Working with the Final Hallucinatory Patripassianist rock group…..
Flanked by Andrew Liles and Bobbie Watson; with C93 at the Union Chapel, 2014
Bobbie & I first got to know David Tibet through the good offices of Comus, and it was after a Comus gig in 2013 that David asked us both to contribute to the then-upcoming C93 album, ‘I Am The Last Of All The Field That Fell: A Channel‘.
Despite Bobbie and I each having only worked on three tracks for the album, David – as is his way – decided, during the rehearsal for the album-debut Union Chapel gig, that we should play / sing throughout the set. This required a bit of fleet-footed key / mode determination, and some high-wire improvisation on my part, but the gig was one of the most satisfying I’d played in a long time.
Like another friend, Steve Krakow, (AKA Chicago’s very own Plastic Crimewave), DT has fashioned a highly expressive, idiomatic written language. He is very good at the poetic slight of hand that implies networks of meaning between words in a phrase, and, over time, he has constructed a rich, meaningful relationship with reality from the accretion and layering of arcane, sometimes archaic, religious and hermeneutic ideas.
He is also, famously, a ‘hallucinatory cartoonist at Docetic Mountain’. So not a muso then!
When funding permits, C93 appears live with Bobbie, myself, Ossian Brown (formally of Coil, and now Cyclobe), and Jack Barnett of These New Puritans augmenting the ‘core’ band line-up. A fabulously able, highly-companionable outfit to work with.
Below is some video footage shot at the Union Chapel launch of ‘I Am the Last of All the Field That Fell: A Channel’, and includes two manifestations of tracks from that album. I contribute flute to the first, and bass clarinet to the second.
Jon Seagroatt 