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.
