The English esoteric artists Current 93, Nurse With Wound and Coil - recently canonized in David Keenan's England's Hidden Reverse - are obviously intelligent, always creative, and often revolutionary. If anything bad could be said about these artists, it would be that they suffer from a kind of record release diarrhea. Their absurdly prolific release schedules litter the world with pointless EPs, singles and limited-edition releases that are immediately snatched up by collectors, but often suffer from a dearth of worthwhile musical content. Recent flagrant examples have been Current 93's The Great in the Small CD and the Maldoror is Dead EP. Both of these CDs contained no new musical content, and left me scratching my head wondering how I was hoodwinked into purchasing them. This new little artifact, one of a pair of discs released as a partnership between United Durtro and Anomalous, contains two lengthy tracks of sound material from 1985's In Mentrual Night, recently given a remix treatment by Steven Stapleton. In Mentrual Night was one of David Tibet's final works from Current 93's "spooky loop" period, and also one of the best. The atmospheric mixture of chanting, operatic scales, chain-rattling and musique concrete' tape tricks was a superior final chapter to Current 93's noisescape phase. Why revisit this material almost 20 years later? These remixes were commissioned to be used as opening music to Current 93's recent shows in San Fransisco. Because these pieces were to be used primarily for background music, Stapleton has decided to muddy the mix, making it impossible to distinguish the voice and noise elements, turning the music into murky, nebulous ambient soundscapes that fill the room with atmosphere, but don't share the unfolding, jarring drama of the original music. The sounds share the same kind of distant, dreamlike uneasiness of earlier Current 93 tracks like "The Dreammoves of the Sleeping King," with half-remembered audible fragments of sound that trigger strange feelings of nostalgia and/or deja vu' in the listener. Both tracks are quite good, but whether or not they are worth the price of admission depends upon your level of Current 93 obsessiveness.

Jonathan Dean
Sunday, 31 August 2003