Peter Christopherson - Farther Son (Coil are gone)

There's still stuff out there, not enough. Tangible (almost) Coil things, lost things, things that make sense (or would have one day made sense). I miss new Coil things, there's just not enough. It feels like you wanted Jhonn and Sleazy to have no lives at all, to just produce, to just give when you knew that that would never be, that that was missing the point entirely. There's lots of Coil stuff out there of course but you just can't get enough and other members or associates often sound like Coil, a little. I quite often get glimpses of their stuff. Comically; I thought yesterday some of my IX Tab stuff was Coil - maybe wearing my influences a little thinly (thickly?) there, maybe put those tracks on the DVD release - and there's a definite sense of... it (id) in some of Drew McDowell's Compound Eye stuff and some of Kemper Norton's stuff - the exotic pylon album in particular is a masterclass - and and and...

It's just so goddamn annoying that they're dead.

Bicycle Day and the NOT 70th Birthday Of LSD

Some people will tell you that the 19th of this cruellest month is the 70th anniversary of Albert Hoffman's infamous bike ride and thus that LSD is 70 years old. They'd be wrong. It's nowhere near that old. LSD never really got a good innings, got curtailed and bludgeoned before it really got going - 70 years old implies a hell of a run up but that didn't happen and we should all take the blame for not having the confidence or the conviction to change our world to accommodate it. Aristotle was right in suggesting that beauty was a visitor from another world but he'd have been more convinced by acid. This is the visitor we sort of let in but then never really addressed. It's been 70 fucking years and... nothing. The world seems worse now. Not even a war film.


It's perhaps spectacularly idealistic and naive to think that this little molecule (or all those little molecules: the mushrooms, the spores, the rot) might actually have changed things, that we might actually have ceded to its influence but... Fuck it; I still kind of believe that we genuinely might have, that we only just missed the moment, that things might still be different.

This book, for instance, seems like one of quite a few that are... piping up. There is something in the air.

Perhaps.

Yeah, Leary was an messianic arse perhaps, Kesey lost in mostly bad music and a desire to lose, Cassady a hammer spinning emotional aggregate and misogynist... Yeah, maybe the McKenna brothers got a little too close to the Sun eventually, perhaps RAW just wasn't sure after all... Yeah perhaps there really hasn't been the advocates of late that could have visioned a future for acid and we ended with the subtly mystic Breaking Open The Head which sort of accidentally got commodified and coffee-tabled into something else...

In fact, we lost the eloquence of acid quite early, with the death of Aldous Huxley... we lost it to Americana or the Military or to silly hats and Ozric Tentacles...


In fact, you can see the slippage right on that page, on the noxious introduction to the Huxley video: "Did you know that Aldous Huxley died whilst frying balls on multiple massive injections of uncut ACID? Trippy..." that delicate turn of phrase, that implied machismo is where everything went wrong...

Oh...

I'm not about to rant about how LSD could have changed the world. I know how that'll sound in print, on screen, at a time when I should know better but there's smaller little bitches to make instead.

The music itself let LSD down... The fact that there still isn't anything that only makes sense on LSD (no variation on Chris Morris's Cake music) is a massive missed opportunity (yeah, perhaps I will... Just wait and see... Maybe that's a way for IX Tab to go, it needs somewhere to go) - Acid House doesn't count because it's really suitable for ecstasy rather than acid, even psy-trance and all that hippie trance ethnic-techno isn't perfectly aligned with the chemicals, it all makes perfect sense on speed and alcohol and E and Coke... It's not music that engages with the sensibility of LSD, just music that engages with the engagement of LSD, that is it complements acid but only in the way that all music sort of complements acid (people use Bach, Beach Boys, Burzum - ok, not many use Burzum). LSD needed a music that was its own but instead it got what was simply called psychedelia. The map is not the territory etc etc etc etc


When we were kids we made stuff that only made sense on LSD. I had a stereo that could play both tapes simultaneously and we'd experiment with different mixes: two different Shamen albums, bits of Jack The Tab and Coil, bits of Monty Python and Shamanarchy albums, Bach and Autechre, Front 242 on half speed and Philip Glass... Outside of those few hrs at the peak of the flash these primitive little mixes sounded terrible (of course they did) but inside new things were born and music stopped dominating and became dominated; we chose the mood and the music followed us. In the age old battle between drugged-out humans and music we won...

