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CURRENT 93, "AT SUNSET BLACK SHIPS ATE THE SKY"
Durtro Jnana
This unassuming CDEP was made available at the recent Toronto shows, but the people working the merchandise table were mysteriously tight-lipped about its contents. The packaging contains no information other than arcane Coptic Greek text printed in gold on a black background: "PSHOUO NMEHPSAITSHOMTE: NTNAU NHïTP MPRæ AHENJæU EUKæM OUEM TPE." There were also T-shirts for sale with this same cryptic text, untranslatable to all but the most diligent esotericists. After seeing Current 93 play all three nights, and popping this CDEP in for the first time, however, it became quite clear that this was a brand new Current 93 single, taken from the forthcoming studio album Black Ships Ate the Sky. David Late Tibet and friends are long overdue for a new full-length, so it's very nice indeed to see something surface, a new release rather than another in a long line of re-released repackagings of remixed, reshuffled remasters. And luckily, the new material sounds utterly brilliant: a return to form and some of the best music Current 93 has made since 2000's Sleep Has His House. It is clear from the first few seconds, however, that Black Ships in the Sky does not repeat the same minimal, ascetic instrumental palette as Sleep or Soft Black Stars, much to my relief. As much as I loved those albums, I was always hoping that Current 93 would revisit the fuller, richer, more compositional arrangements of classic albums like All The Pretty Little Horses and Thunder Perfect Mind, and that is exactly what I got on this single. The EP contains only one seven-minute track, divided into two sections. The first has David Michael describing at intense apocalyptic vision glimpsed at sunset in his sixteenth year, against a lovely backdrop of fingerpicked guitar and disarmingly gorgeous swells of viola and cello. Though there are no personnel listed on the sleeve, I am guessing that these are the contributions of Simon Finn, William Breeze and Joolie Wood, talented collaborators all. As the track passes the three-minute mark, things suddenly become dark and nightmarish, and the music becomes a series of noisy, staccato string stabs, electronic pulses and the searing electric guitar work of Ben Chasny (of Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire). David Michael screams and curses his fate, wishing in vain that he had been "unborn," straining and cracking his voice, crying out in the abyss: "Who will deliver me from myself? Who will deliver me from myself?" It's very intense stuff indeed, and bodes very well for the upcoming album. - Jonathan Dean
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NURSE WITH WOUND, "ECHO POEME: SEQUENCE NO. 2"
United Jnana
Echo Poeme: Sequence No. 2 is quite a surprise, even for an artist like Steven Stapleton, who has spent the past 25 years confounding expectations. It is the second part of a series begun with a limited, Vienna show-only CD-R entitled The Little Dipper Minus Two: Echo Poeme Sequence No. 1. Those who are lucky enough to have heard the CD-R will know that it is a hypnotic combination of eerie, layered female vocals floating delicately around seething, sexual inhalations, barking dogs and psychedelic, vibratory shudders of mysterious origin. It's a thrilling and magical 20 minutes, climaxing with the eardrum-piercing squall of a WWII air raid siren and the dive-bombing blitzkrieg of warplanes. Sequence No. 2 uses some the same elements, but subtracts the overt sexuality, the canine outbursts and the Nazi attack, leaving only 50 minutes of overlapping, interwoven vocals from Amantine Dahan Steiner and Isabelle Gaborit, all of which are exclusively en francais. Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter utilize the various utterances, hums, whispers, recitations, laughs, breathy coos, and vibrational oms of the two women to create a suggestive ambient tangle of ghostly, gossamer thread. The vocals create soothing undulations, tantalizingly linguistic but staying just out of reach of full comprehension, improbably panning around the stereo channels with a logic that would only make sense in a dream. Indeed, the album is ideal for headphone listening, provided you don't mind two disembodied voices spookily reciting French words in your ears for almost an hour. The title of this album and its predecessor seem to be consciously retrograde allusions to classic musique concrete pieces (i.e. Edgar Varese's "Poeme Electronique"), even though it's much more likely that Potter and Stapleton have used digital means, rather than analog, to create these highly-constructed, multilayered compositions. The black-and-white cover art seems a little grainy and chintzy, but it's hard to tell if this was intentional or not. This album was used as between-set music at the recent run of Current 93 concerts at a Toronto church, and it does seem to operate best as background music. Though the entire album is undeniably beautiful and haunting, it refuses to develop, transform or build drama during its considerable length. It ends right where it begins, and in between is more of the same. No one is going to accuse Echo Poeme of being Steven Stapleton's most exciting work, but it does have a consistently ravishing, gorgeous, mesmerizing beauty that makes it very worthwhile tangent. - Jonathan Dean
