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1[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/c93_colour_00023.jpeg]] Current 93 is an experimental neofolk band that has been actively recording since 1982. At the helm is David Tibet (né Bunting), who was born in Malaysia from English parents and immigrated to England in his childhood. Originally releasing harrowing {{Industrial}} music, Tibet transitioned to a vein of Neofolk known as Apocalyptic Folk by 1988. He has worked with members of Music/DeathInJune, {{Music/Coil}} and Music/ThrobbingGristle, as well as Creator/ThomasLigotti, Music/TinyTim and Shirley Collins. Steven Stapleton of Music/NurseWithWound was also a regular collaborator, appearing on nearly every Current 93 release until TheNewTens, when his bandmate Andrew Liles stepped in (and Tibet also regularly appears on Nurse with Wound releases.) Recurring themes of his work include religion (primarily esoteric offshoots of Christianity), mythology, philosophy and nihilism.
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4!!Tropes present in his works include:
5* AndIMustScream: Discussed frequently during the '90s, usually in relation to Patripassianism (which is the perspective that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are aspects of one entity, whose eternal fate is this.)
6* AnimalMotif: Many, but the foremost is cats, which were the motif of one of his favorite artists (Louis Wain) and an object of worship in ancient Egypt.
7* ApocalypseHow: Most of his works play with this trope in some way or another. Some, like ''Nature Unveiled'' and ''Black Ships Ate the Sky'' deal with demons and {{Eldritch Abomination}}s; others like ''The Inmost Light'' refer to a personal, yet still very much real and full-scale apocalypse. "The Seven Seals Are Revealed at the End of Time as Seven Bows: The Bloodbow, the Pissbow, the Painbow, the Faminebow, the Deathbow, the Angerbow, the Hohohobow" details a Gnostic interpretation of the Bible's Book of Revelation.
8* ApocalypseWow: His end-of-the-world scenarios can get particularly bizarre or spectacular, from reality-destroying, malevolent boats to surrealistic displays brought about by angry deities.
9** ''The Inmost Light'' trilogy portrays the loss of childhood innocence and wonder as its own, very real apocalypse, in glorious and disturbing detail.
10* ArcWords: "Black Ships", "Menstrual night", "Imperium", "Arise arise, full of eyes, of eyes", "Baalstorm, sing Omega", "Theinmostlight"... loads of them, really, both arcs within albums and arcs linking albums.
11* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy[=/=]HistoricalVillainUpgrade: "Hitler As Kalki (SDM)", which posits that Adolf Hitler was the Antichrist, and that his end goal was to murder Christ and bring about the apocalypse.
12* BerserkButton: David Tibet strongly resents being identified with the {{Goth}} scene.
13* CallBack: This occurs all over the place due to Tibet's WorldBuilding, but ''Or Ruine or Some Blazing Starre'' is one of the most noteworthy examples for referencing: both ''In Menstrual Night'' by name and by repeating its concept – "where dreams go to, when they die" – verbatim in the final stanza; "The Blue Gates of Death"; "Great Black Time"; and more.
14** ''All the Pretty Little Horses'' opens with a small recap of its preceding conceptual EP, ''Where the Long Shadows Fall''.
15* TheCameo: Music/{{Bjork}}(!) provides backing vocals on the song "Falling."
16** Creator/ThomasLigotti shows up at the very end of ''All the Pretty Little Horses'', reading a passage from his story "Les Fleures".
17** Shirley Collins speaks a few lines to kick off ''Thunder-Perfect Mind.''
18** ''Black Ships Ate The Sky:'' Each version of "Idumaea" is this for the singers, save for Anhoni's (she gets another solo later in the album) and of course David's.
19* CarefulWithThatAxe: From him and a few of his guests, including Lilith Stapleton, who was at most eight years old at the time. "She Took Us to the Place Where the Sun Sets" is a particularly horrific example.
20* CatsAreMagic: A recurring motif in his lyrics.
21* CatapultNightmare: "This Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich"
22* ChildHater: His work consistently characterizes God as such--in fact, "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion" suggests the first three things God made were children's crying, a CreepyDoll and a similarly unsettling rocking horse.
23* ConceptAlbum: Most of them. Each one has a page of text dedicated to its concept. Many of them are about how the Apocalypse will occur, or Gnostic interpretations of Biblical scripture.
24** ''In Menstrual Night'': Where dreams go to when they die.
25** ''Thunder Perfect Mind'' is based on the Gnostic poem ''The Thunder, Perfect Mind'', an extended monologue by a deity describing their contradictory nature.
26** The ''Inmost Light'' trilogy deals with maturing from childhood and adulthood and losing the senses of innocence and wonder in the process, portraying such loss as though it were the end of the world.
