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.