Current 93
I Have a Special Plan for This World

Released in 2000, "I Have a Special Plan for this World" momentarily sets aside the intimate and singer-songwriter atmospheres of David Tibet's new artistic course ("Soft Black Stars" was its manifesto) to take a plunge into the band's darker past.

Although far less iconoclastic than the early works, it is, in my opinion, a real punch in the stomach: "I Have a Special Plan for this World" is a disturbing journey (a single twenty-two-minute composition) that consolidates the artistic partnership with writer Thomas Ligotti, with whom the band had previously collaborated (the double album "In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land" is the illustrious predecessor). In this case as well, Current 93 becomes the musical transposition of the restless literary art of the American writer.

Tibet does not merely create a soundtrack for Ligotti's writings; he sets up a standalone work of art, capable of reflecting the writer's intentions and amplifying its expressive power. So much so that it is impossible to separate the conceptual aspect from the formal one. Mind you, this is not descriptive music: far from banal temptations of didacticism, Current 93 crafts a work capable of mirroring the complex structure of the story using the tricks that the music medium offers. But not only: Tibet absorbs the obsessions and reflective cues posed by Ligotti's story, reworking them in the light of the spiritual and eschatological themes that have always permeated his artistic journey.

From a strictly musical point of view, it speaks the language of precise dark ambient, where every note is rigorously calibrated and placed in the right position. It speaks of an obsessive synth loop that comes and goes throughout the track, and it's no coincidence that Steven Stapleton, the master of tiresome electronics, accompanies Tibet in this operation, significantly influencing the final output, so much so that it ends up resembling more an album by Nurse With Wound than anything else released under the name Current 93.

From a conceptual point of view, the work presents considerable complexity. Like in the thrillers of master Hitchcock or in a psychological horror worthy of the best Polanski, or in the cinematic nightmares of David Lynch, Tibet plays on ambiguity, unrest, and tension: the narrative pathos rests not on gory effects, but on the dialectic of spoken/unspoken, on the continuous alternation of different dimensional planes.

Just as Polanski's films play on the fragile opposition between reality and madness, and Lynch's between conscious and unconscious, in "IHASPFTW," one oscillates continuously between "objectivity" (a plot we rely on, at least temporarily) and mental representation.
Ligotti's story, for its part, does not follow a linear path, and certain passages remain enigmatic (an Italian translation would help; I went online to find the text in its original language). The mechanism is that of Russian dolls, where general reflections form the framework, followed by the point of view of the narrating I, within which events are narrated both in the first and third person. It speaks of darkness, and of a light found at its end (perhaps the mirage of the Afterlife?). Then there is a clumsy character who entertains children (Jesus Christ? God himself?), of a horrible puppet show (the deeds of an entire humanity hanging by the strings of a mysterious puppeteer?).

In between, there is a restless soul, a soul that has lost all hope and has reached darkness through the black corridors of pain. A soul that asks questions and answers them, embodying the certainty of one who no longer harbors illusions or dreams. Until the chilling finale, which throws everything back into play, as if the individual, despite getting close to what they believe is truth, cannot possibly reach it and is condemned to rambling, as long as they view things through the perceptive channels that humans have to navigate this world.

Life, therefore, as an ongoing delve into darkness, at the bottom of which flickers the faint glimmer of a flame seemingly within reach, but in actuality, unreachable. And humanity, despite being disillusioned, despite being stripped of the dreams and illusions that distort the world and mislead from the truth, inevitably retains the limited character of its humanity. Because truth, assuming there is one, is incomprehensible, beyond the most penetrating of speculations. A truth we may perhaps learn one day in death, a truth that will flood the intellect, which we can hardly comprehend, just as Dante, at the end of his initiatory journey, could not bear the vision of God. A truth that terrifies, that causes the jaw to rattle and tremble, rendering us poor demented souls.

But this is only one dimension of the work: it is the narrating I we follow behind, and perhaps it is only a vain voice with no other intent than to lead us astray mockingly. Tibet masterfully embodies the voice of the narrating I: never over the top, he launches into a passionate yet sober interpretation of the text, without succumbing to theatrical temptations, except for a few unhealthy flashes, but always emphasizing each passage of the story with extreme care. Tibet's voice reaches us from afar, as if coming from an old broken radio, continuously interrupted by a disturbed frequency, where one hears the sob, the incomprehensible and subdued groan of a perhaps no longer human being. The two dimensions alternate, interspersed by a click, as if a mysterious hand decides to switch from one to the other by pressing the switch of an apparatus.

Thus, there are three planes used to tell us the story: 1) the narrating I, 2) the one complaining, 3) the one pressing the switch. But whose is the tormented sob? Is it from the one who does not understand? And does the stylization of his verses precisely constitute a metaphor for his limited being? Or, on the contrary, is it from the one who understands and has a reason to lament precisely due to his awareness? Of the terrible secrets he has reached? (Always assuming Lynch's cinema as a reference point, think of the seemingly nonexistent plots of his films, where, in reality, through the hallucinatory final collages, one ends up learning that what seemed to be the main plot was actually the result of the protagonist's clouded imagination, and vice versa).

Similarly: who is the narrating I that entertains us? The one who arrives at the truth? The one who simply deludes himself of doing so? And the two voices, what is their relationship? Are they perhaps the same entity viewed from different perspectives? Is one the destiny of the other? Is it thus the temporal plane that is skewed? But above all: who is it that continuously changes the broadcast? And from here would descend millions of philosophical-existentialist discussions.

In the chilling finale, things get even more complicated, as if at a certain point the character played by Tibet, in the manner of a typical Pirandello farce, descended from the stage and mingled with the audience. The last destabilizing minutes of the composition, mind you, are not the expression of the visionary madness infesting Tibet's brain, nor a cheap trick to destabilize the most sensitive. The final passage, when seen clearly, is the inevitable outcome of a game based on the juxtaposition of perspectives, or even better, on the impossible dialogue between different perceptual channels. It is the last box remaining to be opened in this game of Russian dolls.

The box that holds the worst surprise for us...