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
If you don't know about this battle then you haven't been on drugs. Everyone I know knows about the battle. You take enough drugs and the music nearly always wins... You see the people lurching from microspace to miniplace at Festivals, unable to take, to stand what they're hearing, needing to find a place where the music wins but in a good way... The music nearly always defeats people, bends them to it's will, takes them on and off... the battle between the drugs and the music, with people as the battleground, are what Festivals are

^^^^^^^^*^^^^^^^^^
But... In 70 years, we haven't really got much further (back and faster) than The Grateful Dead / Pink Floyd axis... And they're not even particularly good at being LSD music... They work (again, everything works) and they are functional (even The Grateful Dead who I've tried and tried to understand but just can't) but that is all... They are just music... They are for something else, like Techno and Trance are for dancing, like Autechre et al are for curing headaches (unaccompanied, Autechre et al makes no sense on acid because it makes sense on acid, becomes plodding and empty, becomes about the lost beats that are suddenly found - no, Autechre's mysticism is about thinking things through while perfectly straight, they are a crossword puzzle and you should keep them the hell away from LSD).

Even the trippiest, trickiest music of the spheres (Parmegiani, I'm looking at you) is just...not...quite.


At the time, we often talked about this as if it were a synaesthetic problem; with bendy, circular, rhizomatic music (those Mille Plateux Deleuze and Guattari albums were NOT remotely rhizomatic, even if they thought they were) being the music of choice (we all got Coil, got stuff with phasing, got some of the Psychic TV stuff, understood where the pre Mr C Shamen were coming from) but I'm not sure even that way of looking at things was truly appropriate; I suspect there was better stuff around the corner and always suspected it.




There wasn't. It never happened. Acid House really let us down, at a time when it didn't need to. It punked / Punked out. I still remember the MAARS single coming out and seeming like a throw in the right direction (us geeky guys had been trying variations of those cut ups with old Derek and Clive and New Beat records for ages). It wasn't quite right but with AR Kane involved it was almost right - and the idea of dream-pop sounded like it might be the right idea (ie music that could only make sense in a dream) but...

No. That didn't happen. Another missed opportunity. Instead dream-pop became the ultimately disappointing (mostly execrable) shoegaze, whose very genre name (laughable that some bands are deliberately adopting that as a signifier, as stupid as the Tories adopting that "I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher" song) gave up the ghost, the dream and conceded without ever throwing a single limp-wristed punch (that punch might have been You Made Me Realise, played live but it really wasn't Loveless, whatever you think)

There was Spacemen 3 back then but we knew that was just our Grateful Dead and even at their most abstracted and dissolute, the music was just so damned listenable in any circumstances. My kids love Suicide. Everybody loved Spacemen 3, whether they were LSD'd or not. And, to be fair, the boys were perhaps thinking of other, more appropriate, fuzzes.


There's been plenty of other false dawns and lots and lots of music that worked well with whatever. Christ, this blog used to be full of it back in the earlier days. Here, for instance, where I rhapsodied about Kahimi Karie (Still love this version):


Yeah, this. Whatever. I haven't linked to it in a while. I still worry about this kind of thing.

So, what I meant to say is that its sad that we've already had LSD for 70 years and haven't really done anything about it. In fact, its a spectacularly unpopular and uncool drug; one that barely registers as anything other than some faintly ironic plod towards nostalgia, towards the dreaded hippies... The arch capitalist wow of Cocaine has taken over, people still suck on Es, try variations of Plantfood & animal tranquillisers - anything to avoid the sheer hard work and effort required for a decent acid binge. No one seems to know what to do with that amount of time anymore. To concentrate on all those utterly prosaic things for 12 hrs or whatever seems almost unthinkable and maybe even slightly ridiculous and deceitful (what might anyone be looking for, when all the world is here?) and indulgent...

