With last year's limited concert EPs on Jnana Records and this year's How He Loved the Moon, Current 93 makes the first tentative steps outside the World Serpent Distribution umbrella that Durtro has labored under for so many years. Moon is a double LP containing nearly 80 minutes of music, a reissue and expansion of last year's Anomalous release A Little Menstrual Night Music, containing four sidelong remixes of vintage Current 93 album In Menstrual Night undertaken by Steven Stapleton, originally commissioned as opening music for a pair of Current 93 shows in San Francisco. Beta-Lactam Ring. Though conceived and recorded well before the tragic events of last November, in retrospect the album has been dedicated in memory of the dearly departed friend and collaborator, subtitled Moonsongs for Jhonn Balance. Beta-Lactam Ring have outdone themselves with this release, a deluxe double-gatefold package with colorized versions of the original sleeve art from the 1986 Mentrual LP (never noticed that giant purple phallus), as well as a beautiful bonus silkscreened picture 7" containing edited versions of the original two mixes, included with initial pressings of the album. The glossy, colorful sleeves set a new standard for Beta-Lactam releases, and the heavy, substantial vinyl should satisfy any serious collector. Here's hoping for more deluxe editions of hard-to-find Current 93 back catalog material given this treatment. The music on How He Loved the Moon is a tangential return to an earlier Current 93, when the name stood primarily for long-form, dark ambient noisescapes; multilayered cacophonies composed of dusty drones and spooky tapes loops of rattling chains and disembodied whispers. Each sidelong track is named after a chapter and verse of the Bible. "Ecclesiastes XII:2" ("While the sun or the moon or the stars be not darkened") mixes the source material into a series of subterranean, reverberating arterial tunnels in which all of the original elements become nebulous and subliminal. On the flip side, "The Song of Solomon VI:10" ("Who is she, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners") transforms the material into a slowly percolating dubby rhythmscape, with submerged samples bubbling to the surface and a persistent megaphone voice intoning tantalizingly inaudible imperatives. "Psalm VIII:3" ("When I consider the heavens, the moon and the stars which you have put in place") is the most haunting, with voices obscured behind layers of murky silence, each muffled reverberation reduced to metallic alien syllables divorced from all linguistic sense. For those who have steered clear of Current 93 for all these years because of the increasing emphasis on David Tibet's spoken-word poetic cycles, How He Loved the Moon represents a satisfying return to the early, atmospheric C93 that really just wanted to scare the hell out of you. For others, this album will seem like yet another superfluous stopgap on the path to the brand-new studio album, due later this year. For myself, I quite enjoyed this atavistic salute to lunar concerns, and could practically imbibe the exudations of magickally charged menstruum, reinvigorating me with adumbrations of the hidden nightside aeon.

Jonathan Dean
Sunday, 13 February 2005