L.A.Y.L.A.H. Records had invited me to go to Bruxelles to record an album there. I had agreed, thinking it was time for me to do a solo album. At that time I was living in Tufnell Park, North London, in the basement of Freya Aswynn's house. It was a huge and somewhat dilapidated structure, full of a bizarre and everchanging assortment of bores, schizophrenics, megalomaniacs, drug fiends, and even some geniuses. My room had once been Freya's Odinic Temple; after I left for Iceland, it reverted to its former use. She, herslef a superb woman of great charisma and intelligence, introduced me to an icelandic friend of hers, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, an expert on the Runes, who had just finished cataloguing the huge Crowley collection of Gerald J. Yorke, erstwhile disciple and loyal friend to The Beast. HÖH and I had both known Gerald, but without meeting each other. We got on famously, and he would stay with me on frequent trips to London. We decided to attempt to drink ourselves to death in four weeks, helped by vast amounts of amphetamine sulphate. When we realised that we were drinking on waking at seven in the morning, we knew we had to get away. This desire was compounded massively by the fact we were both sick to death of meeting people at Freya's who claimed to be the reincarnation of Crowley: they were all living in squats, were on the dole, and had no girlfriends - not, I think, a likely state for The Beast to choose for his next sojourn here. Total collapse would ensue if we ever heard the phrase "sexual magick" again. We helped each other down to the tube station, and the speed helped us to get to the airport, where we took the plane to belgium. And ended up at a recording studio at Waterloo, where Marvin Gaye had cut "Sexual Healing". Marc Monin, L.A.Y.L.A.H.'s head, had brought in several crates of alcohol - Alas! He had also brought along the exquisite Niki Mono, and her brother Peter 77. And we had brought along a friend of Hilmar's, James Foster of The Monochrome Set. Now all we had to do was record an album...The weather was beautiful, the food and drink were wonderful, but unfortunately I did not have the slightest idea of what I was meant to be doing there. My memory - cloudlike, of course - is of Hilmar and James doing all the music whilst I lay under the mixing console drinking. I do recall Hilmar drumming with one drum and a coathanger, as that was all they had for percussion. Not that I cared.
It was, unfortunately, the worst album I had ever been involved in, though I still enjoy the breathy melancholy of Niki's "My Secret Gardener", and the camp foolishness of "The Aryan Aquarians' Theme Song". I do console myself with the fact that I only sang on two songs, and mumbled on one other. The album's only redeeming feature was that, during it's recording, HÖH and I decided to do an album together, which would result in Island. But, for all those who are tempted to buy it at an extortionate price from a record dealer, You can hear for a low price a reason not to. For those who have already bought it on vinyl, all I can say is... Sorry!

David Tibet, far from Waterloo, and never to return there, July 18 1997.

Strange times indeed. David and I had hit it off in a big way and we seemed to bring out the worst in each other, much to our enjoyment I might add. It was not so much a Dark Night of the Soul as Soulful Nocturnal Activity filled with Dark Humour. Misery was never so enjoyable and looking back at this period of enforced degradation still makes me laugh. We decided to explore the depths of human depravity, but this venture was somewhat limited by the fact that female company was conspicuous by its absence. Our carefully cultivated Byronic personæ (David had the dark looks, I the limp - the result of trying to board the 73 bus at 30mph after a successful day at the Sevilla Mia Drinking Club) seemed to fall on barren gorund, possibly because of David's favoured pick-up line being "Can I interest you in Death?" and my stony Icelandic silence. Anyway most of the girls who came around to the house in Tufnell Park where David lived were committed Goddess worshippers and spiritual, neither of which could be found in those two dregs of humanity who spent most of their time lying on the floor moaning and arguing about music.
The ongoing and epic drinking in David's basement was usually spiced with the loony de hour who might be the reincarnation of A.C., a direct descendant and spiritual heir to King Arthur who had just deciphered Malory and divined the whereabouts of Excalibur, the King of the Witches or a permutation of all three. I remember being impressed by David's encyclopædic knowledge of obscure sixties bands, an area of which I fancied myself and expert, and recalled being horrified and amazed in equal measures by the fact that he could make a pitch perfect rendition of every guitar solo I would mention. The combination of sixties nostalgia and encounters with people who would have been so supra-normal in the hey-day of Gandalf's Garden got to us in the end and we started to speculate about the greatest band there never was, invented a background replete with pompous songtitles and bogus mysticism, and thus the first seeds of the Aryan Aquarians were sown.
The day when we were nursing the Great Grandmother of all hangovers is still etched in my mind. After a prolonged encounter with Jordi Valls and his evil absinthe collection we had spent I don't know how many hours trying to find our way between his house and Tufnell Park (a stretch of two miles or so), weeping like children as we listened to the death rattle of every cell in our bodies. This was it, we decided, no more suffering. Upon collapsing on the David's floor we swore that booze and Byronic posturing were out. I woke up discovering that I was being lectured to by someone whom I faintly remember as the reincarnation of Malory who had divined the whereabouts of the King of the Witches. David was nowhere to be seen so I decided to lose concsiousness again. Next I have the blurry memories of David bursting into the room, saying that he had been offered to do a record in Belgium and asking me to come along. After laying down some strict guidelines about alcohol intake I agreed to come and then mercifully fell asleep.
The morning after we sent a fax to Belgium outlining our needs and then decided to celebrate our imminent holiness by a week of partying which was made all the more fun by the series of alter egos which we promptly invented. Gone were the pale and brooding poets; we were here to have fun and that in abundance. One of our better creations were Jaime and Jorge, the Puerto Rican cocaine smuggling twins, who would offer linguistic advice to young maidens, the intricacies of the Puerto Rican patois being an endless source of wonder, and in the same spirit we would offer lessons in knife fighting to any interested male. It was in the character of the twins that we boarded the plane to Brussels taking with us guitarist extraordinaire James Foster, by virtue of him being the only man who ever accepted our offer of knife fighting and Puerto Rican tap dancing lessons.
As we arrived at the studio in the hills above Waterloo we saw that the record company had prepared everything according to our demands. We would be there for a week so we had asked for two crates of beer, two bottles of white wine, two of rosé, two of red, one bottle of wodka, one bottle of whisky and one bottle of gin. Unsurprisingly the first day was filled and rather unproductive. The morning after we arrived to find that the record company decided, probably in the evidence of our appearance, that our weekly rations were meant to be renewed daily. The rest, as they say, is history.

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Denmark, July 23 1997

The Aryan Aquarians were, and never will be again: James Foster, Niki Mono, Peter 77, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, David Tibet.

All music by Hilmarsson/Foster.

The Aryan Aquarians/David Tibet 1986/1997.

Cut by Denis at Country Masters

Thanks to all at World Serpent, and to Marc Monin and Kat.

Published by Ourobouros Music.