Current 93

Current 93 performing on May 19, 2007

Current 93 is a British music project founded in 1982 by David Tibet (birth name: David Michael Bunting). He received the name "Tibet" from his companion at the time, Genesis P-Orridge, because of his interest in Tibet and ancient Tibetan . The band name is based on the numerical value according to gematrical calculation of the words Thelema and Agape , which is also pronounced in thelemic circles as "93er Strom" or "Current 93".

Participating musicians

Prior to the founding of Current 93, Tibet had been active on Psychic TV and 23 Skidoo , both of which had roots in the early industrial movement. After the release of the LP LAShTAL he played two concerts under the name Dogs Blood Order, the songs of which are on the later published Current 93 album Dogs Blood Order .

Many different musicians participate in Current 93, but David Tibet is the only constant line-up in the group. Of the other contributors, Steven Stapleton from Nurse With Wound should be mentioned first, who is featured on almost every album. The second constant has been guitarist and pianist Michael Cashmore (formerly Nature and Organization ), who composes a large part of the music for Current 93 , since the early 1990s . Steve Ignorant and Little Annie (both including Crass ), up to and including Thunder Perfect Mind Douglas Pearce ( Crisis , Death in June ), John Balance ( Coil ), Boyd Rice , Tony Wakeford ( Sol Invictus ) also worked on the band's earlier recordings. , Björk , Nick Cave , Joolie Wood and Rose McDowall with. In recent years there have been a. the folk singer Shirley Collins , Christoph Heemann ( Hirsche Not Aufs Sofa ), Tibet's wife Andria Degens , the author Thomas Ligotti , Antony Hegarty ( Antony and the Johnsons ), Will Oldham , Baby Dee , Simon Finn , Marc Almond , Andrew WK , Om , Sasha Gray and Keith Wood ( Hush Arbors ) added.

style

Current 93 could never be tied to a certain style or a certain genre, the sound of the recordings often changed with the respective musicians with whom Tibet decided to work. Nevertheless, certain phases can be identified with specific stylistic and content-related focuses. Especially the soundscape -like compositions of the early 1980s are often very harsh and atonal and partly based on collagen from Noise - loops , sampled Gregorian monk chants and distorted screams. Thus, the early Current 93 are also close to industrial music. LAShTAL and Nature Unveiled can be seen as groundbreaking for the ritual environment. Tibet itself was rather critical of the categorization as an industrial band and emphasized, among other things. a. because of the special length of many pieces, a proximity to Krautrock . Thematically, this early phase is very much influenced by occult themes that were primarily influenced by Aleister Crowley's works. The Maldoror fabric by the French Decadénce author Comte de Lautréamont was another focal point at the time .

With the album Dawn , Tibet noticed that he had distanced himself from what he believed to be the most important thing, the centrality of emotion, the conveyance of one's own emotions; he himself thought it was “horrible: too simple, too simple”, and his personal taste in music also changed. Also influenced by the music of Shirley Collins , Tibet returned to what moved it, namely nursery rhymes and folk . With Swastikas for Noddy , Tibet completely detached itself from the background noise of its industrial past. At the end of the 1980s, Tibet increasingly took up themes of gnosis , Hinduism and Buddhism , which he linked more and more with a positive view of Christian healing doctrine in the further course of the band's history ; important albums of this phase are Imperium , Swastikas for Noddy and Earth Covers Earth (on which Tibet wrote only a few texts and instead resorted to poems, e.g. by John Hall ). At that time, singing and lyrics were generally more important. Musically, Current 93 turned more and more to a melodic soundscape based on acoustic guitars, which is why the band was quickly regarded as a pioneer of neofolk , and later even of weird folk . Above all, the 1992 album Thunder Perfect Mind is seen by many as a complete transition to folk and is also considered one of the most important albums by Current 93. From the second half of the 1990s, an even bigger phase followed around Soft Black Stars and Sleep Has His House Turning away from the esoteric focus of the early work in favor of introspective, self-analytical texts. During this time, Tibet also temporarily dropped its pseudonym and only used his two first names, and the spelling Current Ninety Three was also used for a while.

