COIL

One of the most experimental electronic artists to haunt the 1980s and 1990s, the British experimentalists that made up COIL were relentless in their constant pursuit of innovating the strangest and most alienating sounds that were possible to eke out of as many unexplored avenues as humanly possible. The results added up to a huge expansive canon of some of the most bizarre and unorthodox musical statements that blurred the distinctions between what music properly is considered and what many would consider to be nothing more than random noisy gibberish. By the 1990s the eccentric team of John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowell seemed utterly limitless in how many directions it could pursue the experiments with one album after another delivering a sonic experience that stood apart from virtually anything else ever laid down to recording. Everything COIL released was utterly unlike what came before and a testament to the fertile minds that tapped into strange worlds where no one else dared tread.

By the mid-90s COIL was also adopting strange pseudonyms for various projects with names like ELpH, Time Machines, Sickness of Snakes and The Eskaton popping up randomly throughout the band's run. Yet another one-off moniker was BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT under which the COIL team released this sole album A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM. Characterized by the group's love of dark ambient bleakness and electronic free form texture building, this release showcased a new approach to the COIL playbook by offering a series of rhythmic underpinnings accompanied by a litany of overlapping electronic textures, sound effects, vocal samples and the occasional lyrical output halfway sung and halfway spoken as well as simple poetic prose. The album which featured 11 tracks was a bit on the long side well exceeding an hour's playing time at nearly 73 minutes but provided a stream of consciousness continuity which allowed the tracks to slowly ooze into one another all the while providing a diverse palette of experimentation to keep the album from resembling the more more monotonous undertakings such as performed as Time Machines.

The album begins with the short "Unprepared Piano" which is a tribute to John Cage and establishes a precarious balance between the chaos and order approach that COIL made all their own. While utterly inaccessible from a traditional popular music point of view, the avant-garde approach allows the album to proceed in a similar manner which finds the electronic-oriented tracks like the following "Red Skeletons" creating a consistent rhythmic flow of sound courtesy of strange loops, sonic patterns, scattered sequences and sound effects that seemed to have been sampled primarily from industrial soundscapes and processed through the arsenal of sound-altering devices that COIL had amassed during its career. The entire album flows accordingly with different rhythmic jingles, blurbs, pulsations, beats, bangs, freaky loops or whatever the band could cleverly conjure up in the midst of whatever they did to channel such strange and hypnotic flows of consciousness. The difference between A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM and other COIL releases is the fact that group really put a lot of effort in crafting a diverse roster of tracks that implemented a wide array of sonic textures, timbres, dynamics and unorthodoxies as humanly possible.

Overall this is one of the most playful COIL releases that offered surprises at every juncture with stranger than life sonic textures, beyond bizarre effects, delicately designed rhythms and other musical elements including the occasional melodic touches to interact in some of the most peculiar unconventional methodologies imaginable. Tracks like "Blue Rats" even harken back to the group's more industrial dance days from albums like "Scatology" and "Horse Rotorvator." As BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT i have to say that COIL crafted one of its most diverse sounding albums of its beyond eclectic career and is somewhat comparable to the "Unnatural History" compilations which featured a similar continuity yet scattered with unbridled creative prowess. This is certainly the kind of music only electronic avant-gardists crave and will be completely unintelligible to those who have not conditioned themselves to the COIL universe. This has always been one of my favorite COIL releases but as i listen again currently paying attention with an intense scrutiny like never before i have to conclude that this album displays the perfect balance of detachment, engagement, melodic interplay, human connections, bouts of chaos and atonal freakery. A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM is without a doubt the perfect display of an avant-garde electronica masterpiece.

The English experimental electronic act COIL was so very, very innovative and always thinking outside of the box with seemingly every album they released. While woefully misunderstood and beyond the the comprehension of most listeners of established musical genres, COIL continued to dabble with new equipment, new concepts and new musical expressions that were hitherto never associated with certain concepts and yet the creative triumvirate of Peter Christopherson, John Balance and Drew McDowall never ceased to meld music and electronic timbres with esoteric concepts such as philosophy, theology and spiritual practices.

