BEAUTY REAPS THE BLOOD OF SOLITUDE

Michael Cashmore had come into the Current 93/Death In June gravity well in the early 1990s, and I would go so far as to say that this album completes a triptych that caps off this particular era of those musicians' work. Thunder Perfect Mind and But What Ends When The Symbols Shatter? constitute two classics in the Current 93 and Death In June catalogues respectively, and I have reason to believe that the May 1994 sessions for this album constituted the final musical collaboration between David Tibet and his merry band on the one hand and Doug Pearce on the other, bringing the neofolk era shaped by their alliance to a close. (Tibet and allies are featured on the Death In June release Rose Clouds of Holocaust, but based on the timeline of their bust-up I think it is very possible that they were only involved in the April 1994 sessions for that album, and that the October to December 1994 sessions that completed it happened after the split... plus I think that album is a bit of an aesthetic failure all round, so there's that.)

But this album is not merely the last time Tibet (plus allies) and Pearce would collaborate so successfully and harmoniously on a musical project - it's also Cashmore's change to sign as a composer and multi-instrumentalist, and he certainly does that, offering in the album what amounts to an early blueprint of the sort of softer, gentler influences he would bring into the Current 93 sound (coming to the fore particularly on Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre). By itself, it is achingly beautiful; set next to Thunder Perfect Mind and But What Ends..., and it's the final piece of a puzzle revealing the absolute best the apocalyptic folk scene has to offer.