Death In June

We're going down in history…

An ordinary afternoon in the bedroom of a teenage punk, in the house of a far-left family, in a small town in central Italy. My father walks in without knocking at the worst possible moment, right on the ill-omened notes of the second-to-last track of that record with a totenkopf on the cover. No scene, though: he just asks me "why are you listening to the Nazi anthem" and then withdraws, more puzzled than scandalized, without waiting for an answer I wouldn't have known how to give. On that occasion I realized not so much that I wasn't free, but how much responsibility and awareness are needed to exercise certain freedoms.

Raise your hand if, especially at a certain age, you haven't felt drawn to certain clandestine readings. In that foul jumble where unbridled libertinism, radical science fiction, French sociology and occult-esoteric shallowness can and must stir together, right-wing authors inevitably hold pride of place: tomes from obscure publishers, often tracked down by sheer luck, to be hidden away for private pleasure or flaunted to shock others. A contradictory mess that is divine (or rather, infernal) nectar in the years of restless maturing, best paired with a deathly side dish of ear-scything industrial symphonies and porn-horror films with conceptual pretensions unsupported by adequate budgets. Far from merely tickling our morbid side, peering into the abyss and confronting the unacceptable is above all a way of testing one's own moral limits and, in doing so, becoming immune to any harmful temptation.

Si parva licet, I don't imagine there's too much distance between the little sketch of adolescent naivety described at the start and the trajectory of Douglas Pearce: he too was a bedroom punk, only with history books in precious bindings standing in for posters, and stark runes in place of circled "A"s. He was never a provocateur, this incurable romantic afflicted with anachronism, obsessed with the fate of a West already in decline rather than with any desire to stir up its ruins. In that decadent, antimodern misanthropy - more tender than threatening - is reflected a human archetype impossible to resist: that of the eternal loser, irredeemably out of place, alone against everyone, always and forever. A loser who can become a hero when, in his rapt meditations, he agonizes over atoning for the suffering of humankind.

And in 1987 he truly was left alone. First Tony Wakeford departed, soon to helm the Sol Invictus project, then Patrick Leagas, in charge of the electronic side. The former, it's said, over disagreements more political than musical, the latter because he was shaken by that cursed concert two years earlier in Bologna, where an outraged audience member confronted them bluntly. He was left alone, but old and new trusted friends rallied to his side - the kind you can call in the dead of night if you wake up next to a corpse: Rose McDowall (Strawberry Switchblade), Ian Read (Fire+Ice), a John Balance at the peak of his career (just a few months earlier Coil had released their supreme masterpiece), and above all David Tibet. It's precisely the Current 93 leader who proves to be the key figure of this new chapter, infusing Pearce's historical-militaristic visions with heavy doses of Thelemic magic à la Aleister Crowley. Not that someone like Douglas needs much backup: few other musicians have managed to be so intense and self-sufficient using nothing but their own guitar and voice.

Calling "Brown Book" the absolute manifesto of neofolk feels like an understatement: these eleven tracks house the most complete realization of that "authentically European music" Pearce has been pursuing ever since founding New European Recordings. It's the disarming but not disarmed portrait of a continent in ruins, long before Laibach delivered its autopsy report, a contemplation of the rubble and from within the rubble. The decadence the author condemns is one of values, not morals, and the result is a tearless lament rather than a fiery tirade, drawing on a set of references running from Spengler to, of all people, his beloved Mishima.

Pearce's voice is drained of life, seeming to echo from another era, resigned yet full of dignity in its awareness of having no one left to speak to. The image is that of a man holed up in a bunker while civilization is razed to the ground outside, a Japanese ghost soldier still nailed to a position no emperor requires him to hold, since there's no emperor left. The only word to describe this state of mind, both individual and collective, is the name of Pearce's very first band: Crisis.

It would be too easy to sum up the scope of the work by stopping at the cover and the title, eloquent as they are, even frightening: there's much more, both before and beyond the Third Reich, feeding this torn cry of pain. It's true, though, that the infamous Night of the Long Knives remains Douglas's favourite allegory - a Viscontian homosexual capable of facing a firing squad while sipping red wine (blood), never self-indulgent, not in his most overwrought metaphors nor in his most funereal samples. In his own personal exhibition of atrocities, the brown shirts of the SA merge with the Pasolinian circle of shit, a shipwreck "neutered and muddy" in which to seek one's own redemption by staring into the eyes of a world now adrift.