1998 was a very productive year with not only the "Moon's Milk (In Four Phases)" set of four EPs each representing one part of each season (equinoxes and solstices) but also found the band conjuring up yet another pseudonym, this time the moniker TIME MACHINES. This one-off released an album of the same name and featured four psychedelic drone pieces each named after a hallucinogenic drug. The titles were presented with a partiality of their scientific organic chemical name thus the opening track "Methoxy-β-Carboline: (Telepathine)" was basically a truncated form of the preferred IUPAC name 7-Methoxy-1-methyl-9H-pyrido[3,4-b]indole but given that the fanbase most likely weren't trained organic chemists, it's doubtful anyone really cared.

The album of 73 1/2 minutes playing time featured four lengthy tracks, the first and last well over 23 minutes in length with the second over 13 and the third only slightly over 10. The album mixed long drones with binaural beats and psychedelic electronic embellishments. The idea of the album was to create temporal slips which were known to occur while ingesting the chemical compounds referred to in the track titles. The inspiration actually stemmed from the hypnotic states created in Tibetan spiritual music only presented in more of a shamanic rainforest leader's way of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms or DMT and telpathine which are both components of ayahuasca. The album was intended to be a 5-disc box set but that idea was scrapped as was another plan to release a 2-disc version later on. A "Time Machines II" has been released archivally only as a Peter Christopherson solo release.

Musically the drone is the primary element but the release also uses binaural beats which refers to the auditory illusion perceived as the listener hears two separate frequencies in each ear leading one to interpret the difference between the the frequencies as one tone thus more effective on headphones. This alone is purported to affect brain waves and in some cases has been promoted as a healing mechanism by various record labels. Psychedelic sounds were created with modular synthesizers and above a consistent tone of a drone, oscillating electronic sounds pulsate like a heartbeat or other rhythmic flow. There are no traces of melody or orthodox compositional musical structures here whatsoever. This is purely experimental electronica designed to alter consciousness through hypnotic trance inducing waves and monotonous tones.

The album was actually performed live at London's Royal Festil Hall in a show called "Time Machines From The Heart Of Darkness" in the year 2000. The positive feedback found the band continuing such performances until COIL's demise in 2004 after the death of John Balance. Overall anyone adverse to non-melodic drone albums will not enjoy this one bit and while such minimalistic music isn't my primary passion, when done correctly it can be mesmerizing and indeed transcendental and the requirement of ingesting the chemical compounds is not a prerequisite in the least. COIL just had a knack for making seemingly boring concepts pulsate with life although one has to meet it halfway and accept it on its own terms. TIME MACHINES has gained a loyal cult following and although not every release in the COIL playbook is a doozy, for some reason this really does resonate on that energetic and subliminal level in a way i can neither comprehend or explain. All i can say is that when i'm in the mood for an effective drone album, TIME MACHINES really does deliver what it promises.

This is certainly one album i got the right introduction to. In fact i can't think of a better way to become acquainted with one of COIL's most mind-blowing and alienating freakfests of its entire career. Back in my party days i let my naughty friends influence me into the occasional night of overindulgence where i didn't hold back and went for it with all the youthful nonchalance and gleeful intoxication that one would expect from someone in their early 20s. One fateful night my friend who prided himself on trying and turning everyone on to his favorite new intoxicant of choice gathered his friends for a drunken drug-fueled night of excess. Oh yeah! Those were the days :D

Having always been a lightweight in the drug and alcohol department i ended up passing out on the couch with the party still in tact only to wake up after most guests either puked their guts and and passed out elsewhere or just went home. Upon waking up in the pitch dark only with the music still playing, bizarre sounds were oozing out of the hi-fi speakers and exposing me to one of the absolute strangest sound journeys i had ever encountered at that period. This was the music of a friend who introduced me to the vast array of electronic music that i was rather clueless about at the time being a metalhead primarily at that age. To make it even more transcendental my buddy who worked at a hi-fi music store in the San Francisco Bay Area had one of the best sound systems that existed in the early 2000s.

