Norman Kuusik
The Mythology of Current 93 and David Tibet
The subject of this paper is the Current 93 frontman David Tibet, rather as a poet than artist as I attempt an analysis of his texts and mythology. As such, there will be less to do with Current 93's music, although I do not remove the lyrics from their original musical context. The scope of this paper is by no means absolute, entailing only a fragment of pieces of my own subjective choice and whereas a difference is made between earlier and later work, it does not cover Tibet's full chronology. In spite of these initial shortcomings, I hope this paper to give way for further discussion.
Early life & work
Born in 1960 as David Michael Bunting in the Malaysian town of Batu Gajah, Tibet spent the first 14 years of his life in the region, and this early experience of mixed cultures and religions he admits and open and deep influence himself:
"I was in Malaysia for about 14 years," he recalls. "I loved it. My childhood in Malaysia was practically perfect and I really miss it a lot. I dream about it a lot, it echoes in my soul always. It reverberates, and as you get older and you lie in bed and you think, the rain sounds like it's the monsoon coming. I was always interested in religion so I used to spend a lot of time in the temples, Buddhist temples, Taoist temples, Hindu temples, I remember all of it." (Keenan 1997)
Arriving in England in 1973, and attending a university in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne from 1978 onwards, Tibet would ultimately start creating music as a part of “the then nascent Industrial scene” joining first with Psychic TV and then forming the separate Current 93 with John Balance and Fritz Haaman. The change from this industrial/ambient Current 93 of 1980ties to the “apocalyptic folk” of the 1990ties would occur in several transitions and as “Tibet sees an obvious link between his early music and the subsequent Collins-influenced recordings” (Keenan 1997), the least of things to do is to look a few examples of the band's early material before looking onwards
The first track under the name of Current 93 was released in 1983 as a split with Nurse With a Wound named Mi-Mort. This 18 minute long ambient piece titled Maldoror est mort does in ways reflect the many future developments of Tibet's writing – firstly, the persona of Maldoror itself, taken from the French surrealist poet Comte de Lautréamont (who is already featured in the adjacent industrial scene in Nurse With Wound's Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella in 1979) that remains a recurring, though a minor, character of Current 93 (Maldoror is revisited in Maldoror is Ded Ded Ded, a track recorded of the new folk style during the Thunder Perfect Mind session, and as a separate compilation CD titled Maldoror Is Dead in 2002) and secondly, the absoluteness of death which even a supernatural creature is unable avoid. As such, Maldoror stands as the first death in Current 93's long list of obituaries. Being an instrumental track, Maldoror est mort does not elaborate the image beyond the initial title, but in a “chance meeting” some ten years later Maldoror Is Ded Ded Ded (1992) returns to the concept in all straightforwardness:
Maldoror is dead\Little brick\Buried in the earth\Maldoror is gone\Was I a man?\Was I a stone?\Maldoror is dead\Chance meetings, Maldoror\You are gone now, Maldoror\The ship that sunk, Maldoror\Dispatched by bullets, Maldoror
Perhaps one of the more influential tracks of early Current 93 is Falling Back in Fields of Rape (album Dogs Blood Rising 1984) – 15 minute looped track after the industrial fashion. Unlike other similar tracks of the time, the loops are mostly extracts of intelligible human speech, combined to create a coherent narrative. Remaining vague on specific details (“In a foreign town/ in a foreign land”), the subject matter is narrowed down on the crimes of modern wars – perhaps the image proposed is that a foreign army advancing on defenceless women and children in the final war of mankind (“In this last summer the Rapture descends...”). In the songs long list graphic violence, much is also to do with the double meaning of fields of Brassica napus and sexual abuse.
