AS THE WORLD DISAPPEARS...

The addition of Michael Cashmore to the Current 93 collective coincided with a new and completely unexpected beauty emerging from what David Tibet and company. Bear in mind that for much of the 1980s they had been associated mostly with disturbing dark ambient soundscapes and an abrasive take on neofolk as captured on Swastikas For Noddy, but neither sound is especially prominent in this document of a live gig from late in 1990; instead, Cashmore's delicate guitar playing combines with Joolie Wood's violin and James Malindaine-Lafayette's harp to provide a gentle texture to Tibet's song-poems that really brings out the best in them.

The set list takes in both the immediate past of Current 93 and its near future. As far as the past is concerned, songs are plucked out from the Imperium, Horse, and Earth Covers Earth releases (including a rendition of Horsey that is radically different from the one on Horse), but the album also includes early airings of songs from Island and Thunder Perfect Mind, plus a rarity in the form of They Returned to their Earth (For my Christ Thorn). The shift in Tibet's lyrics to intensely personal subjects is very evident here, with loss and allusions to a loved one's drug use being perceptible across the lyrics.

Interestingly, it includes some heartfelt performances of A Song For Douglas After He's Dead, a song which clearly refers to Doug Pearce of Death In June fame who Tibet was regularly collaborating with at the time. What's notable is that Doug was not performing with Current 93 at the concert in question - making it a bit of an oddity, since during this era, prior to their 1994 parting of the ways, Doug and Tibet had seemed almost inseparable; however, with Cashmore on guitar Pearce's absence does not seem to be a disadvantage, and if anything it rather illustrates how quickly Cashmore's own guitar style became very important to Current 93's music. Cashmore would be a common link running through an incredible triptych of releases in coming years - Current 93's Thunder Perfect Mind, Death In June's But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter?, and Cashmore's own Nature & Organisation project's Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude - and this makes a superb prelude to that.