This is a welcome development: Hypnopazūzu, a duo comprising Current 93’s David Tibet and Killing Joke bassist Youth, will be releasing an album and playing a show in London this year. (Youth’s other duo is the Fireman, with Paul McCartney of Wings fame.) The date of the show has not been announced, but the record, Create Christ, Sailor Boy, is coming out on the House of Mythology label in August; it will be a three-sided LP (with side four devoted to “a laser etching of a Youth/David Tibet Hallucinatory Cartoon”) and a single CD.

It figures these guys are old pals. Youth, along with Annie Anxiety and Steven Stapleton of Nurse with Wound, joined Tibet on Current 93’s first album, 1984’s Nature Unveiled. As for Pazuzu, whose name I will forever hear as intoned by Richard Burton in Exorcist II, he is among the evil deities William S. Burroughs invokes at the beginning of Cities of the Red Night:

Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, Dark Angel of the Four Winds with rotting genitals from which he howls through sharpened teeth over stricken cities…

 

 
Pazuzu is also the subject of a number of Tibet’s recent paintings. Tibet explained (sort of) his interest in the Mesopotamian demon king in a very condensed memoir published by Dazed three years ago:

I started painting Hallucinatory Prayers, which consisted of biblical verses written thousands of times in white ink on black paper. Revisiting my pubescence, I did an MA in Coptic and started translating mainly Sahidic texts. Then I began to learn Akkadian after dreaming of metal doors covered with cuneiform, which meant I had also to paint Pazuzu. Anaku pazuzu, as the Akkadians wrote.

While you search for your copy of Huehnergard’s Akkadian grammar, hallucinate with “Magog At The MayPole,” from Create Christ, Sailor Boy.