Temple Music - Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing (2009)

Temple Music was formed by Alan Trench and a couple of pals back in 1995 as an outgrowth of other, loosely related things. I saw them live in 2011 - I think it was - and assumed they had ceased to be soon after, reforming as the Howling Larsons and therefore leaving this behind as a coda of sorts. However, it seems I'm mistaken and there have been a number of subsequent releases, two of which I've actually owned all this time, so I guess this may be a reissue.

Some may recall Alan as a patron of World Serpent distribution, the label which brought us Der Blutharsch. Der Blutharsch recorded aesthetically extreme music of pseudo-martial composition which, as such, was often lumped in with others of the stiff right arm brigade - possibly due to the titles, occasional allusions to the Hitler Youth, and appropriation of artwork by Werner Peiner whom you may remember from world wars such as the second one. I had the pleasure of at least one evening on the razz in south-east London with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch. He was an oddball in black clothes with an upsetting haircut, but otherwise seemed like a decent guy; and having spent an unfortunate plurality of evenings on the razz in south-east London with actual Nazis, I feel reasonably certain that he wasn't one.

Anyway, it probably doesn't matter given that he's no longer with us, and Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing was issued, or possibly re-issued in memoriam, which seems fitting. Temple Music had a very much Mediterranean sound, one which seems to foreshadow the more recent music of its crew. It's loss, rocks, sorrow, wine, bleached animal skulls, and whatever token Charon may require for passage across the great river this month, all beneath a killing sun with crickets in the background. The dark ambient tag has inevitably attached itself, but the drones and the jangle of bells in the wind seem to come from something older, and something which has endured despite everything. I've listened to this CD and thought about Albin and wondered just what the hell was going on with that guy, although I doubt I'll ever have an answer. All that remains is the sound of waves lapping against the side of a boat.

Howling Larsons & Nikolaos Lymperopoulos - Poemandres (2021)

Occasionally there will be a piece of music of such self-contained power as to inform the suspicion that any comment one might offer will be essentially dog shit; and that's what we have here. I've known Alan Trench for a long time, and on the last occasion of our being together in the same room, he'd remarried and bought a house on a Greek island with the intention of living there in response to some seemingly mysterious calling. I say house, but I had the impression that it was actually a pile of rubble and the newlyweds would need to undertake some renovation work - and by renovation, I mean things like electricity, running water, and basic plumbing. Anyway, they seemed to know what they were doing, and it sounded exciting in a massively reckless sort of way.

Another couple of years down the line and it seems to have worked out well for Alan and Rebecca, now recording as the Howling Larsons - amongst other wilfully tangential names - and they've produced this, a collaboration with one Nikolaos Lymperopoulos who I'm sure Alan described as their next door neighbour, a man who just happened to be fluent in ancient Greek. It sounds unlikely, but this sort of thing seems to become fairly commonplace once you achieve a certain remove from locales with shopping malls; and in any case, this album definitely derives from somewhere outside the familiar, mainstream reality. Poemandres is nearly an hour of Lymperopoulos reading, chanting, and intoning as follows.

The ancient Greek text, a revelation of the creation of the Universe and the fate and nature of Man, is presented here in the original, using the Byzantine intonation method. This has long been considered one of the most important, and certainly the most famous, documents of the Corpus Hermeticum. The music, performed as a ritual piece, draws the listener into one of the most important mind-states of the Ancient World.

...and that really is what it does, underscoring the spoken account with a powerful devotional drone of church organ and other elements hidden further down in the mix to produce something which actually achieves the promises made elsewhere on Current 93's proverbial tin without the emphasis on crap tattoos and pierced todgers. This is because the Howling Larsons took a different route to many of their showier, better publicised contemporaries in moving to Greece and just getting the fuck on with it. Remember all those [name diplomatically withheld because he's probably reading] albums wherein the lad pretends to be a thirteenth century monk by whacking the decay of his digital reverb up to five minutes? Well, this is the real thing.