An odd superstition perhaps but I never bought the original version of The Remote Viewer because, well, because I didn't like having everything Coil came out with... I liked having something in reserve, to delay the moment, defer the gratification... to stop myself getting too used to the mechanisms of their sound; to protect myself against sudden abandonment...
To have something to look forward to in case... Well, in case the worst happened and they split up suddenly.
The other worst was never imagined, of course. Still not really imagined and the terrible feeling that there will never be another 'new' Coil album has sent me spiralling to find a new kind of kick, something equivalent which, frankly, I haven't found yet...
So I kept something back to buy in moments of abject mucical anomie, when all else was failing and then.... well the buggers only re-released it with some new tracks...
In fact they re-released The Remote Viewer and Black Antlers, both in newly remastered forms and with an extra half-disc of supergranulated extras I couldn't resist...
Both albums are better than The Ape Of Naples - Black Antlers is much more like the real thing, soft sounds pulling themselves in and out of holes, Balance at the helm, his voice carrying the tumbles and interlocks and sweeps and gurgles through (the sound of a plastic bag crackling and a door opening)... and The Remote Viewer sounds like where the other Coil might have gone...
If one Coil is, basically, a kind of terribly degraded pop, veering near the end to the kind of stuff I imagined solo Gavin Friday might have done - or should have sounded like - then the Coil of The Remote Viewer, the Equinox Coil is the kind of avant-folk I imagined before the media got hold of avant-folk and made everything folk avant-folk, just because it grew a beard or mentioned an elf... I mean, I love the cosmic whining of Devendra and Newsom, even Circulus (lovely big sword at Green Man, for instance) but they seem very much like folk to me... I can't see where the avant or the psych or even the cosmic comes in...
This second Coil is like folk played by non-folk; folk played by the instruments themselves and the sprites that surround them, floating in electro-magnetic coils of energy, self-adapted and fused with the kind of nature that Dylan Thomas used to talk about - "force(s) that through the green fuse drives the flower" etc
The Remote Viewer sounds really good in a ditch at dusk, looking up as the sky turns to stars and the plant-life starts to wake up for its morning walk. Its impossible to picture the band as the music plays; human images just don't come to mind at all, not even when there's tiny snatches of singing.
It reminds me of almost nothing and I'm gonna miss music like that.
A Yousendit ElpHinationary Xperiential Learning Curve
This is one of the extra tracks - the first 3 are the real killers but the extras add new themes and spin around some ideas that could have been.
3 comments:
yep, these are delicious re-works, looking forward to the live DVD myself... all those morphing shapes
i really like your analogies - i also always see coil as a two sided thing. i've been listenining to michael nyman a lot recently - thre is a real similarity with coil (or the other way round, i suppose).
i love the ape of naples - i like its unfinishedness.
great blog - anything from the new TG album ?
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