Upon awakening my mind was blown into a million pieces as i sat there and listened to the most uncategorizable musical sound clips which in the morning i discovered was coming from the album WORSHIP THE GLITCH under the moniker ELPH VS COIL. Laying there soaking in the album in my state of mind with nowhere to escape i merely became one with the music that was specifically designed to showcase an unthinkable array of sound effects that can only be heard on the absolute best recording systems. While no album sounds as good on a YouTube video or regular stereo system, this was on a whole other level with an entire spectrum of sound effects that could only be detected on a hi-fi sound system that offered a wider spectrum of sound than the average.

Of course this experience affected me profoundly and although i had already known of COIL, nothing sounded like this one except perhaps a few early tracks that were compiled onto the first compilation of "Unnatural History." The ELPH VS COIL in reality refers to COIL itself given that ELPH was a pseudonym that John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowall used for two releases that utilized computer mistakes from their own equipment and used as the sound effects that were organized into creepy, ethereal and eerie melodies that excelled at taking your mind on the wildest journey possible in the context of experimental glitch electronica. Following in the footsteps of the 1994 EP "Born Again Pagans" which itself was released under the moniker COIL VS ELPH rather than ELPH VS COIL, WORSHIP THE GLITCH polished the imperfections of that production into a serious gem of mind [%*!#]ery.

By mixing the sounds of computer glitches and forging them into bizarre samples and instrumental rhythms, the album is almost exclusively instrumental except for the rare vocal samplings of Aleister Crowley's wife Leah HIrsig which adds an even more bizarre sense of esoteric abstruseness to the mix. These guys even managed to include the track "Mono" which is a highly processed and unrecognizable cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down." Esoteric references lurk around every corner but nothing is really more relevant than the music itself which represented some of the most creative expression of sound mistakes ever recorded and taken to such extremes. The holographic cover art pretty much symbolizes what you get as the bizarre worlds of dark ambient and glitch mix and meander with sound collages and electroacoustic psychedelia. Easily the most influential glitch album to spawn the genre that followed.

While it may be tempting to conclude that the album is only good under the conditions of my first exposure, i have often revisted this one over the years to see how it holds up on its own without the ample use of a drug high experienced in the dark on the best stereo system of the day. I'm happy to say that the ingenuity alone guarantees that for anyone seeking the most wildly experimental and creative fertile soundscapes conceivable, WORSHIP THE GLITCH more than holds up under the scrutiny of my now completely sober brain primarily judging its qualities on intellect rather than emotional impact. For me it works on multiple levels and although this is hardly the place for COIL newbies to begin their journey, for those well indoctrinated into the COIL cult who crave their most wild and unapologetic visions of true sound freedom, this will surely please them immensely if they take the time to really examine this beyond the initial alienation effect. Personally this one ranks very high in the mighty COIL's canon and although a bit too abstract to pull out on a regular basis, totally hits the spot like no other when such musical excess is needed.

One of the more awkward releases in COIL's massive discography, the music on THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION included some of the earliest recordings of John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Stephen Thrower around the same time as the band's debut "Scatology." The music was created exclusively for the soundtrack of the 1985 film titled THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION, an arthouse drama film directed by Derek Jarman. The film featured homoerotic images and served as a visual quest that was supposed to represent a dream state and the daily rituals of navigating the violence of the real world in order to transcend into some sort of perceived paradise.

The music eventually found its way onto CD in 1994 but obviously lost a lot of the effect without the intended visuals. COIL mixed various orchestral samples with dark ambient atmospheres and surreal musical soundscapes that merged the world of musique concrète with neoclassical darkwave and nature recordings. The soundtrack also featured recurring spoken word recitations of Shakespeare sonnets read by Judi Dench. COIL also used samples from the debut EP "How To Destroy Angels" and the track "Never" was previously released in a shorter form on the "Unnatural History" compilation.