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CURRENT 93, "HOW I DEVOURED APOCALYPSE BALLOON"
Durtro Jnana
Currrent 93 live albums have always been a bit of a tricky proposition. There have been at least a dozen or so live albums released throughout Current 93's long career, and they range from almost completely unlistenable (Loony Runes and Hitler as Kalki), to pleasant but unremarkable (Halo and Live at St. Olave's Church). To me, the live albums always seemed like filler in the Current 93 catalog, frequent stopgaps between studio material, meant to please hardcore fans and completists. The problem plaguing much of the past material, in my opinion, is that Current 93 just weren't a very good live act until very recently. Though they have performed many live shows since their earliest incarnation, David Late Tibet and his merry band of apocalyptic folksters have frequently given new meaning to the term amateur. Just listen to the Hitler as Kalki material with Douglas P. senselessly pounding away on the same chord he's been playing for twenty years, John Balance "playing" stick guitar and Tibet and Rose McDowall shrieking out of key, taking a massive shit all over songs that sounded powerful and hypnotic on the proper studio album. Adding to the problem were bad PA systems and bad recording equipment. So, with all this in mind, I found myself pleasantly surprised by How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon, a new double-disc live album featuring two full sets from last year's two dates at Toronto's St. George-the-Martyr Church on June 18th and 19th. (By the way, I can't stop singing the title of this album to the tune of The Fall's "How I Wrote Elastic Man.") This is probably Current 93's best live album, at least the best one that I've ever heard, as I admit to having skipped a few. Though the ensemble featured here is not quite as large and spectacular as that which was featured during this year's three-night run, the players still do a wonderful job of creating a fine musical accompaniment for Tibet's intense, crepuscular, poetic speak-singing. Though there are no liner notes which would indicate the personnel that performed at these concerts (and also, alas, no track listing), I think that I can hear and identify Maja Elliott on piano, Joolie Wood on violin, and perhaps also Simon Finn and Ben Chasny on acoustic guitar at various times. The recording quality is sparklingly clear, and the setlist chosen for both nights features of some of Current 93's best and best-loved material, drawn from as far back as Island and Imperium, all the way through Thunder Perfect Mind, Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre, All the Pretty Little Horses, Soft Black Stars, Sleep Has His House and even a cut off of Bright Yellow Moon. Along the way are some surprising wild cards from the back catalog that I've never heard performed live - including the haunting and powerful "They Return to Their Earth," "A Sadness Song" and "The Blue Gates of Death (Before and Beyond Them)," each faithfully rendered within a more limited instrumental palette. The second features very effective usage of noise loops and live electronic voice manipulations, which I can't recall hearing since the earliest phases of Current 93 live shows. I still don't think I'll listen to this much beyond the few spins I gave it before writing this review, but as Current 93 live albums go, this one is truly definitive. - Jonathan Dean
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SIMON FINN, "MAGIC MOMENTS"
Durtro Jnana
Magic Moments is the new album from Simon Finn. If someone were to have asked me six years ago, when I first heard Simon Finn's legendary 1970 album Pass the Distance, to assess the chances that such a thing would ever come to pass, I'd have rated the probability a big fat zero. Simon Finn was one of the many late-60s psychedelic folk and progressive artists that released one obscure album and then seemingly disappeared into the aethyr, never to be heard from again. Original press copies of his frequently bootlegged Mushroom Records LP (which has only just last year been officially reissued on Durtro Jnana) have traded hands for insanely high prices, the inclusion of maverick experimental accompanists Paul Burwell and David Toop making it a desirable treasure, as well as soul-shattering tracks like "Jerusalem," easily one of my favorite songs of all time. Unexpectedly two years ago, David Late Tibet somehow dug up Simon Finn, who has continued to write music through the years, and has given Finn an outlet to release new material, as well as utilized