LSD was always indulgent, is indulgence, always brings to mind the fin-de-siècle guys and girls, who would have loved the arse off of it and maybe actually changed the world because of it. Moorcock (Did he just mention fucking Moorcock? What next? Hawkwind?) knew it - Dancers At The End Of Time, for fuck's sake - and you can sense in that book how he misses that future. Are The Focus Group gonna spin off into that missed opportunity?

****Update: in the comments this great little mix has appeared, so i thought I'd stick it in... Cheers for that!


Lord, can you hear me?

Anyone?

I'm off to make something that I can't listen to.

Here's to the next 70 years!

Shackleton - I Miss Coil

 Previously on Freq

I miss Coil.

If that seems like speculative disrespect in this context then it’s not meant to be. Lots of this might even be Coil, since I’ve never been convinced that they’ve gone. The meat may have died but the spirits remain, flying. I hate the phrase channelling because it’s not true; those that think they’re channelling are often merely copying, repeating spectral phrases without spectral phrasing but… there’s a touch of Coil around the eyes. Someone else missed them too, perhaps.

I got this as a solid, bandwidth-worrying lump of MP3s so didn’t come to it in the ‘right’ order; I don’t think it matters* Each piece slides in and slides away again; some tracks are full of space, some crammed with content. There are perhaps too many ideas, but that is faint criticism, especially when so many other releases (and there are so many releases) don’t even bother having one idea. This is grand in scope and turns a little away from the insular darkness and drum clatter of the much-loved (by me, by everyone) Three EPs collection. This is Shackleton unshackled and is a lot more fun, even if the fun itself comes from imagined dystopias and ontological insecurity. Max Ernst’s painting Europe After The Rain would have been a decent bit of cover art (you know what the cover art is by now).

You see, the thing I liked about Coil was that they didn’t dwell on the darkness; they dealt with death and madness and psychoactive delirium as if… well, it might be a bit of fun. Several slices of this thick pie could’ve been on Stolen and Contaminated Songs and if that makes that title a prophecy, then I think the Coil boys would be proud. This is a singular, rough beast, lurching towards us with a manic grin on its face.

And so Shackleton almost goes tropical on a few tracks and one section even reminds me of a similar section in Shpongle’s “My Head Feels Like A Frisbee” (though I doubt you’ll get anyone to admit it). There’s a love of the word in here, even if often they are mangled. The words dominate; samples break the flow of the music in exactly the right way. They wrestle with the beats, with the organs, with the shadows. They are full of a sudden, breath-taking clarity; a voice spoken from above like the voice in Samuel Beckett’s “Company.”

What would God say? Let's listen.

One track is even formed from a letter written to a future grand-daughter; a little mini sci-fi short story that seems written with Houellebecq in mind. This is a very literary album and is never afraid that it’s sounding too precious or portentous or pretentious… it skirts all these boundaries expertly, delivering on almost every count. This is dark and grandiose and occasionally silly and all the more surreal because of it. It’s almost Nurse With Wound surreal, ‘gets’ surreality better than any album I’ve heard in the last five years or so (gets it better than most NWW, to be honest).

This is compelling stuff. I’ve listened all the way through now three or four times. The cycles repeat. It’s on shuffle play on my iPod and every track order makes a certain (non)sense. There’s a world in here and Shackleton is slowly showing it to us, in all its mad glory, exploding frogs and all (I might have invented that last bit). It’s overblown in the best ways, a trailing fuse to what I hope might be an explosion in surrealist maximalism. If nothing else, Shackleton has re-energised the idea that an album release might be an event (a point well made by Dan Baker of Devil Can You Hear Me fame ). He’s reintroduced the idea that an album ought to be something considered, waited for and then discussed rabidly.








