Current 93

cover: DUJ33

The Inmost Light CD Durto Jnana

durtro jnana

Disk 1

  1. Where The Long Shadows Fall

Disk 2

  1. The Long Shadow Falls
  2. All The Pretty Little Horsies
  3. Calling For Vanished Faces I
  4. The Inmost Night
  5. This Carnival Is Dead And Gone
  6. The Bloodbells Chime
  7. Calling For Vanished Faces II
  8. The Frolic
  9. The Inmost Light
  10. Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil
  11. The Inmost Light Itself
  12. All The Pretty Little Horses
  13. Patripassian

Disk 3

  1. The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home

Originally issued in 1995 '96, this set, which announced itself as being “Hallucinatory Patripassianist Song” reissues in their entirety, the mini-albums 'Where The Long Shadows Fall' and 'The Stars Are Marching Sadly Home' , as well as the full length 'All The Pretty Little Horses'.

Current 93 became David Tibet, Steven Stapleton, Michael Cashmore and Joolie Wood for this album. Guest vocalists included Nick Cave, Jhonn Balance of Coil, Andria Degens of Pantaleimon and Shirley Collins.

'All The Pretty Little Horses', an album which Tibet describes as a personal favourite, features guest appearances from Coil's John Balance and Nick Cave. Stapleton's surrealistic tape manipulations are once more to the fore, transforming what would be reasonably normal folk guitar stylings into strangely queasy pitch-shifted nightmares. Tibet's texts are clearly enunciated (and reproduced in the CD booklet) and the album is beautifully structured to build to a shattering climax with the terrifying disembodied voices of "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" and 'The Inmost Light', after which Nick Cave's reprise of the title track, which might seem maudlin out of context, makes perfect sense. Cave also reads the text from the 'Pensèes Of Blaise Pascal' (the most influential theological work of the child prodigy who became a mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher) on the closing "Patripassian", built over a reverberant loop of English 16th century choral music, another one of Tibet's passions.

This series was inspired by such visionaries as painter Louis Wain and author Thomas Ligotti (to whom a track was dedicated), nursery sing-songs and Christian heresies (most notably Patripassianism otherwise known as Trinitarian heresy). In Current 93’s hands the traditional lullaby that lends the album its title, sparks an explosive torrent of bittersweet childhood memories and apocalyptic prophecies. The musical setting for Tibet's narrative is exquisite, kaleidoscopic music composed with twelve-string guitar, piano, string arrangements, flutes, bells, massed drones, childrens voices and ecstatic recitations.

'The Inmost Light' is a powerful and extremely moving listening experience.