This is a rather lengthy album at nearly 70 minutes and never seems to really go anywhere. It's primarily an incessant flow of abstract swirlies that float around like amoebas in a petri dish and while the ambience aspects with snippets of orchestral embellishments is a nice way to drone out for an hour's run, the incessant poetic prose of Judi Dench constantly contrasts with the otherwise surreal and detached nature of the musical flow which for my tastes ruins it. Not that the music itself varies much at all as it sounds like the ultimate recycling of snippets and tidbits that never really coalesce into anything other than aimless ambience.

I've personally never seen the film the soundtrack accompanies but usually these types of film scores are only relevant in conjunct with the visual aspects and / or dialogue that they accompany and that is definitely the case with THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION. This is probably my least favorite album in COIL's entire discography but yet it isn't totally awful either. I really only pull this out and listen to it every few years after i totally forget what it sounds like only to be reminded why i didn't care for it much in the first place. The ultimate collector's only edition but since i'm a huge rabid fan of COIL's insanely experimental electronic sounds i couldn't possibly live without this mostly unheard album in my collection. Worthy of hearing once in a while but it really fails to engage in any meaningful way whatsoever.

As a huge fan of 80s-90s Swans, Throbbing Gristle, and Bauhaus, I'm surprised that I never gave Coil much thought before.

The instrumentation is industrial in parts (think TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats), and in other parts reminds me of Jarboe era Swans such as Soundtracks for the Blind.

The singing style and negative lyrics feel somewhere between Throbbing Gristle, Neurosis, and Bauhaus. They are unmistakeably English in style, with little of the American drawl or low register associated with Michael Gira.

This album would have been a difficult sell back when I listened to 70s-derived prog, but it very much clicks when starting from a love of no-wave, industrial, and avant-garde.

Five stars from me - this is an instant essential within my library.

I have never actually listened to any works of Coil. I have heard of them and I definitely seen their album covers, but I never actually listened to their albums, at least not fully. But on one day someone on Discord recommended this album to me since I liked more weird music. I thought, why not, how about I listen to something new for a change. I didn't know what to expect from the album, but I was eager to find out. One thing I have noticed with the album is that it had a very morbid and almost grief like sound to it (probably enhanced after the death of John Balance). It also has a really pretty experimental edge to it in the vocals and production value. It really feels like a album for the dead and for those beyond the grave. But the album also feels like a sort of 7 stages of grief in it's sound where some songs sound like they are sad, in denial, angry, and soon, accepting. This is definitely an interesting album and definitely one worth checking out if you like more experimental music.

COIL's ambitious recording work ethic led to many tracks being rerecorded, remixed or completely reinterpreted over the years and one of the first of these collections of new inspirations emerged with the 1992 version of HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS only with the tagged on subtitle "(New Remixes and Recordings)" to distinguish it from the 1984 EP of the same name.

While the original EP only consisted of the 17 minute title track and the one second of silence at the end titled "Absolute Elsewhere," this remix album contains six tracks that reimagine the same track in various different ways. This album was the collaborative effort of COIL itself meaning John Balance and Peter Christopherson along with Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound.

Balance remixed "The Sleeper," "The Sleeper II" and "Tectonic Plates," Christopherson remixed "Remotely" and "Dismal Orb" and Stapleton remixed "How To Destroy Angels II." "Absolute Elsewhere" remained the same unmixed silence as on the original EP :D Generally speaking the tracks are so radically different from one another that's it's almost impossible to tell that they are indeed spawned from the same source.

HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS Remixes is an extremely dark and bleak journey through the deep darkened harshness that evokes the chilling sounds of some terrifying underworld. While it may be difficult to even call this music due to the incessant industrial droning effect and the wild and unpredictable synthesized sounds that simulate everything from beastly breathing to hydraulic systems having a very bad day, this collection of reinterpretations does hit the spot if you are seeking some of the most sadistic sounds possible.

This 1992 Remix album is almost always one of the lowest rated and under appreciated COIL releases when you gaze upon the lengthy canon list that spans four decades of releases and i can totally understand the reason for this. Firstly, there's relatively little to grasp on to and much less to relate to in any sense of musical structures or patterns. This one is all about freaky unnerving sounds that are designed to terrify.