Never eating/ Bags of bones dying quietly/ Homeless/ Drinking foul water/ Sorting garbage/ With flies in heat/ Raped/ Axed/ Burned with acid/ Locked away for thirty years/ Thrown out of a helicopter/ Forced to labour endlessly/ Castrated/ Burned alive/ Killed so easily by firing squads” (10:28 – 10:48)
Like Maldoror, the field covered with rapeseed is an image lasting well into the band's work in early 90ties. The song itself undergoes a reincarnation as a short Death in June's piece in 1989 (album 93 Dead Sunwheels), an acoustic composition reusing some of the lyrics, and as a Current 93 live track thereafter. One of its later occurrences is in Nature and Organization's Bonewhiteglory (album Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude 1994), the mellow musical context almost reversing the tone of the image
The lovely coppercoloured mountain of flesh and starres./ In my hands I cup my decline as it flowers into them - /this is the rippling of the ages: our lives like rain, the small shower, the downfall, the thunderous pouring... in some greenfield of rape we lie...
Later work
Thunder Perfect Mind is perhaps the first 'classical' Current 93 albums that would define a central sound and emotion of Current for decades to come. Released in 1992, Tibet describes it as the album “I started writing about friends of mine, about how I felt about things.” Whenceforth Current 93 “became a lot purer for me.” (Keenan 1997) The title of the album comes from the poem The Thunder, Perfect Mind found in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 and direct quotations of the English translation are used in the thirteenth track Thunder Perfect Mind I, the narration ending abruptly in the middle of the line “I am war [and peace]”, thus paving a way for further culmination of tension in Hitler as Kalki (SDM). This is also perhaps the furthest Current 93 gets in to the flirtation with fascist aesthetics common for the genre. In a poem of over 130 lines and a song of over 16 minutes, Tibet proposes the idea of Hitler as the tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu who will come to end the present age of darkness and destruction known as Kali Yuga, according to the tradition of Hinduism. Although Tibet's commentary on the song has always been that “I am in no doubt: Hitler was Antichrist” (sleeve notes from DURTRO014 CD) and dedicated to his father who fought in WWII, the voice of the song is of gloating and jeering on the mortal man.
Where's your God now?/ I'll point out his varied forms to you/ One, he hangs on the end of a tree/ Two, he's nailed to the arms of this selfsame tree/ And three, he spins, he spins and soars and laughs through space/ Ah, one day the world sees/ Oh, one day the world sees/ Hitler as Kalki/ Hitler as Kalki
As said, the new direction of Thunder Perfect Mind was personality. The subject matter may have continued to be the apocalypse, but no longer would it take place in the abstract distance of time and space and rather being centred around Tibet himself. Perhaps the most direct manifestation of Tibet's new focus on his personal life is A Song For Douglas After He's Dead – a dedication to Douglas Pearce of Death in June in a satiric mingle of both Current 93s aesthetics of death and Death in June's aesthetics of totalitarianism.
There's a swastika carved, in the palm of his hand./ There's a crooked cross, that is caught in his mind./ There waits a falling sun, in his eyes./ There's the honor, of violence, on his lips./ His father waits for him, at the towers of silence./ Where they worship the fires, so long ago cringed.
This transformation is not, however, absolute and more than once Thunder Perfect Mind retains a degree of distance even if the new mode of folk music has been adopted. The latter is true for A (Sad) Sadness Song which, as if standing still in time, paints a sluggish picture of the world around in a complete state of inertness.
Where the sanddunes stretch unbroken/ And the dry wind bends and sighs/ And the geese are running harmless/ And our desires are running wild/ Then we're looking at the smoke/ That's rising from the incense/ Neither coming here nor going/ Neither heaven here nor hell/ Neither borning here nor birthing/ Neither dying here nor death
The other new aspect to come with Thunder Perfect Mind is the prevalence of Christian thought. Although religiosity has always been an inseparable part of Current 93 – and Christianity has never been a marginal part of the mix – “everything from Thunder Perfect Mind has been pretty overtly Christian to me.” (Pitchfork 2006)
The succeeding Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre (1994) takes both these aspects further, and the album “became a specifically autobiographical record (The Wire 1997).” The album's entire essence is best expressed on The Cloud of Unknowing – a nod towards the medieval work Christian mysticism of the same name. If the 14th century text argues that “reason can never 'know' God” and “advises moral reform, humility and asceticism as a way of preparing a life of contemplative prayer” (Sanders 2004:79), Tibet's poem can be seen admitting a failure to achieve such goal:
And then when then I die/ I feel I shall say/ I have not understood/ I have not understood any of this/ My eyes are still coaldark.
