Current 93
The Great In The Small

LA RECENSIONE

For once I will be brief, but you will agree with me that, in light of what I will say, my words will still always be too many.

Because to describe this album, only one adjective is needed: unlistenable.

And yes, this time even the greatest fan of the Current will have to capitulate before the evidence: the chilling evidence of a work that cannot in any way be appreciated by the human ear.

But even in its less convincing endeavors, Tibet manages to create something rare, in this case we could add "unique". Because no one ever in the history of music has dared as much as David Tibet and Steven Stapleton dared in this album: "The Great in the Small", released in 2000, compresses into sixty-one ultra-compressed minutes the entire discography of Current 93 from its beginnings to the EP "Faust" (about twenty years of career), including all the tracks present in various compilations, all the remixes, all the b-sides, and all the recordings made by Tibet and Stapleton not released under the names Current 93 and Nurse with Wound.

No, perhaps we didn't understand each other: "The Great in the Small" is not a collection, it's a single track that contains in a disconcerting simultaneity all the material recorded by the Current, that is, dozens and dozens of hours of music, all in sixty-one minutes.

I repeat: all the material of the Currents from its early years to 2000, and it’s not like Tibet was stingy with his releases along the way. The effect? It's like turning on a dozen devices at once, including CD players, cassette players, and turntables. So: an amazing thing.

There's undoubtedly a powerful work behind the imponderable cacophony of these sixty-one minutes, and Stapleton and Tibet (plus Colin Potter as sound engineer) confirm themselves as excellent assemblers in managing (speeding up when necessary) to put all this stuff together, layers and layers of music in which obviously the sum is infinitely lesser than the parts taken individually: a meticulousness that can only match the madness that animates such an intent.

In practice, "The Great in the Small" is a shameful incest of all the Current 93 albums, where the creeping esoteric tracks of the beginnings copulate with the works of folk maturity: essentially, an infernal whirlwind where grandparents, fathers, uncles, children, and grandchildren engage in a swirling orgy that will leave very little room for listening pleasure.

No, this album cannot be listened to: only in the last minutes, after almost an hour of horrendous cacophony (an exhausting maelstrom of dissonant voices and muffled sounds that plunge into the infernos of the most painful senselessness) does it seem possible to reach a moment of catharsis, where the predominant feature is the epic, mystical harmonium of "Good Morning, Great Moloch" (from the funereal "Sleep Has His House"). But it is truly little to reassess an endeavor of this type. Even the cover (a collage of the covers of all the Current publications, by the always excellent Babs Santini) is nice, but it certainly won't be enough to repay the money spent on this monstrous discographic operation.

A "no rating", therefore, that diplomatically positions itself between the absolute zero of the final delivery of the product and the highest grades it can deserve, for boldness, the idea of being able to crown such an intent.

For everyone, but really for everyone: a purchase to avoid like the plague, unless you have time to waste and the patience to grasp the endless details served on this infernal platter.