27** ''Sleep Has His House'' is David Tibet processing his father's death in near-real time.
28** ''In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land'' is based on four thematically linked Creator/ThomasLigotti stories, one of several collaborations David Tibet has done with the author.
29* CreationMyth: More than a few.
30* CreepyChildrenSinging: From the beginning Tibet has used this to evoke a particular uncomfortable mood. His earliest use, the epic "Falling Back in Fields of Rape", featured a child yelling an insanely creepy poem. It still continues to this day, to a certain extent.
31-->"Mothers, babies, bleeding! You stand there laughing! Unquestionable; unconfronted! Poetic lines on the art of dying! Falling back in fields of rape! Falling back in fields of rape!!"
32* CrypticConversation: A recurring theme, and a recurring source of inspiration.
33* DigitalPiracyIsEvil: He takes this a bit more literally than most. Promotional releases of ''Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain'' even opened with the following announcement:
34-->This is a promotional CD. Anyone illegally selling, copying, uploading or downloading this material is condemned to eternal hellfire. Happy listening, God is love.
35::He would later go on to say that he was only half-joking.
36* DroneOfDread: Present in a lot of his stuff. ''Dogs Blood Rising'' and ''Nature Unveiled'' are built mainly around this, and it still pops up frequently in his folk material. "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" is an especially unnerving example.
37* EldritchAbomination: The Black Ships. Also, possibly, The Inmost Light.
38* EpicRocking[=/=]MinisculeRocking: It's not uncommon for both to take place on the same album.
39* EverythingsLouderWithBagpipes: "Inerrant Infallible (Black Ships At Nineveh Or Edom)" uses bagpipes.
40* FakeGuestStar: Steven Stapleton, Michael Cashmore, and others.
41* GenreMashup: As a folk singer--he primarily does English or Celtic folk, but will link it together with such things as drone, noise rock and industrial.
42* GenreRoulette: While most of his career has been gothic folk music, his early industrial drones have crept back periodically into his work. He's also experimented with new age, synth pop and even metal every so often.
43* GodIsEvil: Frequently played with through references to Gnosticism.
44* GratuitousForeignLanguage: Many. Of note: quite a few of them are dead languages, associated with old religious texts or, more recently, fallen empires.
45* GrowingUpSucks: Exaggerated: ''The Inmost Light'' and ''The Light is Leaving Us All'' portray it as the end of the world.
46* HarshVocals: Very rare, but "She Took Us to the Places Where the Suns Set" uses this trope to terrifying effect.
47* HaveAGayOldTime: Occurs prominently on a few occasions, usually as the result of quoting old poetry.
48** "Falling Back in Fields Of Rape" does this rather deliberately--"rape" is also an archaic shorthand for rapeseed.
49* HotAsHell: He believes that Satan manifests as beauty of all forms, which is why the concept tends to be a recurring motif in his art and music.
50* IAmTheBand: David Tibet ''is'' Current 93, though he has a fairly regular cast of collaborators.
51* IronicNurseryTune: Tibet is obsessed with [[WesternAnimation/NoddysToylandAdventures Noddy]] and its nursery rhyme influence is present in all of Tibet's folk work.
52* JumpScare: "She Took Us To The Place Where The Sun Sets" starts with a minute or so of tolling clocks and elegant classical piano, before suddenly exploding into David Tibet's incredibly distorted HarshVocals shouting in a VoiceOfTheLegion. He even gets one last line in after the song has already ended.
53* KidsRock: For the times when this isn't scary as all hell, it ventures into softer singalong or backing vocal territory.
54* KindHeartedCatLover: Beyond making them a recurring theme in his work, he's kept several of his own at any given time. He even posts pictures of them to the band's Facebook page. ''Aww.''
55* LastNoteNightmare: Has appeared in several songs over the course of his career--even ones that were already soul-crushingly terrifying.
56* {{Leitmotif}}: Many albums have one, from chord progressions or instrument parts to lyrics, or even entire songs. ''Black Ships Ate The Sky'' is the most prominent case, featuring nine different renditions of the Methodist hymn "Idumaea."
57* LoopedLyrics: Common, and in multiple instances, overlapped with BSODSong or MadnessMantra.
58* LyricalDissonance: Rather common--"Misery Farm," "The Beautiful Dancing Dust," "The Frolic," among others.
59* MadnessMantra: "MALDOROR IS DEAD" and "JESUS WEPT" were two that were repeated several times early in his career.
60** ''Christ and the Pale Queens Mighty in Sorrow'' featured the titular phrase across ''25 full minutes'' of the album. The record then concluded with a 3-second section of the backing track from the 20 minute title song looping for another 18-and-a-half minutes.