his considerable talents on new Current 93 recordings. Magic Moments is a collection of 12 folk songs, Finn singing in his familiar, world-weary Tom Rapp-esque voice, accompanied on a few tracks by Joolie Wood on flute or violin. Because of the simple, unadorned recording style and the minimal instrumentation, this record doesn't repeat the same shambolic, psychedelic chaos that characterized his classic LP. This can't help but come as something of a disappointment to me, but I have no complaints about Finn's songs, which are deceptively simple, redolent of the best British folk, with cryptic lyrics pregnant with meaning and emotional intensity. Three tracks on the album are repeated from last year's Silent City Creep CDEP (now out-of-print) - "Walkie Talkie," "Eros" and "Wanted You," great songs all. Of the brand-new material, the title track is one of the best, a sad rumination on how human lives involve long periods of unhappiness, punctuated by magical moments that we carry with us as a salve against depression. Also memorable is a song Finn wrote many years ago but has never recorded until now, "Golden Golden," an apocalyptic war ballad that ends the album on a pessimistic note: "All our lives we're searching/to find a lord to crown/And Golden, Golden was our time/Golden, Golden truths and lies." This song is also one of the few times that Finn's vocals reach the throat-stripped ferocity of his performance on classics like "Jerusalem" and "Big White Car." Magic Moments is incredibly brief at only 30 minutes, but eminently listenable, and it's great to hear Simon Finn making records again. - Jonathan Dean
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SIMON FINN, "SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD"
Durtro Jnana
Perhaps as a little addendum to his full-length, Simon Finn simultaneously released this five-song CDEP, for sale at the recent Toronto shows. It's very much in the same vein as Magic Moments, just Finn and his guitar, more musings about the frustrations attendant to love, human communication, sadness and joy, longing for life and death. The title track tells the story of a man who has passed away his existence as a stranger in his own life - forever living in the subjective, the hypothetical, the plane of dreams and ideals - the verb tense suggested by the title: "Most of his life, it seems/Has passed in the subjunctive mood/The imagined, wished and dreamed for but/He must learn how not to brood on all the/Were it nots, and were she theres/The be that as it mays/and God help him." On all of these songs, Finn accompanies himself, strumming or fingerpicking simply melodies that bolster his lyrics, which are the real attraction here. I thought at first that "Rich Girl With No Trousers" might be a declaration of love for the slutty heiress Paris Hilton, but judging by the sad, reflective lyrics, it's more likely about a woman from Finn's half-remembered past. The high lonesome blues sound of "Lingering" recalls Chris Thomas King's haunting versions of Skip James songs, connecting Finn's traditional Brit folk leanings with early American folk and blues. I have nothing but respect for Simon Finn, who has jumped back into writing and recording after a more than thirty-year absence, with all the aplomb and poise of a seasoned veteran. However, I do hope that at some point he considers recording another album like Pass the Distance, working again with collaborators that can transform his emotionally charged folk songs into something even greater through unorthodox arrangements and interesting production. Not that I wouldn't be happy with more like this EP and Magic Moments, it's just a wish. - Jonathan Dean
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BABY DEE, "MADE FOR LOVE"
Durtro Jnana
This three-track CDEP follows closely on the tails of Baby Dee's recent A Book of Songs for Anne-Marie, which was her first full-length since the double-disc masterpiece Love's Small Song. Very little has changed about Baby Dee's sound since her earliest demos, still the same hauntingly affected voice singing fragile songs about love, loss, gender, identity, mothers and fathers, and the tiny, seemingly insignificant memories that collect over time to comprise our emotional lives. On all three of these tracks, Baby Dee accompanies herself on piano (no harp this time), with bright, sad minor-key melodies that set her songs aloft. There is still something unmistakably, gnawingly creepy about the pain and sadness that seems an inseparable part of Baby Dee's transgender vocals, even when she sings relatively joyful songs like "Morning Fire," a simple and sweet declaration of love. On "Three Women," Dee sings a mournful song which seems to be about her desire for motherhood: "I'm making a cradle/Out of broken arms/Out of arms that sing." On the song's masculine counterpart "Three Men," Dee sings lyrics so achingly simple they could be straight out of a book of nursery rhymes, but they are nonetheless sad and evocative: "I went to see my mother/And I got lost/Now it's so hard to get home...I heard your children singing/In a western sky/Let them call that sky their own." There are many who will doubtless continue to regard Baby Dee as a novelty freak show (as a youth, she worked in a Coney Island circus sideshow as a bilateral hermaphrodite), something along the lines of a transsexual Tiny Tim. However, there are a precious few enthusiasts, who like me, never regarded Tiny Tim as a novelty act, and don't think of Baby Dee that way either. Baby Dee is an utterly unique voice in contemporary music, one that once you have let it into your heart, can scarcely be forgot. - Jonathan Dean
