DOGS BLOOD RISING

This is the kind of music I'm expecting to encounter in hell after I die... Bring it on, that's all I can say. Hell is where all the interesting people go!

'Dogs Blood Rising' is a guitar and bass free album but is very intense from the first notes right until the end. The opener 'Christus Christus (the Shells Have Cracked)' gives birth to something vile where Aleister Crowley tape loops are played at varying speeds and direction creating a kaleidoscopic effect.

'Falling Back in Fields of Rape' is a tune that both 'Current 93' and stable mates 'Death in June' occasionally re-visited, giving it a severe re-working on a number of occasions. This version is certainly the creepiest and peaks with some insane sounding vocals by 'Crass' front-man Steve Ignorant. Rose McDowall of 'Strawberry Switchblade' also contributes a spoken passage about 'falling from a helicopter' and other unlikely ways to die.

David Tibet sounds like the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada throughout with his high pitched shrieking which quite literally sounds like a hallucinatory nightmare. Just one look at him on the inner sleeve is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

To cheer myself up I think on little plastercine man 'Morph' from 'Take Hart'. He does, after-all, enormously resemble lead vocalist David Tibet.

This is very different in sound from almost all of their recordings from 1988 onwards. If you have a penchant for the morbid suffering of Christ and almost Satanic Mass-like lyrics, you'd do well to check out 'Dawn' and the well and truly terrifying 'Nature Unveiled' which took this sound as far as the genre could go.

One point is docked for the too live sounding 'Jesus Wept' which overstays its welcome by a good 5 minutes, although the manipulation of vocals through tapes from various sources are very impressive.

Unbelievably there's a cover version of Simon and Garfunkel's 'Scarborough Fair' to see us out. Needless to say, it's the polar opposite in atmosphere of the original.

The best thing about early Current 93 is that David Tibet doesn't yet sound like UK 90's astrologer 'Mystic Meg'. From that point on I went off them very quickly. 'Dog's Blood Rising' is however a fantastic album if you're in a misanthropic mood. If you're not you'll HATE THIS - guaranteed!

Black blood

Sounding unlike anything else in Current 93's discography, Dogs Blood Rising throws the listener into a nightmarish jagged edge soundtrack. I've heard a lot of people talking about evil music - albums that are supposed to be frightening, and most of the time what you encounter are melancholic droopy atmospheres which are as horrifying as a pack of black poodles. Woof!

This debut though will have you reaching for the light-switch in no time. I know, I've had several nightmares due to it. I often use music in the mornings to pull me out of bed - setting the timer on my stereo, and then slowly and comfortably awake to the soothing gentle touch of patterned sound. Having forgot about the cd changer in my old stereo system, this particular album sometimes acted as substitute for an alarm clock, although I wouldn't in a million years consciously dream of using it as such. No way in hell! The music had a ninja like way of sneaking into my dreams - terrorising and haunting me like an evil shadow you can't escape. Each time, I woke up completely soaked in sweat with flashing black dots in front of my eyes - desperately trying to remind myself about reality, life and sunshine.

The music itself is void of bass and guitars, which does conjure up a distinctive high pitched atmosphere, that evokes images of ancient bottomless Gothic churches with huge black holes in them that stretch all the way down to the place where demons and darkness dwell. Instead the sound spectrum is filled with strange embryonic tape loops, crashing cymbals, whispering witches on the wind and most importantly David Tibet's demonic vocals.

It's strange to think that this album just might be the most religion saturated one inside an enormous discography, yet at the same time fulfilling the role of being the single most devilish, evil and frightening of the lot. David Tibet sounds like a man who's personally spent a couple of weeks dangling on a cross with rusty nails through his wrists before laying down the vocal tracks. Imagine an absurd mix of Prodigy's Keith Flint and the utmost vile and rusty black metal screeching cobbled together into one bone-chilling affair - and you're not that far off. Somewhere between incantations and mad unchecked warnings from a religious hermit - you'll find this startling man. With a lyrical content that puts forth the horror and madness of the biblical texts, he illustrates what man has become in order to contain the animal side of him - though always lurking in the back of our minds like burning white embers.

Whether you choose to look at the cold and lifeless ambiance of the music, that more than anything resembles a soldier's march through fields of death and mud - or you face towards the raging vocals of Tibet - the counter-pointing effect of religion and fear, God and hell, man and animal, -is always there. Drawn like a fly to a wound, the feel of this record is the omnipresent soulless and bottomless pit. It's frightening yes - dissonant at times also, but aside from all of these less than sympathetic characteristics of Dogs Blood Rising, you have to give the band some respect for putting such a record out in the midst of the 80s. There was literally nothing out there that sounded remotely like this, and even today I struggle to find any other album that frightens me the way this one does. It is that scary. Feels like a long strange kiss from Vlad the Impaler, while sniffing in the smell of burning wild flowers.

