Dear all:

Thanks to all that came to Santiago; especial thanks to Rosario Rivero for making it possible!

‘Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain’ now available

This album is now released; all of those who ordered it from Durtro have been sent their copies.

Regarding the extensive leaking and bootlegging of the promo version of the album, I was amused to see that the spoken introduction and outro on the promo edition, which had Alice and Henry Rousham saying "This is a promotional CD. Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening. God is Love…" was removed from the majority of the postings of the album online. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The album is 53 minutes long and is packaged in a full colour 6-panel digipak with a 28-page booklet containing all the album's lyrics and photos of all the band and a folded poster with the names and photos of all those who took part in the Subscription Edition. The album was produced and mixed by Andrew Liles, Steven Stapleton and David Tibet.

The album has 8 tracks:

Invocation of Almost • Poppyskins • On Docetic Mountain • 26 April 2007 • Aleph is the Butterfly Net • Not Because the Fox Barks • UrShadow • As Real as Rainbows

The line-up is:

David Tibet: vocals, July and Gorgon guitars
James Blackshaw: 12-string guitar, piano
William Breeze: electric viola, viola-controlled sampler
Ossian Brown: synthesizers, treated organ, electronics
John Contreras: cello, synthesizers
Baby Dee: piano, Hammond organ, throat song
Andria Degens: vocals
Sasha Grey: vocals
Andrew Liles: electronics, guitars
Alex Neilson: drums, percussion
Rickie Lee Jones: vocals
Alice Rousham: vocals
Henry Rousham: vocals
Steven Stapleton: electronics, glands
Matt Sweeney: electric guitar, vocals
Andrew W.K.: bass, piano, vocals
Keith Wood: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, bass

iTunes exclusive download for ‘Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain’

This album is exclusively available for download at iTunes for this week. It is also available, of course, from Durtro's Greedbag store.

Reviews of ‘Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain’

There are four excellent reviews of ALEPH already:

Brainwashed • Judas Kiss • Observer Music Monthly

Plan B:

“Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience”—Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

David Tibet, an autodidact prophet in the tradition of Gerrard Winstanley and John Lydon, has been preaching apocalypse for over 25 years. But no longer is he a voice crying in the wilderness: now, every day, the air tingles with anxiety—global recession, energy crises, environmental disaster. Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain can be seen as a return to the matter of the first, recently reissued Current 93 recordings, whose ravaged soundscapes—a reaction to the Babylon of Thatcherite Britain—seem increasingly pertinent.

Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain is probably Tibet’s most ambitious project since 1993’s The Inmost Light trilogy. It is an eschatological rock opera of sorts, acted out in Tibet’s own bewildering, syncretic cosmology, the frequent incomprehensivity of which matters no more than it did for Blue Öyster Cult on Imaginos.

Its theme—which, as far as I can tell, is that of the war of opposites: flesh and spirit, Rome and Jersusalem, Samael and Monad—isn’t that important, except as a justification for Tibet to deliver some of his most overwrought, fire-and-brimstone performances in Current 93’s history. Those who accuse him of being campy and OTT will find plenty of fuel here: when he draws the word ‘murderer’ out over James Blackshaw’s Early Music flourishes on ‘Poppyskins’, or whispers that “my teeth are possessed by demons”—snarls of guitar like lightning—he seems possessed of both sincerity and an awareness of how ludicrous he sounds. A gnostic Vincent Price, he rolls his ‘R’s in his best Abiezer Coppe impression.

The (admittedly impressive) list of players gathered on this album is also unimportant. Except for Alex Neilson’s supportive, malleable percussion (which occasionally resembles that of Om’s Chris Hakius) and Blackshaw’s guitar filigrees, the ensemble is united in support of Tibet’s benevolent demagoguery. In what is largely a continuation and refinement of 2006’s Black Ships Ate the Sky, grinding rock sits alongside becalmed folk. Even the peaks of Tibet’s sermonising aggression are balanced out by plateaus of slowly-building tension girded with strings and organ. ‘26 April 2007’ is a narcotic glide shot through with coronae of fuzz; the voices—supplied by Pantaleimon’s Andria Degens and Baby Dee, among others—drift like EVP. ‘Not Because…’ and ‘As Real as Rainbows’, are frighteningly intense: the former verges on metal, Tibet ventriloquising the final tribulation amid vast, electric slabs—his incantations sound like Ozzy narrating the end of Clash of the Titans. After the extinction of Antichrist comes the advent of paradise in the form of a stately guitar and piano; and, when ‘As Real as Rainbows’ drops into a maelstrom of glitch, organ and piano—it’s as moving as anything on Sleep Has His House, still C93’s peak.

“The deserts will be filled/With the comas of stars” speak Degens and Grey in words resonant with the promise of the millenarians who captivated England 360 years ago—that another world is possible, here and now.

“I live in an increasing awareness that a Love will come suddenly who will finally tear our skies apart,” Tibet wrote in the sleeve notes to Black Ships Ate the Sky. Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain is the most preposterous warning yet of its imminent arrival; a vital reminder that the end of the world, if we choose, will also be the triumph of love.

David Tibet joins awesomely beautiful Japanese metal band SIGH on their new album

I was hugely honoured to be invited by Sigh's Mirai Kawashima to contribute vocals to their forthcoming album, ‘Scene from Hell/Tempore Belli/Vanitas’, to be released on The End Records later this year. More news when we have it. www.myspace.com/sighjapan

love to you all,

David Tibet