Interview: Current 93
Interview by Brandon Stosuy Despite the success of his Durtro label (original home of Antony) and Ghost Story Press (home of high-quality books since 1993), David Tibet remains best known as the mind and voice behind Current 93, his main project since he formed the group in 1982 with former Psychic TV bandmate Jhonn Balance (Coil) and Fritz Haaman (23 Skidoo). In May, Current 93 released
Black Ships Ate the Sky, its first proper studio album since 2000's
Sleep Has His House. It's a huge dose of apocalyptic gorgeousness peopled by Tibet's constellation of friends and musical associates. Regular collaborators Stephen Stapleton, Michael Cashmore, and cellist John Contreras are there, of course, as is the newest Current 93 mainstay, Ben Chasny. William Basinski, among a handful of others, also contributes to the instrumentation. For all the cooks, it's a surprisingly spacious recording, intensified by repetitions of the central hymn, "Idumæa", sung and scored variously by Marc Almond, Antony, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Shirley Collins, Baby Dee, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Tibet himself, among others.
I phoned Tibet at his home in Hastings, England. Mistakenly characterized as dark and foreboding because of his often dark and foreboding themes, Tibet proved a generous, thoughtful, and funny conversationalist, considering questions carefully, responding at length to anything I tossed his way. The discussion pleasingly wandered across various subjects, including his frustrations with James Joyce and jazz, his love of Shirley Collins, the death of Coil's Jhonn Balance, and why girl-group music reminds him of the apocalypse.
Pitchfork: Black Ships Ate the Sky took quite some time to complete. That, along with the number of collaborators, gives it the air of a magnum opus. Did you intend to for it be the biggest statement of your career?
David Tibet: Well, no I didn't. It was a really important album for me, and like a lot of Current 93 albums, it starts off with a conceptual idea, which is sometimes just a phrase. So with this album the phrase came to me, “Black Ships Ate the Sky”, then I started having a lot of very intense dreams and a lot of text would come in. It's difficult to explain-- it sort of falls into my head. I get the sensation that a hole, or like a slit, opens in the top of my skull, and colors and words started falling in. It happened before with other records or sometimes paintings, but this time it was particularly intense, and it just kept on pouring in with just so much material. The whole idea, it was revealed to me.
I don't mean that in a religious or pseudo-religious sense. If I say it came to me in a vision it sounds like I'm being really pompous-- I don't want it to sound like that. Bill Fay said to me, "Do you mean stream of consciousness?" Perhaps it's that, but it was very visual. I saw colors. Sometimes I get really bad migraines with big hallucinatory patterns, so there's that as well. It was a personal experience. What I mean is I got the phrase and I didn't quite understand its significance-- the explanations came afterwards.
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