You remember those days, you can remember the expectation. The queuing.  You'll remember that the possibility of disappointment confusion were integral parts of the experience. The wtf moments that lingered. You'll remember that you often needed to listen 3 or 4 times before even attempting an analysis but that the first flash of hearing was also important: I can remember me and my friends listening to Neubauten's Funf album and looking at each other and just letting it in. Same with Snivilisation and Daydream Nation and  Allegory and Self and... everything.


People should love it or hate it; they shouldn’t be able to shrug it off. I’m glad that some people think he’s gone too far (How can you? The very idea is laughable) or that some think the spoken word is too disruptive to their precious beats (Um, Fuck Off). I’m glad because it’s an album that challenges people to be wrong about it. Yeah, it’s not Coil, it’s not perfect, not yet – some of the loops still sound too much like loops, some of the samples don’t feel self-evident or necessary** in the way that the Coil ones did – but this is still the best album of the year so far and more importantly, it’s probably destined to be everyone’s best album of 2012 sometime around 2032.





*but maybe it does. I'm going to arrange things in the right order tomorrow and listen to them right the way through all over again. This is considered and maybe I should do it that service. There could be a plan here I'm missing...

**Mmm, not sure what I mean by this except that it's a kind of odd sur-emotion (an aesthetic emotion) where, sometimes, the samples feel like they crept in behind the music and settled there unannounced, preparing. I hear the (sometimes silly) eruptions in Coil ('You've been exploding frogs again') and they are just... supposed to be there, as if the film was written and played out so it could eventually be used as a sample in that track. Same with Tricky's use of 'Let Me Tell You About My Mother' where he takes what was already a prosaic, quotidian source (Bladerunner) and just runs with it because it was already part of the song. I can't say what exactly makes it this way except that I can hear it in the music I'm trying to make too... sometimes a voice is exactly right, sometimes almost right, sometimes it's just there, hanging above the rest of the sounds like it doesn't belong. Most of the samples and voices in the Music For The Quiet Hour sections are almost right, some are exactly right, some just hang.

Colour Sound Oblivion Coil

Love this Val Denham portrait. It manages somehow to capture an intensity and a normality, a humanity... this is the kind of portrait I'm sure Houellebecq was on about in The Map And The Territory. A rare thing. I found this again here, where there's loads of Coil related images, scans, covers etc. Some of which I've never seen before (and I've looked... a lot) Glad someone's still fanning the flames. Miss them. There's also a brilliant Cyclobe interview here . I especially like this bit:

I'm not saying music has to be complicated, or that it has to take a long time to make to be interesting, but I do think people need to take more time. The world is too 'now' orientated and we're littering, smothering each others’ minds with all this uncensored mundanity.

It's something too few people say. Another, incidentally, saying much the same thing is Kevin Shields, of course and he's also been interviewed at the Quietus. Really interesting. Anyway, if it's possible to be bored with nowness, I think I am. It's a seductive quality, spontaneity (or valuing spontaneity) but... maybe it's run its course for a little while. Time and Place. Take your time, folks...

Love's Secret Domain

I never actually saw this, only imagined it. Now it's here. I knew where but, well, you never really know where do you?

Select Magazine Scans

A big thankyou to Richard at Select Magazine Scans for finding, scanning and sending me this (negative) review of Love's Secret Domain... I don't agree, of course, with Ted Kessler's review but, in the same way I occasionally read The Mail (or even the NOTW - what? It's gone? Why? What happened?) just to get a perspective on what the enemy are thinking, I like reading negative reviews of albums I love, just to prevent my Groupthink at bay in the hope I'll avoid the blog/critical equivalent of The Bay Of Pigs...

Ha, just found that my old Love's Secret Domain review is now coming up second (under Wikipedia) on Google... Jesus, I must've spent a lot of my life talking about this album!

Keith Fullerton Whitman/Alien Radio (Rhizomatic Review Remixxx)

This is a remix of the review over at Freq.

This is a work in progress about a work of progress. A split album in all senses.

