 93’s main guitarist.

The next Current 93 album was 1992’s Thunder Perfect Mind. Originally intended to be called The Tale of the Descent of Long Satan and Babylon, at the time Tibet planned for it to be the final Current 93 album, having been unhappy with everything he had recorded prior to that point and desiring to start a new project. The album was at first supposed to be a concept album, a sort of “apocalyptic Tommy.” Instead, it ended up being the first album in which Tibet found himself writing personal lyrics about not only himself but also the people around him. Besides being the most expensive Current 93 album to date, it was also their most bestselling album at that point in time. It was around this period that Tibet began studying Christian theology again, but now he began to think of it as a reality rather than viewing it simply in an academic light. A big influence on his worldview were the writings of Pascal and Kierkegaard. According to Tibet, “I felt that in the shadow of what they were saying, nothing else was important. They pointed out what I now saw as simple truths and simple facts. I felt that we’d all been judged and all found wanting. After reading them things couldn’t be the same again, everything took on a new light, so I’d look at my early material and though I’d be proud of it as experiments in sound and form, I didn’t want to be involved in anything that wasn’t specifically dealing with one’s own soul. The state of the soul became of paramount importance.” Thunder Perfect Mind was also the first Current 93 album to feature an appearance by Shirley Collins, who recorded the album’s spoken word intro. She would play a bigger part in future Current 93 releases, however.

In 1993, Tibet purchased a house in North East London. Inspired by the cat artwork of Louis Wain, who was by this point his favorite artist, Tibet began creating his own artwork, simple drawings using chalk and pastels on paper. He began immersing himself in ghost stories again, re-reading the work of writers such as MR James and Arthur Machen. The financial success of Thunder Perfect Mind enabled Tibet to begin collecting first editions of obscure supernatural fiction writers, and he even started up a new imprint in 1992 named Ghost Story Press, which began publishing deluxe limited editions of obscure ghost story collections. Sadly, I don’t own any of these as many of them are now out-of-print and extremely hard to come by (to say nothing of expensive).

1994 saw the release of a new Current 93 album, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Star, a record very much inspired by the 17th century composer William Lawes, whose music Tibet was now obsessed with. Unlike previous Current 93 albums which featured a wide variety of musicians, this album was mostly just Tibet, Cashmore and Stapleton. I would like to add here that this album features the track “The Great, Bloody And Bruised Veil of This World” which is, in my humble opinion, Current 93’s finest moment and best individual song.

In the mid 1990’s, Tibet discovered the work of Tiny Tim, who he eventually befriended, although they only met in person once, in 1995. Douglas Pearce objected with Tiny Tim’s views on homosexuality and broke off all ties with Tibet around this point. Tibet released an album of Tim’s music on his Dutro label, and though the two often talked of collaborating, it never came to be, though a few recorded telephone conversations between the two men found their way onto the Current 93 song “When the Great Satanic Glory Faded,” along with the Current 93/Nurse With Wound/Tiny Tim collaboration “Just What Do You Mean By ‘Antichrist’?” Tiny Tim died on November 30th, 1996: Tibet was the last person to speak to him on the phone. A personal disclosure: while I find myself fascinated by many of Tibet’s obsessions, I never got his attraction to Tiny Tim.

In the 1990’s, Tibet also came into contact with the American horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Tibet has stated that he considers Ligotti to be “the greatest living writer.” According to the book England’s Hidden Reverse, when Tibet first came across “The Frolic,” the opening story of Ligotti’s first collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer, he found it so disturbing he couldn’t read the rest of it. Eventually he did finish the book and became a huge fan, to the extent that he ended up sending Ligotti a stack of almost every Current 93 CD, claiming that they shared a vision and that he’d love to collaborate with him. Ligotti agreed with Tibet and the two became friends. In 1998, Dutro released a CD/book entitled In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land, with a text by Ligotti and atmospheric, instrumental music by Current 93. They did another album in 2000 entitled I Have a Special Plan For This World, with Tibet reading a text written by Ligotti, somewhat based on a story Ligotti had written entitled “The Bungalow House.” Dutro would also go on to release not only some of Ligotti’s books (such as Death Poems in 2004 and Teatro Grottesco in 2006), but also an album of his own music entitled The Unholy City in 2003. If I’m grateful to Current 93 for anything, it would be for exposing me to the writings of Thomas Ligotti more than anything else.