For that it works quite well but even though COIL is one of my favorite artists of all time, i have to admit that i rarely play this one but when i do i am utterly in awe as this instantly makes me feel as if i'd been transported into a virtual reality set of an H.R. Giger scene from Necronomicon and although my desire to go there often rarely occurs, when i do have the urge to experience the bleakest existence possible in terms of sound then an album like HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS is exactly what Dr Evil ordered.

3.5 rounded down

John Balance mumbles and intones dark little thoughts as synthesisers twinkle like stars in the night sky in this second volume of Coil's Musick To Play In the Dark. As with its predecessor, the album captures Coil following a transition from the "sun music" of their earlier career - with its more aggressive, boisterous aspects - to the "moon music" captured here, with its roots deep in the subconscious and its approach almost ambient in its gentleness. Double meanings abound - "Ether" could refer either to the titular narcotic, or more ethereal spiritual ideas, or the idea of the luminiferous aether, and Balance seems to be talking about at least two of these at any particular point in the composition. A puzzlebox to contemplate when the lights are out.

HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS (EP)

Amongst the earlier techno flavored albums released by COIL, this first extended play release HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS focused on a meditative otherworldly mix of ritual ambient and droney industrial textures that conspired to create a bizarre amalgamation of sounds that transcend 3D reality. Subtitled "Ritual Music For The Accumulation Of Male Sexual Energy," this collection of two lengthy tracks that still extends to a near 40 minute playing time was originally intended to be the B-side to the track "Silence & Secrecy" by Psychic TV but due to John Balance and Peter Christopherson leaving became an early aspect of the COIL universe.

As with most of COIL's early output this one is mired in mystery and ambiguity. Originally released on L.A.Y.L.A.H Antirecords in 1984 it was later repressed in 1988 but never found its way onto any other format than vinyl 12", however remixes were crafted and the HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS "New Remixes and Recordings" emerged in 1992 on CD format. Add to that of the the two lengthy tracks that swallow up each side of the original vinyl, the second side "Absolute Nowhere" varies during the repressing. It started out as simple noise-filled grooves on the first edition and then became multi-layered music on the second.

This two track EP takes the cosmic otherworldliness of early progressive electronic acts such as Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze and creates bizarre soundscapes outside of the Berlin School continuum. The title track sounds most like a mix of a Tibetan Bhuddist ceremony with a steady percussive flow of metal percussion such as on cymbals, gongs and other metallic devices that make nice resonance. The synthesized parts are more ambient and flow like gentle clouds in the skies above with no rhyme or reason but still offer a subtle exchange of tones, timbres and dynamics that never get too wild.

The second side consists of the lengthy "Absolute Elsewhere" which clocks in near 24 minutes and is eerily hypnotic and will only be accessible to those who have mastered the ability to meditate for long periods of time. A droning sound that sounds like a dial tone on 20th century telephones before dialing is accompanied only by what sounds like the scratchy end of a record where the loops of staticky contact are in a perpetual loop for eternity. I can understand why the monotony of this one will not appeal to all but for me this experience is literally transcendental. It's almost like a bridge between the third and the fourth densities of consciousness and the portal to get there with a high pitched soundtrack.

Coil's infamously rejected dark ambient soundtrack work for Hellraiser has been released in various forms over the years - first as a highly abbreviated EP, then with further bonus material from other soundtrack jobs added, then as tracks on the Unnatural History series of compilations.

The best release of the material so far is the 2015 one - reverting to the title The Consequences of Raising Hell (a subtitle used for some earlier releases of The Unreleased Themes For Hellraiser), it includes the 9 surviving Hellraiser tracks, a series of short pieces produced for commercials to pay the bills, and a clutch of untitled tracks which represent early instrumental working versions of pieces that ended up on Gold Is the Metal.

On the whole, it's as good a collection of Coil's mid-1980s soundtrack and similar instrumental work as we're likely to get. A little reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' soundtrack to Quake in places, the Hellraiser material is just as spooky as the movie demanded; meanwhile, the remaining tracks explore other moods, with the advertising jingles offering a sort of interval before the more disquieting material creeps in on the concluding untitled tracks.