The Wily Filipino

Current 93 / Om / Pantaleimon / Six Organs of Admittance / Maja Elliott, SF, 11/5/2005.

This was Night #2 of the big Current 93 lovefest; given that this was only the second time, in almost a quarter century of existence, that Current 93 has toured San Francisco, I bought my ticket the day it went on sale. (The fact that Om was opening for them made the concert even sweeter.)

First up was Maja Elliott: while her piano has, in essence, been the cornerstone of Current 93's sound in the last few years, Elliott solo is another matter; the music wouldn't seem out of place on a Windham Hill release circa 1982. (Not necessarily an insult, but you know what I mean.)

I have to confess I walked out once from hearing Six Organs of Admittance (he was opening for Ghost last year). This time, however, Ben Chasny started off with some serious effects pedals din, flailing around like Keiji Haino; by the time he would alternate this with relatively gentle and intricate fingerpicking, I was hooked. I'm not walking out on him again.

Pantaleimon, who is basically Andria Degens -- whose album I bought off eBay when I got home from the concert -- played haunting stuff: droney tone poems on harmonium (I think) and hammered dulcimer (I think). Too bad the audience was extremely, rudely loud at this point.

Then Om was next. I have Variations on a Theme (and of course all the Sleep albums), but listening to them on crappy computer speakers simply didn't prepare me for the sheer, brutal, lunkheaded purity of their vision: detuned bass guitar, a badly-abused drum kit, blown-out speakers, hair flying everywhere, and one hypnotic 45-minute track (or at least it seemed that long). This was straight-up, bludgeoning stoner rock right out of Jerusalem / Dopesmoker; considering that Om is basically Sleep minus one (i.e., Matt Pike's guitar), the new music is necessarily even more reductive, if that were possible. (I think they annoyed the hell out of the Strawberry Switchblade goths in the audience, so it was great to hear Tibet later call Om "my absolute favorite band in the world." A few around me had their fingers in their ears the entire time; that may have included the guy with incense up front who, I swear, was writing in his diary in between sets.) Their set alone practically wiped me out already.

Of course, the band everyone came to see was Current 93. The current touring lineup -- Elliott on piano, John Contreras on cello, Joolie Wood on violin, William Breeze on viola (one would think that the Caliph of the O.T.O. would be pretty busy, but hey), Baby Dee on harp, Chasny on electric guitar, the legendary Simon Finn on acoustic guitar, and of course, The Artist Formerly Known As David Tibet on vocals -- was a quite formidable one, at least sonically speaking. Because of this, in many ways, the highlights of the concert were the new apocalyptic songs from the upcoming Black Ships Ate The Sky album; the so-called Coptic single, for instance, is a collision of Soft Black Stars-style minimalism with the industrial crash of his earliest albums.

The last time I saw David Late Tibet was at the same very venue, though I was standing next to the bar and mostly hearing the clink of the bottles. This time, however, I had managed to wriggle my way into the second row, close to the center, right behind David's lyric sheet stand (one row away from where I was standing at the Merzbow concert a couple of months ago). This gave me the perfect vantage point to see him declaim and grimace and twitch like a preacher possessed, almost unrelenting in intensity.

The setlist, as one could have guessed, drew largely from the output of the last few years (see also How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon and Halo), with a blistering "Oh Coal Black Smith" before the encore, from those days when David and Boyd Rice and John Balance and Douglas Pearce were all still buddies. (At some point some idiot in the audience yelled for "Freebird," to which Tibet replied, "We're no fucking covers band," but did do a scary version of Bill Fay's "Time of the Persecution.") The evening ended with one of my favorite C93 songs: piano, vocals, "Have pity for the dead / Sleep has his house." Amazing.

Posted by the wily filipino at November 7, 2005 01:34 PM