Current 93 and Nurse With Wound
Bright Yellow Moon

When I say that the dawn of the new millennium was a difficult phase for Current 93, marked by artistic and conceptual uncertainty, I don't think I'm talking nonsense. If only because of the complete lack of a stylistic directive to crown the always challenging existential journey of David Tibet. Taking a quick overview of that period, we can say that the last significant release was "Sleep Has His House" (2000), the epilogue of a new path of sound hermeticism that had flourished a few years earlier with the masterpiece "Soft Black Stars." Just before "Sleep Has His House," they had the time to release a dark-ambient work (the obscure "I Have a Special Plan for this World," 2000) and the split with Antony and the Johnsons (2000). Shortly after, another EP dedicated to dark industrial sounds ("Faust," 2000), a bizarre remix operation ("The Great in the Small," also from 2000, which gathered all the material released until then into a single absurd suite), and yet another live recording, "Cats Drunk on Copper" (2000), followed.

Reaching 2001, Tibet decides to give birth to "Bright Yellow Moon," which is released under the name Current 93 & Nurse with Wound, an album that officially consecrates the longstanding artistic partnership with friend Steven Stapleton (who has accompanied him from the beginning but with only this work manages to bring the name of his project on the cover of a Current album). An episode of secondary importance in the vast discography of Current 93, but paradoxically fundamental in the spiritual journey of David Tibet.

The lyrics of the album were written in August 2000 during Tibet's hospitalization in a hospital in London for a (apparently) peritonitis that required urgent surgery and a long recovery period: a time when he, suspended between life and death, with a tube in his mouth and a catheter in front, clouded by morphine and the pain and anguish of the illness, disturbed by the groans and delirium of other patients in his ward, navigated in total unawareness, only to develop, shortly afterward, new reflections on the concepts of Life and Death ("No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. [...] any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." - John Donne, literally quoted in the booklet).

It is no coincidence, in my opinion, that in the following years we will witness the explosive and unexpected conversion to a totalizing and pantheistic Christianity, whose seeds we find right in this work, full of mystical visions: a testimony that, for moods and atmospheres, we can associate with a work like "Imperium," the 1987 masterpiece that saw the "light" just as Tibet was struggling with another disease that could have cost him his life.

Opened and closed by the soft acoustic guitar of Michael Cashmore, "Bright Yellow Moon" carries with itself a structure that can recall that of "Animals" by Pink Floyd, where the prologue and epilogue were entrusted to the two specular parts of "Pigs on the Wing," an easygoing acoustic frame for an album whose sound body consisted of long and complex tracks, dark in their development.

The poetic opening of "Butterfly Drops" (chilling for the intertwining of melody and words) is therefore only a splendid mirage (but how much I love you, Cashmore!) that doesn't reach two minutes. The substance of the album moves instead on more typically “nursewithwoundian” dark-ambient trajectories, called to describe – perhaps in an excessively didactic manner – Tibet's hallucinations in the throes of delirium. The soundscapes devised by the skillful Stapleton (as had already happened for the albums inspired by the stories of Thomas Ligotti) mirror the lyrics, not just atmospherically, but stringing together a series of onomatopoeic solutions that underscore the images described by the verses (and if, feverish, Tibet hears the whirring of helicopter blades above his convalescent bed, so we will hear real helicopters coming out of our stereo speakers; and if Tibet evokes the imposing march of metaphysical legions treading through his clouded mind, the clattering of heavy boots will be the logical sound counterpoint). A visionary record is this "Bright Yellow Moon," which nevertheless proceeds in a rather academic manner, where the tragic and fragile nature of the distressed Tibet and the dadaist and surreal spirit of Stapleton clash (something that had never happened before), whose irony and love for mockery diminish the dramatic charge of the concept at the core of the platter.

The almost twenty minutes of "Disintegrate Blur 36 Page 03" are just a gloomy appetizer: an ambient stasis in which Tibet's reflections accompany us into the darkest depths of a squalid hospital ward, amidst slowed heartbeats and the pulsing of infernal machines. The initial organ of the subsequent "Mothering Sunday (Legion Legion)" breaks any hesitation and opens the delirious phase of the journey (it is here that Stapleton's "narrative" effects make their entrance), leading into the paranoid tension of "Nights": pure non-sense noise, a train gone mad – in the truest sense of the word – where distorted and overlaid voices like in the good old days copulate wildly with overlapping effects and samples that show no mercy for our reason. A train that slows down to once again reach the placid "Die, Flip or Go to India," a cosmic nightmare halfway between the more minimal Tangerine Dream and the freer Nurse with Wound (with evident references to the aforementioned "I Have a Special Plan for this World," where Stapleton's hand had heavily influenced, but with better results, the sound economy of the Current).

The concluding "Walking Like Shadows," a relaxing folk-ballad once again inspired by the ever-magnificent Cashmore, provides a coda to it all, finally arresting the delirium of rambling voices and indecipherable sound contortions, and recovering the moods with which the album had opened, leaving the listener with a sense of hope, of newfound faith, which will open to the clear future scenarios of the Current.

An essential album from a conceptual point of view, albeit negligible from a purely musical perspective, "Bright Yellow Moon" is penalized by a lightness in the compositional phase that transforms the original communicative urgency into a manneristic game by that fox Stapleton (small change for a character of his caliber): an operation where unfortunately the transcendental poetry of Tibet pays the price (here at the peak of his physical and mental agony), who could certainly have reached great heights had he known how to more carefully nurture the sound architectures that complement his umpteenth essay of visionary madness.

Still, worth listening to.