It's hard to imagine a more chilling prologue than "Heilige Tod" (a black-mass opening worthy of Anton LaVey dropped into a German nursery rhyme invoking the "holy death" of the title, a vicious Weimar Mitteleuropa somewhere between Weill and Fassbinder), before "Touch Defiles" swoops down from the sky like a valkyrie and drags you by the feet, shattering your bones: a line like "But we desecrate at a touch/ And touch defiles" is a dead body falling from Eden and plunging into the black pit of History ("This war of emotion/ The fate of our age"). The coldness with which Douglas spits out words like "true deceit", "betrayed", "blame" sends shivers down the spine, but how else could one define an age "purged of purity"? All of it cradled in a Franciscan-like folk tune straight out of Campo Hobbit, though threatened by bestial screams.

Now that the coordinates have been laid out, one can venture into the ordeal: "Fear is a token", apparently, and "Hail! The White Grain" lays bare its substance amid solemn tolling of tubular bells. Like a Saint Sebastian in combat fatigues, Pearce immerses himself in his tormented imagery somewhere between Genet and Bataille, arriving at the bleakest of equations: "This life, this pain".

The picture leaves no way out, but self-pity gives way to a comforting languor worthy of a fallen nobleman: introduced by a majestic military fanfare, "Runes And Men" turns the need for relief into a powerful Wotanist hymn against the Present, steeped in nostalgia for golden ages never actually lived ("Then my loneliness closes in/ So I drink a German wine/ And drift in dreams of other lives/ And greater times"), and the urge to escape is so strong it doesn't shy away from a kiss on the mouth of Death itself ("To die now would be perfection").

He comes back to himself in the industrial folk of "To Drown A Rose", resuming his relentless assault on his contemporaries ("Decay of belief/ And the highest doubts"), not without a trace of acid venom ("Like a crystal tear/ I wait to betray/ The lie across the sea/ My hate is love to me"). Remarkable is the fracture between the innocent purity of the "drowned rose" embodied by the lovely McDowall and the monochrome chanting of the beast Pearce, in an art that feeds, above all, on contrast.

And the singer's ambiguity triumphs in the torrential narrative of "Red Dog, Black Dog", perhaps a collage of childhood memories (his mother used to amuse herself with her son over an ouija board), perhaps a political parable, laid over a spectral carpet of damned voices. In nuce, one can already glimpse the spoken-word experiments later canonized in his collaboration with Boyd Rice.

The second side makes its way through a concentric wail of orphans, even though the Zyklon-B-scented Exterminating Angel of "The Fog Of The World" would rather "be the one who makes mothers cry". It's the only moment where Douglas sharpens a genuine sadism and seems to positively relish it, though it's hard not to detect a sarcastic smirk beneath so much cruelty.

The moment is ripe to unleash the fearsome guests: Balance, in the hammering chaos of "We Are The Lust" (which anticipates certain brutalities of Godflesh); Tibet, amid the Carpenter-esque synthesizers of "Punishment Initiation"; Read, on the already-mentioned title track, a slowed-down a cappella version of the "Horst Wessel Song", the hooked-cross anthem par excellence. The sequence is telling: the first track unleashes the ravenous hounds of hell ("We are the lust that comes from nothing"), the second pushes their hideous depravity to its extreme consequences ("This sleepless night's torture/ We pray for its ending/ We push for the slaughter/ Of a broken faith missing/ Of a passing love dying"), the third strikes them down, impaling them on a pyre of history books, the only flame capable of quelling their reckless fire.

After so much noise, closing with a brief elegy for voice and acoustic guitar is a masterstroke worthy of a great showman, especially when the song is titled "Burn Again" and contains lines such as "Dignity and solitude/ The gain of my fortitude/ The strength of my body/ Is the strength of my mind", finally hinting at peace after so much torment. The closing lines, a farewell from a speeding train with dry eyes but a swelling chest, remain among the most moving ever heard: "These dreams I worship/ And nightmares I love/ This 'together' that lasts for never/ This farewell coloured blood love".

In 2007, to mark the twentieth anniversary, Pearce allowed himself a rare bout of self-celebration with a lavish double-CD reissue packaged in solid marble (!). The album is still banned in Germany, where Douglas remains "persona non grata": reckoning with certain ghosts, after all, isn't for everyone.

A work of terrifying intensity in its spasmodic yearning for Beauty, "Brown Book" is a bitter chalice to be sipped in the smallest of doses, to indulge in the murky pleasure of the forbidden and, why not, exercise the most perilous of our freedoms: that of looking Evil in the face.

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16/06/2019