<<<>>>

Split seams... or spilt seems

Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics.

(((arpeggios that didn't follow the usual waves of the sea, that didn't submit to the ravages of what others thought the sea must sound like, but instead turned a conch into an amplifier and heard the sea anew)))

Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms.

<<<>>>

There’s rumours that a good few of the audience were high on LSD when he played this out. Let’s hope not, eh?

<<<>>>

It’s not as… breezy as some of Keith’s recent works, not as obviously de-tangling (insert here quote about Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic structures, strangling the life out of the roots from tree of knowledge) and instead reminds me in form of Faust’s “Krautrock” opener from Faust IV, if less smooth than that suggests and less solipsistic.

((((Actually listening for a third time this isn't true; apologies to Freq readers but it really doesn't sound like that at all; whatever resemblance it seemed to have this morning, seem gone now... I don't know what I was thinking...I'm a twat)))

It’s (still) a symphonic roar of a track (though) which gets to crescendo early on and doesn’t really give up until the end. Despite being built from edits, it’s propulsive and you’ll never hear the joins; you can just about imagine Keith holding on to this track like it’s an aircraft engine, hoping to hell he doesn’t slip on one loose wire and get thrown off.

One loose sinewave, one loose electron... Keith Fullerton Whitman is getting more scientific in his (not very) old age... this is music that sounds like it was made in a laboratory, or rather a garage that's been turned into a laboratory, like those guys in Primer... it's akin to people trying to make Owsley Acid; only to find that occasionally the air turns sulphuric...

<<<>>>

Alien Radio responds to this long, dense frightener with shorter, smaller tracks. Ping pong bleats, electronic White Noise* gulps (gulps seem everywhere at the moment in electronic music; everyone’s finding things difficult to swallow it seems**) that shift ever so slightly in and out of focus (this could be my ears) and then slope off behind the sheds for a robot smoke. He seems a little intimidated, anthropomorphically spinning into a sort of jester role to Keith Fullerton Whitman’s angry Bear King.

(((Listen closely, you'll hear them skipping around, these multi-jesters. you'll hear them sniping at each other with little electronic twizzles; skipping in the light, where Coil*** jesters skipped around in the half-light, pulling on the light cord...)))

They are pleasant and mildly diverting with all the plusses and minuses that come from that shallow-arsed phrase, sounding not unlike the collaboration between Aphex Twin and Mike Paradinas (as Mike and Rich) on Expert Knob Twiddlers. You’ll like both sides, I think but I reckon you’ll return to Keith’s side more often, if just to check that he’s still clinging on.



*I'm sorry, these guys seem to get a mention every fucking review. Lazy, stuffed turkey/tourniquet joinerism, almost Hari in it's effortless smudge...

** I'm assuming this is the gulps of (De)Cameron et al, future-recorded, watching each other auto-fellate while Rome burns. I'm assuming Chris Watson has plied himself from the soft burrs of The One Show and sent himself hurtling into the near-future, armed only with throat-mics...

***yeah, again; fucking sue me... actually I mention Owsley acid in that post too... this blog is eating itself; every post is a remix of every other post...

Larsen w/ Little Annie w/ Coil

I love the way Little Annie says the word cigarette; she makes it an onamatopoeic word. This is a little bit like a Rollins rant, a slight detourn of Steven Jesse Bernstein. A No No Woman in the sub-basement of hell.

It's not as good as this one of course:



...but you could put it in the same box.

Full review of the Larsen album will appear at Freqzine fairly soon.

Red Birds 2

Kind of companion piece to the post below, though don't think any of this is actually Paris, destroyed or otherwise...



In case, you're wondering, Red Birds 1 was here, though now mostly decayed.

RIP Sleazy (2)

End Of Era.

Circa:

1987

...bring home Horse Rotovator (on the recommendation of a one-eyed Record seller at a Yeovil Record Fair: "like Psychic TV, only good...") only to find the speakers are shot... can just about make out the textures of this record from pressing my head very close to the needle itself... hear the opening silos of Anal Staircase, only almost without sound... even then, it was the greatest record ever... the horn blasts, the whorls... this was about to become my music, the only band that ever touched my dead-eyed soul...