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JOHN CONTRERAS/ROSE MCDOWALL/NURSE WITH WOUND, "AFRAID 1 & 2/GEOMETRIC HORSEHAIR CAVALCADE"
Durtro Jnana
This CDEP contains three tracks, all featuring the skillful playing of John Contreras, the handsome young cellist and recent Current 93 and Cyclobe collaborator. The first and third tracks on the disc are adaptations of Nico's beautiful song "Afraid" (from her classic 1970 album Desertshore, one of several collaborations with John Cale), with the singular Rose McDowall lending her sweet, lilting vocals to the song. We haven't heard from Rose McDowall in quite a while, that inimitable chanteuse from Strawberry Switchblade, Sorrow and countless collaborations with Current 93, Death in June, Coil and Michael Cashmore, so it was very nice indeed to hear her lovely vocals again. Even though both versions of "Afraid" are brief, insubstantial and slight, they are still very pretty, and a good showcase for McDowall's voice and Contreras' elegiac, vibratory swells of cello. Sandwiched unceremoniously between these two tracks is an unexpected collaboration between Nurse With Wound and John Contreras, surreally entitled "Geometric Horsehair Cavalcade." The horsehair refers perhaps to the rosined fibers of Contreras' bow, and the geometry perhaps to the angularly edited, resculptured strings of Contreras' cello and Steven Stapleton's prepared piano. There's no telling where the cavalcade comes in. The track, not surprisingly, bears a passing resemblance to Stapleton's collaborations with another master of the stringed instrument on Acts of Senseless Beauty and Santoor Lena Bicycle. In fact, Aranos AKA Petr Vastl is listed as the engineer for all three of these tracks, so there's your connection. On the whole, this CDEP is rather disposable, but it's still a very nice little souvenir, and I do hope that these four collaborate on more material in the future, as a full-length might be very nice indeed. - Jonathan Dean
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The Body Lovers/The Body Haters, "The Body Lovers/The Body Haters"
Young God Records
Michael Gira's work under the Body Lovers and Body Haters names has been reissued as a double CD with a few changes. Gone are the albums' original titles and the artwork from the original Body Haters release is absent. In their place is an extra ten minutes of music on the Body Haters disc. Given that these two albums were meant to be a three part series I can only speculate that the bonus material was part of the never finished third album. Perhaps part three became Gira's Angels of Light? This would make sense as listening to the reissues as it is possible to chart the transition from the Swans to Gira's later works both solo and with the Angels of Light. The Body Lovers album (originally titled Number One of Three) is a number of interlinked tracks that over the course of the album shows the diverse styles and range of Gira's output over the last 20 years. There are riffs taken from older Swans songs and material that would later become part of Angels of Light releases. On the first track Gira seems to be working the Swans out of his system. Towards the end of album, a tone that is more the Angels of Light takes over. In fact, The Body Lovers sounds almost like a dual between both bands with the Angels seemingly the victors. The Body Haters album (originally titled 34:13) is the second round of the fight where the Swans come up trumps. Divided into two tracks, the first is ten minutes or so of unreleased material and the second being the original album. The unreleased material is only partly unreleased, it is a collage of various recordings, most of which seem to be used later in different contexts on the Angels of Light album Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home. It does not really fit with The Body Haters, it sounds exactly like what it is, a piece of unused music to entice someone who already owns the album to buy it. The second track makes up for the first with thirty minutes of drones and noise, not in an abrasive way but more ambient. It starts off disorientating as a few small samples are looped and processed. It eventually builds up into a clamor that sounds like a church organ made of fire alarms. This goes up and down in pitch and Gira adds layers of effects to it over the next half an hour. It finishes up with what sounds like Jarboe's vocals time stretched and heavily treated which builds up to an intense and loud finale, something the young Gira would have been proud of. Whether this reissue is worth buying for those with the original albums is debatable, the bonus material is good for a Frankenstein-type creation but possibly not worth buying the set again for. Both albums do still sound as fresh and exciting now as they did seven years ago. The Body Lovers/The Body Haters works as a nice overview of Gira's work, something like a best of without any actual songs that you know on it. - John Kealy
