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.

COIL - MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK VOL. 1 @ 25

 

Marking a quarter century on the shelves, at 25 years old this month, is Coil's Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1, which was released in September of 1999. The album represented a striking thematic shift for the group and, despite its genesis within the womb of excessive drug use, manifested as some of the most cohesive and intentional music from that era of their existence.

Given the group was primarily the purview of two gay men, their initial conceptual focus was decidedly "solar", or masculine. Solar symbolism was frequently in play, whether it was the Black Sun logo, or the references to gold, an element distinctly connected to solar imagery, though both are also decidedly scatological in nature as well. Their 1984 debut EP release, How To Destroy Angels, was specifically dedicated to Mars and the "accumulation of males sexual energy", deliberately excluding and avoiding female influence as a matter of process. Yet with Musick to Play in the Dark, a realignment had occurred. Jhon Balance specifically announces on the album that this is "Moon Musick", aligning the group's focus with intentionally feminine energies, like tides and cycles of nature. The result in the music is something entirely more atmospheric and ephemeral than much of their prior work.

The album was recorded at a sprawling Victorian manor that Peter Christopherson had purchased in the coastal community of Weston-super-Mare in the UK. He and Balance had set up a recording studio in their new home, and the group, at this time, were augmented by Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowall.

Their social scene was heavily involved with the consumption of large quantities of MDMA (Ecstasy), the semi-psychedelic party pill popularized by the rave scene of the preceding decade, so the process of recording was done in something of a barely remembered blur of intoxication. It's something rather perfectly captured in the album's opener, Are You Shivering, a reference to the distinct teeth chattering & grinding that occurs with sufficient indulgence in the aforementioned substance. If you've ever taken enough, you will recognize the sensations intimately.

Technically, they were working with some of the latest digital tools that were changing the shape of music making for electronic producers at the time, with Christopherson always keen to work on the cutting edge of the available tech, though there was some balance as well with the use of older gear. Advanced recording software like ProTools and more versatile and sophisticated samplers and synthesizers were combined with vintage gear, like their collection of old rhythm boxes and an Optigan, a keyboard from the 1970s which replaced their unwieldy and unreliable Mellotron and it's tape loops with a much more stable optical flexidisc sound library interface.

Given the nature of the substance abuse involve in the production of the album, one might expect them to have done the obvious thing and delved into the electronic dance music genre, inspired by their late nights at raucous rave-ups, but nothing could be further from the results that came about for this album. The style of the music was predominantly in the ambient vein, though with bizarre intersections through Krautrock influences, similar to early Tangerine Dream, or elements of cocktail jazz, spaced out and slowed down to capture the sense of deep, chill-out late-night altered state listening.

The Lunar conception for the album was intended to be pursued in a series of recordings, with a "Vol. 2" of Musick to Play in the Dark issued the following year, though these were both preceded by the Moon's Milk series of EPs, released in 1998. Collectively, these recordings represent Coil reaching a new peak of creative inspiration, and they have gone on to be valued as some of the group's most accomplished and effective works. They would also provide the momentum for them to take their unique sound on stage in the early 2000s, where they performed many of these pieces in concerts that have since become legendary. Most were documented on video and issued on the limited edition DVD box set, Colour Sound Oblivion.

Unfortunately, this era would be sadly abbreviated by the tragic accidental death of Jhon Balance in 2004, when he tumbled off a balcony in their aforementioned Victorian home. His struggles with substance abuse had taken their toll on both his physical and mental well-being, as well as his relationship with Christopherson, who had recently relocated to Thailand where he would remain based until his own tragic passing in December of 2010.

With both of the group's principal creatives now gone, there has been some confusion in terms of the plethora of reissues that have appeared and who, exactly, has the authority to manage their catalogue. Regardless, the group has left an astonishing canon of work in their wake, with this album sitting among the top of the heap in terms of its significance.