Current 93
Live at Bar Maldoror

The album title is misleading: "Live at Bar Maldoror" is not the recording of a live performance, but rather the third official full-length release from the mind of David Tibet.

It is undoubtedly a minor work in the vast series of records released over the years by the Current: released in 1986, "Live at Bar Maldoror" actually collects remixes and reinterpretations of compositions from the two masterpieces that preceded it, "Nature Unveiled" and "Dogs Blood Rising". It is true that in the context of industrial music, the act of remixing assumes particular meanings far removed from what has today become a mere commercial ploy: in industrial music, the art of transformation par excellence, working on a piece means reinventing, redefining, and imprinting new conceptual meanings. Despite this, the album remains, all things considered, a negligible episode, recommended only to the band's completist fans.

The atmospheres, the contents remain those of the two previous works, reread and reinterpreted in a more vividly atmospheric key; or, given the context, we could say catacombic. Placing the record on the turntable or inserting the CD into the player means opening unimaginable abysses within our narrow rooms. You won't struggle to believe that the first two tracks, lasting 19 and 23 minutes respectively, will be able to melt the space-time coordinates with which we usually read and measure the Real.

Steve Stapleton's dexterity in the art of industrial collage and assembly is evident in every moment of the 52 minutes that compose the work, packaged in a more than professional manner: the sounds are indeed excellent, full, round, like a comfortable shroud in which to wrap oneself in the closed confines of a coffin.

"Live at Bar Maldoror" is a sort of turmoil of the subconscious, made of blurred, rarefied images, ghostly presences that overlap and confuse with each other. Tibet's dark ceremonials flow more fluidly than in the past, the percussive side is almost nullified, the voices are dematerialized into echoes and reverberations, blended into a voyage terrible made of shadows and dense, muddy, morbid sound waves. Thus, the listening experience ranges from terrifying to traumatic, and although the album does not carry with it that avant-garde and subversive propulsion of earlier works (which undoubtedly pointed the way for new directions within "dark" music in a broader sense), it remains one of the Current's most dreadful episodes, as well as one of the most vivid examples of what is meant by esoteric industrial music.

Alone into the Alone is the remix of the colossal "Ach Golgotha (Maldoror is Dead)" (from "Nature Unveiled"): an abyss in which to find the themes of "Christus Christus" and "Jesus Wept", both originally present in "Dogs Blood Rising".

"Only Shadows of the Hook" mixes in an infernal orgy "The Mystical Body of Christ in Chorazaim" (also from "Nature Unveiled") and the already mentioned "Christus Christus" and "Jesus Wept".

In the remaining two tracks, the brief and minimal "Christ's First Howling" and "Fields of Rape", Stapleton's influence is strongly felt, and it is no coincidence that both tracks follow in the footsteps of his main project, Nurse With Wound.

"Live at Bar Maldoror", ultimately, is not a bad album at all, but when it comes down to it, it sounds prolix and redundant, even though the operation retains its own reason, its own raison d'être, its own communicative urgency: a step of further clarification and deepening made necessary by the inner restlessness of Tibet's disturbed psyche, which evidently needed to dwell on certain sensations and particularly on the theme of Maldoror, a cornerstone of this early phase of his career.

The album, alas, also marks the first timid sign that a certain type of journey was already running out, mainly due to the irreproducibility (in terms of innovative charge, creativity, and expressive force) of the two previous experiences.

With the benefit of hindsight, finally, we can assert that at the very beginning of his journey, Tibet already erred in excessive prolificacy that would not always hit the mark.

"Live at Bar Maldoror" is an example of this.