Surface Tension
On Derek Southall's Blackwater Recalled - Four Years After (1969) *

And, severance: a dreadful U,
carved from a block of night. Flicker
and swim of country bonfire light,
and past that moving on the face
of the waters. From underneath,

the bleeding. What does this ice-lid
scatter in the fields? Time becomes
the strata resisting footsteps,
the pulse of a camera shutter.
My homes echo with ripples, strokes;

crack with the black puncture of grief.


*This painting, which can be viewed at the Herbert Gallery in Southall's home-town of Coventry, was a reaction to the death of his brother in 1965, who drowned in a frozen lake at Blackwater in Hampshire, my family's home county.

26. Dissolution

Published in Plan B #45, May 2009. Thanks to Lauren Strain, for the editing, and David Tibet for the fact correction.

Current 93
Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain (Coptic Cat)

"Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience" - Frank Kermode, The Sense Of An Ending: Studies In The Theory Of Fiction

David Tibet, an autodidact prophet in the tradition of Gerrard Winstanley and John Lydon, has been preaching apocalypse for over 25 years. But no longer is he a voice crying in the wilderness: every day, the air now tingles with anxiety – global recession, energy crises, looming environmental disaster. Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain can be seen as a return to the matter of the first, recently reissued Current 93 recordings, whose ravaged soundscapes, a reaction to the Babylon of Thatcherite Britain, seem increasingly pertinent.

Aleph... is probably Tibet's most ambitious project since 1993's The Inmost Light trilogy: an eschatological rock-opera of sorts, acted out in Tibet's own bewildering, syncretic cosmology, the frequent incomprehensibility of which matters no more than it did for Blue Öyster Cult on Imaginos. Its theme - which, as far as I can tell, is that of the war of opposites: flesh and spirit, Rome and Jerusalem, Samael and Monad - isn't that important, except as a justification for Tibet to deliver some of the most overwrought, fire-and-brimstone performances in Current 93's history. Those who accuse him of being campy and OTT will find plenty of fuel here: when he draws the word 'murderer' out over James Blackshaw's Early Music flourishes on 'Poppyskins', or whispers that "my teeth are possessed by demons" - snarls of guitar like lightning in the backdrop - he seems possessed of both utter sincerity and an awareness of how ludicrous he sounds - a Gnostic Vincent Price, rolling his 'R's in his best Abiezer Coppe impression.

The (admittedly impressive) list of players gathered on this album is also unimportant. Except for Alex Neilson's supportive, malleable percussion - which occasionally resembles the eternal propulsion of OM's Chris Hakius - and Blackshaw's guitar filigrees, the ensemble is united in support of Tibet's benevolent demagoguery. In what is largely a continuation and refinement of the direction of 2006's Black Ships Ate The Sky, grinding rock sits alongside becalmed folk. Even the peaks of Tibet's sermonising aggression are balanced out by plateaus of slowly-building tension girded with strings and organ. '26 April 2007' is a narcotic glide shot through with coronae of fuzz; the voices - supplied by Pantaleimon's Andria Degens and Baby Dee, among others - drift like EVP. 'Not Because The Fox Barks' and 'As Real As Rainbows', are frighteningly intense: the former verges on metal, Tibet ventriloquising the final tribulation amid vast electric slabs - his incantations call to mind Ozzy narrating the end of Clash of the Titans. And, after the extinction of Antichrist comes the advent of paradise in the form of a stately guitar and piano. When 'As Real...' drops into a maelstrom of glitch, organ and piano - Sasha Grey multitracked over the top - it's as moving as anything on Sleep Has His House, still C93's peak.

"The deserts will be filled/With the comas of stars": words resonant with the promise of the millenarians who captivated England 360 years ago - that another world is possible, here and now.

"I live in increasing awareness that a Love will come suddenly who will finally tear our skies apart," Tibet wrote in the sleeve notes to Black Ships.... Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the most brilliant, preposterous warning yet of its imminent arrival; a vital reminder that the end, if we choose, will also be the triumph of love.

25. Caroline Weeks

Originally published in Plan B #44, April 2009.

A classical figure, misted as if the camera had caught something emanating from a pre-Raphaelite otherworld. Compare, perhaps, with a photograph of the bisexual American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay: the same classic-Hollywood poise, the same melancholy aura. She seems, though, to resist this framing as ethereal siren. She’s nothing if not real.

Caroline Weeks’ debut, Songs For Edna – its lyrics transposed from Millay’s exquisite, haunting poetry – has the feel of a record from a time-slip, an unplaceable artefact. The atmosphere of records by the likes of Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs (Weeks is a fan of both), or Judee Sill, pervades: at once otherworldly and unerringly close, as if “the listener will… feel like I am singing in the same room as them”, cutting surgically to the heart of life. Her unaffected, direct vocal belies the strangeness of the act: over skeletal fingerpicking she reconstitutes the voice of a woman nearly 60 years dead – beautifully. “I was looking through a dusty old book of American poetry and I came across the sonnet ‘I Shall Go Back’, as I read out loud – the words danced off the page into song. Edna's poems struck a chord, deeply resonating with me on a very personal level”. It’s precisely that sense of uncanniness – the revenant past’s ability to shake us to the core – that Songs For Edna captures.

Weeks is very familiar with this sense of connection to the bygone. Her own musical background goes back some generations. “My great-grandad played in a brass-band where every musician was a member of the Weeks family… My grandma Gladys Weeks, who has sadly passed away now, had the most incredible voice, a very high-pitched warble. At a young age, sitting on my grandad's knee I would be mesmerised. I realised then that singing was something special.” Her childhood home was full of music: “my Dad would sing in choirs and listen to Leonard Cohen, my Mum sings around the house non-stop – mostly Carpenters and Joni Mitchell songs. I was always encouraged to sing, to sing from my heart, to sing for pleasure, in quite a spiritual way."

At the heart of folk-song is a dialectic between the experience of the singer, and the singer’s possession by the song. In this, poetry, with its penetrating focus on language, proves the perfect source. “There is a blank sound-canvas, I can colour the words, playing around with the rhythm, harmony and tone… the poems feel their way into music.” Millay is a marginal figure even within histories of American poetry, and the obscurity of source was part of the attraction: “The fact that she is fairly unknown makes her more attractive, or special in some way, like being let in on a secret.” This performative intimacy comes over in her live performances, which often includes “dance, choral pieces… tape recorders hidden under chairs and behind curtains.”

Solo recording is only one branch of the work she has been involved in around her hometown of Brighton, stretching from membership of the live incarnation of Bat For Lashes to “an all-female Bulgarian choir”. Her ex-membership of the experimental folk group Hamilton Yarns perhaps offers a background to her own aesthetic – a kind of futuristic archaism, appropriate to a landscape containing both the modernist incubator of Bexhill and the South Downs’ ancient beauty. “I feel that there are so many beautiful words in the world that have been lost and forgotten…there needs to be a renaissance, a revival of the past. I think we human beings need to slow down and appreciate what has come before us."

Begin here.