What succeeds is a journey of 'unknowing' across the world (“Under the gorgon grinned arches / Of London's great vaults /---/ Under the sunpuckered roofs of Kathmandu /---/ Along the soulstoned streets Of Lower And of Higher Germanie”), through time (“I rested at the temple of Great Black Time – Her”) and religious pursuits (“I bend the pages of yet another book/ And in its lines Great Black Lines”). But up until the closing on death, Tibet remains as ignorant as ever, save perhaps only of God's violence:
Now you are all fading/ All fading/ As my age creeps on/ As This Age stumbles on/ Fires in the earth/ Fires in the sky/ Fires in our hearts/ Fires everywhere/ The black eyes/ Already blacken/ And this I have not understood
Not peace/ But a sword/ This and He/ Unfortunately/ I have understood
The places and events mentioned in The Cloud of Unknowing serve to create a form of map of Tibet's mythology. Additional topography is given in All The World Makes Great Blood, which goes to recollect a time when he “was not yet dressed Tibetan red” and of “the twig-smashed landscape /---/ rolling and waving”, and in the succeeding The Great, Bloody And Bruised Veil Of The World. Among other things, the latters expresses that quintessential of emotions in neofolk – a nostalgic introspection of one's nationality (“The trees wave in England/ The streams flow in England/ The poor halt in England/ The poor heart of England”) but in Let Us Go To The Rose, Tibet's nostalgia taken beyond these England's sad boundaries through Pierre de Ronsard's Mignonne, allons voir si la rose to enforce the facet of Tibet's mythology rooted to the French culture. One could even indulge the thought of the underlying metaphor of Let Us Go To The Rose to be of the indivisibility of the two cultures
The old willows wrecked again and again in the hold of the woods held in close confinement all round into the struggle for existance where the streams were constantly taken from their course by the roots of the old trees in the woods allowing no mill stream the free course through until the whole of these fine old trees had got their whole water course directed by their own roots into each others roots in their own devious ways & so each time the bad weather conditions came the dell of the old popular willows received the whole rainfall & gave the roots of the old popular trees the worst conditions they could not recover from.
Yet there is an air of lightness hovers about the album, and despite the dark natured lyrics as usual, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre is actually one of the few Current 93 records to conclude in a more positive tone as the conclusions of The Cloud of Unknowing are ultimately reversed. Hence, the final motif of the album, echoing through Dormition and Dominion, So: This Empire Is Nothing and This Shining Shining World, express Tibet's Christian persuasion in its most powerful:
We have slept before and shall sleep again/ We have danced through the shallow pools/ And shall rejoice once again/ To those who say there is no hope/ I say liars/ Liars/ Liars you are/ Over the starry dancing stars/ There is a land/ Under the sweatribbed brow/ There is a land/ And this is the globed world of the Pantocrator/ Finally I have understood/ I have understood/ I have understood (Dormition and Dominion)
No doubt the most telling example of Tibet's mythology is The Seahorse Rears To Oblivion. Recorded in 1999 and released in 2003 as a separate demo, the subject of the song is essentially Tibet's retelling of the creation and the destruction of the Universe. The narrator's voice remains his own and this fact he also reinforces by claiming: “the first thing He [God] created, I believe, though the Bible does not tell us so”. Thus the perspective of the poem remains omniscient, although of the four essential characters (these being: God, Lucifer/Satan, the Stars, and the Human) Tibet's sympathy as well as the central progression of the poem remains with the Stars. So the Stars are first introduced as one part of God's creation (“The fifth thing was to create/ one Star, one animal, one fish, one bird, one human /---/ The stars he sent to fly and lie in space”) and become an object of aspiration for both the Human (“the human lies, dies, destroys, creates, and seeks the stars that He sent up in space”) and Satan (“The Devil creates black holes/ Sucks them out of the visible universe/ to create decorations”).
