12. Current 93The Inmost Light
I was a big fan of Current 93 before I worked with them. There are a lot of things with Current 93 that influenced Six Organs in the first place. One is Michael Cashmore’s guitar playing. The way he voices chords, and the way that he works melodies into the progressions. His own particular finger style, which is a little more classical style. His guitar pieces are very concise, and they’re packed full of so much emotional information right there. He was a big influence on my guitar playing, and then, of course, Current 93 itself, the way that they wove drones in and Steven Stapleton’s work on this record with more collage work into drones, how the acoustic guitars are layered on top of the drones. This is all just the music. This is not even mentioning [David] Tibet’s lyrical work, where every song almost presents you with a room with 30 doors that you could go through and discover new esoteric ideas. He throws so much of that into the songs, whatever he’s into at the time, it’s in the record. I think that that’s probably why the cult of Current 93 is so large, because he offers people not just his own music, but all of these ideas that they can go explore if they want to. They’re a pretty important band for me.
It probably went beyond my expectations once I was actually in Current 93. David Tibet is so open and friendly. There was never any sort of hierarchy, he really makes sure that you feel like you’re a part of the band. It just seemed very natural to play in the band for a while. I eventually stopped playing with them just because it was almost too good of an experience being with them. It would have been very easy to just surrender my identity to being the Current 93 guitar player until David decided to do something new or whatever. But I wanted to reclaim the identity for Six Organs and my other things because I didn’t want Six Organs to start to be subsumed under the identity of a Current 93 band. I wanted to be separate, which David absolutely understood and respected. And we’re still good friends. We’re supposed to talk next week and hopefully we’ll do stuff in the future. But that record in particular was very influential on Six Organs records. I did a record called Dark Noontide and that was heavily influenced, not heavily but I was very into Current 93 and Organum, David Jackman, and how those drones could work with folk music, so Current 93 very much worked in there.