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Haino Keiji, "Black Blues"
Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier
Haino's own homage to the blues begs the question of whether he has always burdened himself with a bluesman's ax to grind. Stark primitivism is ubiquitous, even as the artist introduces new strategy or restraint in a work. In recent years, Haino has taken classical guitar through the black-on-black, slow-utterance machine that is his style, and this year also marked his first solo electronic album, instruments pushed not to their own limits, but to Haino's redefined limits of his own art. The two Black Blues discs are not so much returns to the guitar-vocal arrangement, from which the artist first touted his musical discipline, as they are generalized statements from the depths. Haino is less an explorer now, than creator of a two-sided tablet of commandments. One disc acoustic, the other electric, Black Blues is Haino at his most sensual and his most absolutely violent. The discs are themselves absolutes within a style that has rejected nearly every outside structural imposition. Though more heavily composed than any Haino works in recent memory, they are easily more intimate in mood and carry a directness that should be sourced in American blues music. These discs, if not the majority of Haino's work, though not blues in any traditional sense, carry the style's primitive aesthetic, condensed drama, and instinctive spirituality into a conceptual domain. The Black Blues volumes feature the same six songs, some perhaps original, at least one cover (Hendrix's “Drifting”), and at least one traditional blues piece. The trad.song included, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” is a 13-min. sleepy cascade of acoustic reverbed starlight on the first disc and, on the other, a savage landscape of electric salvages, muddied harmonics, surface scrapes, and shaky, neck-rending exercises in contest with a typically asphyxiated vocal. Black Blues' electric version contains probably the most structurally bleak and consistently intense vocal performance I've heard from Haino; however, upon repeated listens, I find that the disc is equally listenable, certainly as cathartic, and even as calming as its acoustic half. The two can only be counterparts, and they are essential to a Haino collection. He's prolific and singular enough that choosing goodies often seems futile, but I can safely say, if you can handle only one Haino this year, try to handle two, and make them these two.
- Andrew Culler
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I have been collecting music videos for over two decades so a collection like this is very exciting. LTM's fearless leader, James Nice, who has pains-takingly been reissuing unavailable music from Factory and Crepuscule has compiled his first DVD of videos from various artists. While Umbrellas doesn't present the legendary compilations like A Factory Video and A Factory Outing in their entirety, it does gather 22 videos from those two comps as well as stuff from the original Umbrellas in the Sun video, originally on Crepuscule, and The Factory Compilation. Some of the gems include Section 25's "New Horizon" - shot outdoors and some ancient looking abandoned home, New Order's "Everything's Gone Green" live performance, Cabaret Voltaire's "Sluggin' for Jesus," Crispy Ambulance's "The Presence," and A Certain Ratio's "Back to the Start," where they're all dancing around an indoor pool! With loads of programs on the market, sound restoration has become relatively easy, when compared to the task of video restoration. While LTM is known for the amazing sound and packaging jobs, it's to be noted that a lot of videos collected have not been able to hold up to the degradation over time. A lot of these videos were done with next to no budget, so a lot of them didn't look terribly great to begin with, and sometimes there's points where the lips aren't even closely synchronized. James Nice made the choice to not rewrite history: to leave them unedited as documents of their time. Don't expect any fancy big budget New Order or Happy Mondays videos here: leave those to the major labels and bootleggers. With Umbrellas in the Sun, I'm hopeful that more video collections like this are soon to follow. - 
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