Yet Tibet attributes an aspiration for the Stars themselves and thus the prevailing theme of the poem is not a conflict between God and Satan, God and the Human or Satan and the Human, but rather of the Stars against the Universe. Hence, like Lucifer, the Stars are driven to rebel, held fast by the tyranny of God:
The stars try and try and try to fly away from earth/ But God has caught them in a large sling that holds them from falling too near or flying too far
Yet if Lucifer's rebellion takes place in the Beginning of Time, that of the Stars gains its momentum only at the eve of the Apocalypse
Then God decides that it is time to blow the final trumpet and call all chickens home to roost in every way and meaning
/---/
The roost begins/ The stars are withdrawn from their heavenly holder/ An attempt to rush away from the stinking world
and coincides with Satan's own design to posses all the Stars of the Universe, this falling short from the final goal as a portion of Stars still manage to flee for their freedom:
Satan simultaneously tries to snatch all of them at once to all his infernal kingdom/ Itself now doomed to his unknowledge
The stars are taken half by Satan/ dragged though an ever increasing black dent in the night sky/ The other half run towards
the Pleiades and Aldebaran
/---/
Even Satan in his great power and great fury and great greed cannot stop them
Ultimately both Satan's power and the Star's flight is only illusionary
and as a punishment for their rebellion, the
Stars are cast down on Earth as the final part of the Apocalypse
in the poem's culmination:
But God knows all, sees all/ And is prepared for all/ He creates a huge net made of spit/ and throws it further than the
furthest star
/---/
The stars are ordered by God to return to the sling or betorch his mercy/ raining down like rain on the earth/ And all of those
that are unfortunate enough to have been born in and of it
Tibet's choice to include the Stars as the central character for his 'genesis' has its predecessors in Christian tradition. According to the Ptolemaic system of the Universe, fixed stars form the penultimate eighth celestial sphere beneath the Empyrean Heaven, so that when God “made the Starrs,/ [He] set them in the Firmament of Heav'n” (Paradise Lost: Book VII, lines 348:349). His handling of both the order of the Universe and the processes from its creation to the end are entirely anthropomorphic – this can be seen in the motivations of different characters, reasoning in terms of “great power and great fury and great greed” when speaking of Satan, of fear and sadness when of the Stars, and of cruelty and anger when of God. Anthropomorphic images are also manifest in the realization God's will and the manner of punishment – the Stars are caught in “a huge net made of spit”, after which “God lectures them with a whip” and “the stars are given great scars with the whip”. Ultimately, the Universe of The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion is in its entirety imbued with the lowly human experience, and the human nature, Tibet's argues, is not directly after God's image, but rather of animal for both the best and worst of it, because “the animal he made to be our base nature and our state of nature and our innocence, and our memento mori on earth.”
David Tibet as a phenomenon of exoticism
It is not altogether difficult to define David Tibet in terms of exoticism - a childhood spent in distant Malaysia, explicit fascination with spirituality, and self-expression as a public artist. As such, the core essence of Tibet would be the joining of Dharmic religions (this aspect literally written in the man's name) with Christian tradition and European nihilism of the 19th century. Ultimately, the dominating Christian aspect may for the modern audience seem equally, if not more, alien than Buddhist philosophy or the writings of French surrealists, placing Tibet strongly at odds with the spirit of the age even if the latter should be transformed into an era (anti)religious fanaticism. Hence, for Tibet's work to become a source for a larger cultural movement has so far been barred by the very premise of its nature, as the ultimate underlying philosophy rejects the commonsensical public a possibility for an harmonious paradise (neither in the mundane or the spiritual), offering instead the personal nightmare of chaos.
List of references:
Primary Sources:
For all quotations of lyrics, LyricWiki was used
Secondary Sources:
Keenan, David. 1997. Current 93. The Wire. Issue #163.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1674.
Sanders, Andrew. 2004. English Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stosuy, Brandon. 2006. Current 93.
www.brainswashed.com. n.d. Hitler As Kalki.
Available at: http://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/durtro014.php?site=c93 (accessed 15.01.2011)
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