In 1995 and 1996, Current 93 released a complex trilogy of albums entitled “The Inmost Light Trilogy.” The key record was the second one, 1996’s All The Pretty Little Horses, which featured Nick Cave doing guest vocals on two tracks. In 1998, the band released perhaps their most minimalist and intimate record, the lovely Soft Black Stars, which was mainly just David Tibet’s vocals and Maja Elliott’s piano playing. Incidentally, the phrase “Soft Black Stars” was taken from Thomas Ligotti’s short story “Teatro Grottesco.”

The start of the new millennium was a turbulent time for David. After officially converting to Catholicism, he had to deal first with the death of his father, then a near-death experience of his own. In August of 2000, a stomach complication left him a mere two days from death. Stricken with peritonitis, Tibet had to have emergency surgery performed, where it was discovered that his appendix had gone beyond gangrenous and that he had developed blood poisoning. After the surgery, Tibet was put on morphine and wheeled back into the ward, where he soon found himself in a hallucinatory state. It was here, surrounded by other men who were gravely ill, that Tibet claims to have seen the angel of death come down to the person in the bed next to him in the form of “a shaft of decadent purple light.” As Tibet described the experience in Terrorizer magazine: “It descended as a scarlet purple bolt that came diagonally across the ward. There was no face, but I was aware that it was the angel of death. It landed next to my neighbor, disappeared, and left behind a dark grey cube. It had the nature of a black hole and was sucking in all the energy around. It was made plain to me that this was this person’s psychopomp- the guide of the dead, the entity that guides you to your judgment. This was left for the gentleman that died.”

In the year 2000 Current 93 also released a new album, Sleep Has His House, which was dedicated to the memory of Tibet’s dead father. One of the sadder and more minimalist Current 93 works, its dominant instrument is an Indian harmonium, which makes the album sound almost like something that Nico would have released in her prime.

Around 2002, Tibet became fascinated with the Biblical Coptic language. This current obsession was triggered by a reading of The Gospel of Thomas in which he came across the line “Jesus said, Lift up a stone and I am there. Split the wood and I am there.” Incidentally, this is the same passage that inspired Poppy Z. Brite to look deeper into Christianity, though I believe she first came across it in the horror film Stigmata. Those interested in learning more about David’s Coptic studies should consult the following link: http://www.copticcat.com/davids-coptic-studies.

In 2006, Current 93 released its most ambitious album to date, Black Ships Ate The Sky. Four years in the making and subtitled “A Hallucinatory Patripassianist Dream,” the texts written for the album were inspired by an intense dream Tibet had which involved black ships eating the sky in preparation for the arrival of the Antichrist. Tibet described this dream as follows: “I had a dream in which I saw black ships coming across the sky. I saw a black smudge on the extreme right of my ocular horizon, and it jumped, almost like those cartoons where you flick the pages, or when you see old film of an athlete running. It was a really disturbing motion. Eventually I realized that the smudge was made of ships, and as the dream carried on they filled up the entire horizon. Everything they passed they devoured, until all that was left was a corrupted sky. It was made clear that these ships were announcing the coming of the final Caesar, the Antichrist, which pre-empted the last scene before the second coming of Christ.”

In following dreams, Tibet began seeing geometric faces, colors, words and shapes falling into a crack in his head. These dreams also found their way into the lyrics for Black Ships Ate The Sky. One of the most notable aspects of the album is that it features nine different versions of the 1763 Methodist hymn “Idumæa (written by Charles Wesley), each which features vocals by a different artist (the hymn is sung by not only Tibet but also Marc Almond, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Baby Dee, Antony, Clodagh Simonds, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Pantaleimon, and Shirley Collins). The album was issued in a deluxe digipak packaging, with a 56 page booklet containing liner notes, lyrics, photographs, and other ephemera. It’s my opinion that Black Ships Ate The Sky is still one of Current 93’s most successful projects to date, and the stream of conscious lyrics are simply mind-boggling (my favorite lines including “I want to have lunch with the Umbrella Ladies/ I want to make love with the Umbrella Ladies”).