David Tibet followed up the epochal Nature Unveiled with this attempt to craft the early Current 93 sound into things resembling songs. A quirky range of influences is unveiled, with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land being one of them (little voices interject here and there with bits of the poem or other similar-sounding phrases, much like the poem itself is written to suggest a babble of different voices speaking) and from a more unexpected direction, Simon & Garfunkel. (Specifically, "St. Peters Keys All Bloody" is an avant-industrial cover of "Sound of Silence".)

The centrepiece of the album is Falling Back In Fields of Rape, a prose-poem set to a dark industrial backing first recited by Steve Ignorant of anarcho-punk band Crass before we hear it recited by a child. A catalogue of horrors inflicted during wartime and dictatorship of all flavours ("fields of rape" being a double meaning for the rape-seed crop and... well. you've probably guessed the other meaning), the composition is a major thematic keystone of David Tibet's work, with snippets of the text appearing elsewhere in his work frequently. A portion of the lyrics became the words to a very different rendition from Death In June on the Nada! album, for instance, and the repeated refrain "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" (which far from distancing us from the atrocities makes us question whether they are really that foreign) would lend its name to a collaboration with famed horror author Thomas Ligotti over a decade later.

Whilst not quite the unflinchingly uncompromising vision that Nature Unveiled was, Dogs Blood Rising is still very dark territory indeed, but one which needs to be explored by those who wish to really unpick what was going on with David Tibet in the early 1980s.

Formed in 1982 by David Tibet, CURRENT 93 emerged as one of those experimental collage type acts that followed in the footsteps of the strange industrial noise artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Nurse With Wound. In fact CURRENT 93's first public offering was on the "Mi-Mort" split with Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound act in 1983 so it's no wonder he invited Stapleton on board to assist in crafting a new style of bizarrely demented soundscapes that offered veritable soundtracks to hell. Tibet put out three releases in 1984 and it's not exactly clear which came first. While some claim "Nature Unveiled" to be the official debut, others cite this darker sibling DOGS BLOOD RISING to be the actual first. It's very likely they were released simultaneously when few were paying attention.

Whatever the case, while CURRENT 93 has become more famous for its experimental folk musical expressions that dominated the 1990s, at this first stage Tibet delivers an anarchic wild mix of Gregorian chants, poetry, grating industrial sounds, field recordings, nursery rhymes, drones and harsh electronics mishmashed into one of the freakiest displays of experimental music that the 80s had to offer in the company of equally disturbing sound weirdos like Zoviet France, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten and Z'ev. DOGS BLOOD RISING features six distinct tracks that experiment with tape loops, chanting, haunting vocal accompaniments and random noise. With a clear obsession with Jesus Christ and the art of violence, the album opens with an abrasive droning industrial soundscape with repetitively looped chanting and absurdly unstable electronic sound effects.

The second track "Falling Back In Fields Of Rape" offers a 14-minute freakathon that finds a subdued backdrop of Gregorian chanting accompanied by an erratic electronic drumbeat and shouted vocals that "bleed" to the forefront with electronic effects. Tibet also showcases his spoken word poetic prose delivered with indignant passion and finding studio effects offering variations on the spoken word delivery system which leads up to crazed angry screams and moments of children's nursery rhymes with a collage of random noise and spoken dialogue overlapping. It just gets weirder and darker as it progresses with more abrasive electronic static sounds and industrial vocal styles akin to Skinny Puppy. "From Broken Cross, Locusts" offers liturgical church readings in text while eerie electronic buzzing jumps in and out along with Tibet's evil sounding chanting. Sporadic percussive clanking offers the bleakest of industrial griminess to the mix.

As strange as the entire album is perhaps the most bizarre of all is the 14-minute "Relo No Terrasu (Jesus Wept)" which finds Tibet bellowing out some of his most possessed vocal performances on the album while a demonic female backing vocalist offers operatic contrapuntal harmonies. The track progresses in cyclical loops with the same repeated phrases and production tricks that create a rather psychedelic weirdness to it all with echoes and reverberation. The layered vocals result in sounding like a swarm of hornets while the Gregorian chanting pops in and out of audibility. The hypnotic chanting reminds a bit of Tibetan Bhuddist varieties which is supposedly designed to reach higher levels of consciousness which can alter the fabric of space time itself. Well perhaps this doesn't achieve the same magnanimous task but does deliver one of the most hauntingly bizarre musical expressions ever laid down to tape. This is more bizarre than any Krautrock or experimental rock of the 70s.

After a rather short ending track "St Petes Keys All Bloody" which is a menacing recital of the lyrics to Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound Of Silence" with minimal freaky effects, the album ends leaving you wondering WTF you just experienced! A highly alienating album upon first encounter, DOGS BLOOD RISING only reveals its genius after fully integrating it into your soul and only then can you truly appreciate the groundbreaking efforts that were performed in bringing this perplexing peculiarity to reality. An acquired taste for sure but the tapestry of musical elements that serve as some sort of musical quilting of pointillistic musical styles is actually quite brilliant. Personally i love this uncompromising experimental stuff and CURRENT 93's earliest releases will deliver to you the most bizarre and erratic quirkiness that you could ever hope for.