61* MadOracle: He even [[LampshadeHanging describes himself as one]] during "Black Ships Were Sinking Into Idumaea":
62-->And if I make no sense to you\
63Well, I make no sense to me\
64The dreams I have are sticky as dreams\
65That leave trails of words\
66That will mean churches' fall!
67* MoodWhiplash: Frequent and extreme. ''The Inmost Light'' is notable for swinging back and forth between hauntingly beautiful neofolk and terrifying industrial drones with very little warning.
68* NewSoundAlbum: ''Imperium'' transformed Current 93's harrowing drones into psychedelic free-form jams and solidified Tibet's signature SpokenWordInMusic vocal delivery style. It also introduced Current 93's signature neofolk sound, which wasn't embraced fully until ''Swastikas for Noddy'', two albums afterward.
69* NightmareFuelColoringBook: A few cases, but the liner notes for ''Black Ships Ate the Sky'' stand out for featuring actual childrens' drawings.
70* OminousLatinChanting: A recurring motif, most prominent in his first two albums and ''The Inmost Light.''
71* PissTakeRap: ''Crowleymass,'' done in conjunction with HÖH, pulls this off with remarkable aplomb.
72-->"Don't give us no sass, or we'll kick your ass\
73For we're the heralds of Crowleymass!"
74* PrecisionFStrike: Tibet doesn't often swear, once or twice per album at most, but it sticks out quite clearly when he does.
75* PunnyName: ''Looney Runes.'' He even played this up by having a pastiche of a golden age character on the cover, with the back reading ''Merry Malaise.''
76* RealDreamsAreWeirder: Tends to pop up on occasion, since Tibet's beliefs profess that all dreams, even ones that fall under this category, are the soul's way of communing with God.
77* RearrangeTheSong: Reworkings and alternate mixes are a very common practice, be they individual songs (some of which get mashed up live) or entire albums (as was the case with ''Swastikas For Noddy'', ''Sleep Has His House'', and ''Black Ships Ate The Sky'', among others), to say nothing of ''Like Swallowing Eclipses'', in which Andrew Liles remixed five of his albums and two of his [=EPs=].
78* ReligiousHorror: Many of Tibet's works fall under this; it helps that the religion in question is Gnosticism,
79* RuleOfThree: In both his music and his nonmusical writings, he often repeats a single word, phrase, or sentence three times over.
80* {{Sampling}}: Possibly in homage to his friend Steven Stapleton, "Great Black Time" spontaneously includes a lengthy sample of "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & the Papas.
81** "Where the Long Shadows Fall" is built upon a loop of the castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi singing.
82** ''Nature Unveiled'' and ''Dogs Blood Rising'' are mostly built around tape collages with David Tibet sometimes providing vocals. Notable samples include [[OminousLatinChanting Gregorian choirs]], [[CreepyChildrenSinging a little girl singing nursery rhymes]], and a man giving a furious TheReasonYouSuckSpeech to the listener.
83* SanitySlippage: A recurring theme.
84* ScaryMusicianHarmlessMusic: Alternatingly inverted and averted. Their music can be panic inducing at times, but Tibet himself is a polite and friendly man who adores cats.
85* SelfBackingVocalist: In an interesting take on this trope, Tibet's multiple vocal takes are usually entirely different and do not match up perfectly when heard side by side.
86* ShoutOut: Everything from old children's rhymes to the works of Louis Wain.
87* SpokenWordInMusic: Quite a bit, usually from guest performers. Tibet himself borders on this most of the time.
88* StarsAreSouls
89* SurrealHorror: Many, many examples, among them the Black Ships. Current 93's music in general carries a hallucinatory, dreamlike feeling, to the point where most of the band's work can be summed up as this trope.
90* TakeThat: "A Gothic Love Song" points its barbs at goths and their pretenses.
91--> I see all too clearly now why you could be discarded.\
92And though I could pray for you, I probably shan't,\
93Having had my cup filled up\
94With your lies and your makeup.\
95You were nothing thinking you're something.
96* TheStarsAreGoingOut: A recurring topic, be it in songs ("The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home"; "The Seahorse Rears to Oblivion") or in albums (''Black Ships Ate the Sky''.)
97* ViewersAreGeniuses: His work will make a lot more sense if you have a robust knowledge of various occult and esoteric topics.
98* VillainSong: His are some of the strangest. One notable example is "The Frolic", which is from the perspective of John Doe, the villain in the Thomas Ligotti story the song is named after.
99* WeAllDieSomeday: Considering Tibet's predilection for apocalypse scenarios and Christian mysticism, this trope is entirely inevitable. There's even a song called, "Anyway, People Die".
100* TheWildHunt: The climax of ''Tamlin'' involves a human ambushing them to take him away.

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