2. ComusFirst Utterance
When I was in my early twenties I was listening to the strangest stuff I could find. I was deep in a Throbbing Gristle phase. I was listening to Coil and Current 93. David Tibet was putting out some strange LPs at that time, and one was of an Icelandic farmer poet, Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson singing the eddas in old Icelandic. Then there was a Current 93 album, Horsey (1997), where they did a Comus cover, ‘DIANA’. So I knew I had to track that original record down. When I saw the cover, it reminded me of Rudimentary Peni and [Nick] Blinko’s artwork. I saw it as super outsider art and the music just felt like outsider folk. It felt like I had this psychedelic outsider folk masterpiece in my hands. I dove in pretty deep and listened to it a lot, and let’s just say I had some very revelatory moments with it when I was in certain states of mind. Especially on the way down. It kind of imprinted itself upon me. In fact in Neurosis – I think it’s at the end of ‘Cleanse’ off Enemy Of The Sun – there’s a part where people are chanting what sounds like ‘insane, insane’, and it’s panning left and right. Well, we sampled that [off First Utterance] and we stuck it in there.
