Current 93
Where The Long Shadows Fall

LA RECENSIONE

The trilogy that goes by the name "The Inmost Light" is one of the most fascinating experiences in the artistic journey of Current 93: it represents a crucial junction in Tibet's thought, which has always shaped, given substance, and consistency to the sonic movements of its artistic creation.

We're in the nineties, and the "philosophical" vision underlying the works of Current 93 has undergone a progressive evolution. The blurred catacomb visions of the early works have slowly transformed into something more mature, into a richer and more composite sound, behind which spiritual research has become progressively deeper and more articulated. "Of Ruine of some Blazing Starre" from 1993 had explicitly dramatized the fractures in David Tibet's troubled path, whose reflections have always centered around themes of life, death, and more generally, the precariousness of man in this world. But it is with the monumental work "The Inmost Light" that the fundamental premises are set for the artistic journey of the Current to be ferried in the future, not without difficulty and setbacks, from Darkness to Light. And while David Tibet's art retains its anxieties and elements of restlessness, it is from the three works that constitute this trilogy that the shoots leading to the final incarnation of the Current, the one that reaches the Christian God with "Hypnagogue," develop with greater vigor.

If the nucleus of the trilogy undoubtedly remains the central work, the superb "All the Pretty Little Horses," an album that can be taken and appreciated even in isolation (miraculous its formal balance, its fragile suspension between light and shadows, poised between brilliant folk-song and dark-ambient d'auteur), the work that precedes it and the one that follows should not be forgotten, completing its message together. "All the Pretty Little Horses" is indeed a work that, with its "glow," inevitably ends up overshadowing two works made of darkness: a sort of introduction and a sort of epilogue that, although they represent more than valid moments in the vast discography of the Current (and therefore unreachable for the rest of the apocalyptic panorama), to be fully appreciated must necessarily be contextualized in a broader vision that includes at least the three acts of the work.

The first of these two works is "Where the Long Shadows Fall (Beforetheinmostlight)," which was released in 1995 and consists of a single track: almost twenty minutes in which the "folk" revolution undertaken in previous years seems to be, at least momentarily, set aside. Evidently, for the purposes of the concept, it was useful to assume an expressive medium that looked to the band's past (and the band has often made these leaps backward), reinstating the spectral dark-ambient of the origins, obviously revisited in light of the artistic maturity, but above all present existential maturity achieved in the meantime.

The lyrics describe a dark and desolate forest, a landscape where a lost soul wanders in the dense darkness of spiritual emptiness, suspended between the bewilderment of a path lost in the Unknown and the terror derived from the inevitable approach to a senseless destination such as Death. To depict such a path, Tibet resorts to a timid whisper and spectral gasps: a prayer in which the track title is repeated with macabre rituality. Surrounding this are the ascetic tones and the long shadows cast by the gloomy bass tones and the reverberation of Michael Cashmore's guitar, shadows accompanied, like a sad procession, by David Kenny's guitar and Steven Stapleton's disturbing sound manipulations.

The sonic corpus of the composition is a sample of Alessandro Moreschi's chanting (sampling taken from the only recording ever made by a castrato) that loops throughout the track's duration.

At the end of the track, which does not foresee great variations and therefore might seem repetitive (I remind you: the work must be seen as part of a greater entity), emerges John Balance's dark speech posing the question from which "All the Pretty Little Horses" will originate ("Why We can't just walk away?"), demonstrating how "Where the Long Shadows Fall" should be taken as nothing more than the funereal introduction of a work that will see its full development in the subsequent two works: a path of darkness whose mist will be dissipated (in one of the most magical moments that music has gifted me) by the crystalline arpeggio of the guitar opening the intense title track "All the Pretty Little Horses."

It's just the beginning of a journey.