Since the release of Black Ships Ate The Sky Current 93 has released two more major studio albums, Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain in 2009 and Baalstorm, Sing Omega in 2010. Aleph was very rock-orientated, what with its use of electric guitar, and featured appearances by Andrew W.K. (on bass, piano, vocals, and finger bells), Sasha Grey (on vocals), and Rickie Lee Jones (also on vocals). Baalstorm, Sing Omega, which is the conclusion of the Black Ships Ate The Sky trilogy, has a sound that reminds me more of Current 93’s Inmost Light/1990’s phase, just with more experimental lyrics. It was also one of the first releases for David Tibet’s new record label, Coptic Cat, which replaced Dutro Records sometime in 2009.

One of the cool things about Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain was that it had a subscriber’s edition, in which people who subscribed to this edition of the album (and thus help fund its creation) got to have their name and picture included with a poster that came with the album. Needless to say I jumped at this opportunity to be involved, no matter how small, in the rich history of Current 93, and thus my visage may be seen in said poster. I hope this didn’t affect sales negatively in any way!

I previously mentioned how collecting Current 93 can be a daunting task due to their exhaustive discography. Indeed, even though I pretty much have all the major Current 93 studio albums on CD there are still a few I’m missing (it kind of shames me that I don’t have Swastikas For Noddy in CD format, though I do have it in MP3 format). It doesn’t help that many of Current 93’s older albums are out-of-print, though Dutro/Coptic Cat has been re-releasing many of the older albums such as Nature Unveiled, Dogs Blood Rising, Live at Bar Maldoror, In Menstrual Night, and Dawn in deluxe editions over the last few years. I really wish they’d re-release both Imperium and Swastikas For Noddy soon, which I assume are next in line!

my Current 93 CD collection

Those interested in exploring the music of Current 93 might want to check out one of their “Greatest Hits” collections first. These are good starting points. To date there have been three of these. The first one was Emblems: The Menstrual Years (Dutro, 1993). This two disk, 28 song set is compiled by both Tibet and Stapleton and covers the years between 1982 to 1992, collecting material from the Nature Unveiled, Dogs Blood Rising, Live at Bar Maldoror, In Menstrual Night, Dawn, Imperium, Swastikas For Noddy, Earth Covers Earth, Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow, Thunder Perfect Mind, and various b-sides, singles and unreleased tracks. Those interested in Current 93’s early sound might be interested in this release, though it’s hard to come by these days. A shame, as the interior artwork is quite nice. The second Current 93 retrospective is entitled Calling on Vanished Faces (Dutro, 1999). This two disk, 30 track set covers the years 1984-1999, with a greater focus on the 1990s material (though it does include “Maldoror is Dead” in its 20+ minute entirety). The easiest Current 93 retrospective to find in stores is Judas As Black Moth: Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song (Sanctuary Records, 2005). This two disk, 32 song set focuses mainly on material from the 1990s and 2000s, with only around 4-5 songs representing the 1980s period. Therefore, ideal for those more interested in the latter day Current 93 material. The CD booklet for this release features some of Tibet’s closest friends and accomplices sharing their thoughts about Current 93, so it’s a pretty nice package.

For the record, my top five favorite Current 93 albums as of June 2010:

1. Imperium

2. Black Ships Ate The Sky

3. Dogs Blood Rising

4. Soft Black Stars

5. Swastikas For Noddy

Although In Menstrual Night and All The Pretty Little Horses are also strong contenders.

David Tibet today

An Exegesis of Imperium

I would now like to talk a little bit about my all-time favorite Current 93 album, Imperium. I forget exactly when it was I first heard this album. It was probably sometime in 2003 or 2004, certainly no later than 2006 (as I mentioned it in my first book, Confusion). However, it wasn’t until 2008 that I became especially obsessed with it.