Current 93

For thirty years, Current 93 have been dominated by the eccentric and mysterious figure of David Tibet, a sort of charismatic leader of the entire esoteric-industrial scene that he himself played a decisive role in creating. Tibet took his first steps in the entourage of Nurse With Wound and Psychic Tv, thereby gaining a fair familiarity with industrial music (the more electronic and experimental strand of it), even though he was never technically a musician of great skill (something he himself has always admitted), as indeed hardly anyone was in that particular musical field. Drawing inspiration from the deranged philosophical-esoteric theories of the guru Aleister Crowley and his rituals of sex magic, Tibet founded Current 93 in 1982 ("The 93rd Current", from Crowley's delirious doctrines), with the help - on the early records, at least - of Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound), John Balance (Psychic Tv, Coil), Fritz Haaman (23 Skidoo), John Murphy and Nick Rogers.

Current 93 signed straight away to a small Belgian label, Layla (a subsidiary of Les Disques Du Crepuscule, founded and run by the intrepid Mark Monin), which specialised in industrial music (over its five years of activity, from 1984 to 1989, its catalogue included the major names of the genre). They made their recorded debut in January 1984 with the EP "Lashtal", a solid effort but still just a prelude to what was to come immediately afterwards (the EP was later included on the first CD reissue of "Nature Unveiled", in 1992).

That same year, in fact, the group's first full-length finally saw the light of day: "Nature Unveiled". Even the striking cover, created by Babs Santini and depicting the body of Christ on the cross (the same image is reproduced on the back, though here the Redeemer's body is smeared with blood dripping from above), gives a fairly precise idea of what the record contains musically.

There are two nineteen-minute suites, one per side. The first, "Ach Golgotha (Maldoror Is Dead)", is the more shocking of the two. The Byzantine liturgical chants heard at the start are gradually crumbled away into a magma of horrifying electronic textures, funereal piano tolls, and reverberated, looped voices. Halfway through the track, this whole sonic magma is buried beneath a thick blanket of screeching dissonance. Tibet's voice (a "singer" with a genuinely original and imaginative timbre), initially in an almost normal register, gradually takes on a possessed quality, obsessively repeating the phrase "Maldoror Is Dead" throughout the piece. Only at the very end does he intone a kind of childlike nursery rhyme, which nonetheless immediately plunges back into Dantean infernos.

"The Mystical Body Of Christ In Chorazaim (The Great In The Small)" is the other electronic "black mass", less monolithic than the first. The opening is almost "reassuring": a Gregorian chant flows into a dark symphonic passage (which is nothing more than an electronic loop, repeated until the end). A voice recites a litany against a backdrop of Gregorian chants, all carried along by hymns and magnetic tapes manipulated in Stockhausen fashion. Leaden gurgles and other nasty effects lead to a deafening finale that then dies away, in the last two minutes, into nothingness.

Heaven and hell blur together on this great album, which remains a landmark for all magical-esoteric music (not just the industrial strand, then). One curious detail: Annie Anxiety of Crass, founders of the anarcho-punk movement, took part in the recording sessions, confirming that the political roots of the industrial movement are far more heterogeneous and contradictory than is usually assumed.

To find, musically speaking, something comparable to the early Current 93, one might look at what Diamanda Galas was doing in those same years, particularly the "Panoptikon" project. Tibet stated years ago that one of the composers who inspired him most was Krzysztof Penderecki, but his points of reference range from deviant, ancestral folk to Amon Duul and traditional Tibetan music. Penderecki's threnodies are relevant only up to a point, at least on "Nature Unveiled": what comes through more strongly is the barbaric, iconoclastic electronics of Iannis Xenakis and Gordon Mumma.

The strong critical reception spurred Tibet, still backed by Stapleton, Murphy, Balance and Rogers, to make another masterpiece the following year along the same lines as the debut: "Dogs, Blood, Rising" (Layla, 1984), if anything even more savage and extreme (many consider it their masterpiece). But already from the second half of the Eighties, with albums like "Imperium" (Maldoror, 1986) and everything that followed, Tibet turned his attention toward forms of druidic, deviant folk, subtly sinister and perverse. In truth, folk influences had always been present on their records, only concealed (if not buried) under layers of dissonant electronics and possessed-sounding vocals. Their famous double album "Thunder Perfect Mind" (Durtro, 1992) would thus sound like a record by some post-industrial Incredible String Band. Tibet was thus able to pay tribute to the idols of his youth, namely the ISB, Pearls Before Swine and Forest. It's no coincidence that the historic (and, at the time, largely forgotten) folksinger Shirley Collins actively took part in that double album.

In retrospect, "Nature Unveiled" and the whole first, truly industrial phase of Current 93 must be considered of primary importance to the genre, since they carefully avoided the worst "darkish" and dancefloor-friendly clichés of the many similar bands of the era (acts that preached one thing and practiced quite another, like the dance turns taken by Spk or Cabaret Voltaire). The early Current 93 were truly an avant-garde electronic music ensemble. Today they are rightly regarded as classics.

For those who don't own the original vinyl on Layla, Durtro reissued it, properly remastered, on both Lp and CD in 2008 (distributed in Italy by Goodfellas).

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02/10/2011