COIL - ANS @ 20

 

Released in September of 2004, Coil's sprawling ambient monolith, ANS, is marking its 20th anniversary this month. The primary release of the album consisted of a box set including three audio CDs and a DVD with abstract visual accompaniment. The initial run of the box set included art prints, though some purchasers, myself included, never received their art prints due to issues with manufacturing that were further complicated after the death of Jhon Balance in November of that year.

All sounds on the album were created utilizing the ANS synthesizer, "a photo-electronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin from 1937 to 1957. The technological basis of his invention was the method of graphical sound recording used in cinematography (developed in Russia concurrently with USA), which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound spectrogram." It was built around half a century ago and still to this day sits where it was originally conceived; in the Moscow State University.

At the time of its recording, Coil consisted of Jhonn Balance, Ossian Brown, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra, and Ivan Pavlov, all of whom contributed to the creation of the album, to some degree, in terms of the creation of the etched transparent plates that were passed through the machine to create the album's sounds. None of the participants understood the exact mechanism for composition when it came to creating etchings, so they essentially created doodles that did not adhere to any fixed musical notation theory specific to the device. It was all a bit of an experiment to see what would happen. Images of the sound plates were included in the graphics package for the box set.

Prior to the full release of the box set, a single CD, identical in content to the first disc in the finished set, was issued in a limited edition, black clam-shell case version in 2003, which was sold at various live shows throughout that year, with the fully packaged box set issued in September of 2004. The album, while perhaps lacking in clear intent, offers up some interesting ambient tonalities. It's a bit like an abstract audio seance, conjuring sounds from the ether in a manner that yielded some unexpected and surprising results.