Since the 2006 album Black Ships Ate the Sky , Current 93 seem to strive for something like a synthesis of many previous focuses, which is reflected in the re-release and revision of earlier albums in addition to the song lyrics. The concept album is based on a vision of Tibet "that the Antichrist would come in black ships that will eat up the sky". The over and over repeated song Idumæa , which was written by Charles Wesley , is intended to remind that the current period will be followed by the judgment; However, Tibet emphasizes that it does not want to proselytize. From Black Ships Ate the Sky and the successors Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain and Baalstorm, Sing Omega was a kind of trilogy, but from Tibet originally conceived as a "separate albums [...], which revealed itself sense," and do not realize as a trilogy written as the Inmost Light trilogy. Rock elements are increasingly found on the most recent recordings , the album Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain , released in 2009, is clearly inspired by Krautrock , Psychedelic Rock and Metal and differs significantly from its predecessor in its basic mood due to the more economical use of acoustic instruments. You can also find references to typical concept albums from the 1970s, the entire text is printed in the booklet as a unit and peppered with elements of Coptic Christianity, which is currently of particular interest to Tibet. The texts of this trilogy have "after a period of introspection have become a completely unique mixture of the autobiographical and the cosmic that is often difficult to penetrate in terms of its metaphor and imagery [...]"; Tibet describes the history of the albums as "theological in the broadest sense of the word," as "stories of progression from birth to death, from mistakes to salvation," linked to its own life. On Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain , among other things, the fall of Lucifer into hell , the birth of the first man and the coming of Jesus Christ as the second Adam , connected with the story of Cain and with it "the [...] onset of murder into the world". With the descent of man from Adam, this is the story of all people, according to Tibet:

“So when I say, 'I am Aleph , I am Adam,' it is that we can all say that. Perhaps a woman would say, 'I am Eve', but she too could say, 'I am Adam'. This is the story of all of us. We are all Adam, we are all born into it. We were created, we are descended from Adam, and we share his experiences. So what I do is talk about myself, but also about how we all exist. "

- David Tibet : Interview in the BLACK online magazine

Publications (selection)

LAShTAL 12 "(1983)
Nature Unveiled (1984)
Dogs Blood Rising (1984)
Live at Bar Maldoror (1985)
In Menstrual Night (1986)
Dawn (1987)
Crowleymass (with HÖH) (1987)
Empire (1987)
Swastikas for Noddy (1988)
Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow (1988)
Earth Covers Earth (1988)
Looney Runes (1990)
Horsey (Split with Nurse with Wound, Sol Invictus) (3 Lp Box 1991)
Iceland (with HÖH) (1991)
As the World Disappears (live) (1991)
Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)
Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre (1994)
The Fire of the Mind (1994)
Tamlin (1994)
Where the Long Shadows Fall (1995)
All the Pretty Little Horses (1996)
The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (1996)
In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land (1997)
Horsey (1997)
Soft Black Stars (1998)
Calling For Vanished Faces (1999)
All Dolled Up Like Christ (live) (1999)
Sleep Has His House (2000)
Faust (2000)
Cats Drunk on Copper (live) (2001)
Music for the Horse Hospital (2002)
The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion (2003)
Halo (2003)
666-SickSickSick (2004)
How He Loved the Moon (Moonsongs for Jhonn Balance) (2005)
Black Ships Ate the Sky (2006)
Black Ships Eat the Sky (alternative version of the simultaneous album in 1000 copies, 2006)
Birdsong in the Empire - Live in Toronto 2005 (2007)
Birth Canal Blues (EP, 2008)
Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain (2009)
Monohallucinatory Mountain (limited monophonic version of the simultaneous album, 2009)
Baalstorm, Sing Omega (2010)
Honeysuckle Aeons (2011)
And When Rome Falls (2012)
I Am The Last Of All The Field That Fell (A Channel) (2014)
The Light Is Leaving Us All (2018)

literature

David Keenan: England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground . New edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-946719-67-9
Jordan Krall (Ed.): Mighty in Sorrow: A Tribute to David Tibet & Current 93 . Dynatox Ministries International 2014. ISBN 978-0-615-99004-0
Ruth Bayer: Skipping To Armageddon. Photographs of Current 93 and Friends . Strange Attractor Press 2016. ISBN 978-1-907222-45-0

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Gary Parsons: INTERVIEW WITH DAVID TIBET OF CURRENT 93 ( Memento of April 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).

↑ ^a ^b ^c David Keenan: Current 93 ( Memento of the original from June 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: The Wire , No. 163, September 1997. @1@ 2

^ Alan K .: Noddy talks .

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f CURRENT 93 - Interview .

↑ Brandon Stosuy: Current 93 .

[quiette-1] Gary Parsons: INTERVIEW WITH DAVID TIBET OF CURRENT 93 ( Memento of April 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).