Current 93
Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre

THE REVIEW

It is extremely difficult for me to find suitable words to describe this wonderful, impenetrable work. A modest, shy work with which one must know how to dialogue, to come into intimate contact. One must earn its trust so that it no longer offers any resistance and lets itself be gently unveiled, layer after layer, listen after listen. An experience more than a work of art.

The folk of "Thunder Perfect Mind," which had been the progenitor of Current 93's new direction, is sublimated in this new 1994 work. In "Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre," the folk sounds become, even more so than in the past, the vehicle for expressing a mystical, intimate experience, an experience that updates the spiritual struggles endured in "Imperium" and rereads them through the crystalline notes of a timeless folk. And where "Imperium" spoke of Death, here we speak of Life. And where "Imperium" was dripping with biblical quotes, here it is David Tibet's heart that speaks.

A stream of consciousness that surpasses and definitively decomposes the song format that the folk clothing had returned to the Current, which today returns to dematerialize in the effluvium of fourteen jewels gracefully and harmoniously set in a single, articulated, anguished composition. Emotions carried by Michael Cashmore's poignant guitar, by Steven Stapleton's delicate electronic manipulations, by David Tibet's evocative oration, probably his best performance: his voice is finally a perfectly tuned instrument, in every word, verse, exclamation, or lament, the infinite nuances of his inner world are revealed, the creaking, the contorting, the turmoil of the fragile strings that weave his tormented soul.
Tibet, supported here and there by the magical voice of Phoebe Cheshire, makes the art of medieval minstrels his own, those who recreated worlds with interpretative pathos and theatrical flair, led elsewhere, captivated the attention of a rapt and ecstatic audience. Tibet takes this art and marries it with the literary revolution of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, with the apocalyptic poetry of Jim Morrison and Nick Cave, with the frenzied ranting of a medium invaded by ecstatic visions.

"The Broken Heart of Man" is the album's subtitle and it reveals the two different planes that run parallel in the work: the biographical dimension of Tibet and the existential dimension of all humanity. "Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre" is a musical diary, a mirror of a restless soul, full of its anxieties and tortuous evolutions. The prostration of Tibet's soul, his inadequacy, his weakness, his loneliness are at the same time the inadequacy, the weakness, and the loneliness of all men, united by the same insoluble doubts, the same unhealable fears, the same, transient, fragile, inexplicable existential condition. The beautiful "All the World Makes Great Blood" and "The Great, Bloody and Bruised Veil of the World" tell us this with elegance and simplicity.

A spiritual journey, a quest in the dark, by trial and error, falls.

"Circles within circles, we ride through them all" are the verses with which Tibet invites us to his rite: a play of light and shadow, from Shadow to Light, through concentric circles. A journey out of time, through London, Leipzig, Kathmandu, to allegorical places, symbolic stages, a spiritual journey fraught with obstacles, crossed by bleeding lacerations, deep fractures, unfathomable abysses.

The Universal in the Particular, "the Great in the Small".

Voices, inner quarrels, echoes of a distant past, a crowding of images, thoughts. A river that snakes, at times impetuous, at times placid, in a mystical valley, between anger, desolation, the stupefaction before the inability to overcome the wall of incomprehension, and new bursts of renewed vigor: the courage, the will to move forward and not stop despite everything, stumbling, tripping in the mirage of that faint thread of light that leaks, somehow, from a thin crack opened between the rocks that bar our path.
Protagonist: hope, which, as the journey progresses and nears its end, soothes, like a distant glow in a sky marred by black clouds, the traveler's path. Even if only for a moment, even if only for a fleeting and temporary instant of awareness and happiness. Even if that moment, we know, is destined to be overshadowed by new doubts, new fears, new uncertainties. The wobbly and bizarre dance of Life.

I don't want to further stain with words the sacred and pure image of this work which I consider my favorite among the many masterpieces that Tibet and his associates have been able to bestow upon all of us over the years. Everyone has an album in their heart, this is mine.

I leave to you the pleasure, the enjoyment, the thrill of sweetly drifting in these notes.