...heard at last a few days later and then played repeatedely, ritualistically, obsessive-compulsively... a new world/whirled opening up... insect chatter, humchatter, big songs when I'd just about started a period of getting rid of songs...

...heard a day or so later through the gauze of just too much hashish... at times, during Penetralia, the world really does seem to slow down...

it becomes the downer LSD record of choice (the upper LSD record seems a long way away) - starts unravelling things... the world is a wound? Yes, of course...

Huge argument: no way this is Goth... this is the nonGoth death record... this is Mexican Goth i.e. not Goth at all...

...consider Malcolm Lowry for a little while.

...go backwards, find myself in a squat with Thatcher On Acid and Blyth Power practising in the basement... spend a few fruitless moments jumping up and down on the roof of the JAMMs car used in the Doctorin' the Tardis video... I've got a copy of Scatology under my arms, bought 2nd Hand at Notting Hill gate... insist on playing it to all the squat's hippies... curdles Soya... whiteouts....



...search.... Maldoror... De Sade... Bataille... it's an odd path but I keep going....

The Black Sun brings us to Harry Crosby... to Austin Osman Spare... to Richard fucking Dawkins...

1988

...hear an odd version of Tainted Love... a spun off version... a black hole of a record... it turns out much much later that it's isn't Coil I'm hearing except that it is...

...wake up in the woods with Coil's advert musics from the hellraiser 10" playing on a loop on a battered cassette player... someone (now also sadly dead and gone, our own version of Balance rather than Sleazy, has mixed the track so that it plays for the whole 45mins...)

...this is the beginnings of An Idiot's Guide... My Book Of Dreams

...read the Wild Boys, decide that Coil are the soundtrack of the film that never was.

Start seeing pirates again.... and not just in the music...

...keep digging... Gold Is The Metal... feels weightless.. true shards... but hearing Sleazy sing seems like he's talking from outside the grave....

1990

Trying to work out the Wrong Eye single... the slurrs not quite making sense... something seems missing from this... like this is a fragment of a bad dream... it's supremely odd... we sit around playing it over and over.... trying out different speeds... at 78rpm it starts to dance and we have to consider that whatever comes next is going to open up new depths....

...but instead... a new, crystalline brother turns out, blinking into the sunlight... Windowpane... this is a new curl, a turn up, a moment of sudden clarity when we weren't expecting it...

it took awhile before we could be turned from Horse Rotovator's churnings...

a little while...

then, Ecstacy.

Oh, yeah. I get it. This isn't about-

1991

I met a perfect girl on the day I bought ...Love's Secret Domain... a girl that would take me right the way through the end of my teenage years and onto my twenties... I'm talking to her and I'm holding this record... Chaostrophy will sort of become our song... without her, I couldn't have found my perfect wife... without this record, I couldn't have hoped to understand girls



from here this record soundtracks every acid trip for six years or more...

LP? yes. Cassette? Yes. CD? Well, you just had to.


The Acid squiggle is getting to me, finally. Before, I'd been following it; now it's following me...

Lying semi-conscious, wracked with shingles and pleurosy, those evil twins, those nasty little Kray fish - can now only listen to the Hellraiser themes, words are making no sense...

Later, humchatter.

1992



it's twin, Stolen and Contaminated Songs, comes a little later and that too keeps pressing at my brain, keeps me understanding the delirium, devastation and fun and frolics of drug use... these twins are the only records that make any drug sense to me... we sometimes played Shamanarchy compilations or early Shamen records but these two are just boiling and immense... these are why.

1993

very drunk, publicschool educated drunk, backstage at a Brighton Festival... Further Back and Faster is playing really loud over a PA, I can't findthe source, it seems to be following me... I've lost everyone I know... I can't even remember what this Press Pass means or who I'm supposed to be innerviewing.... holy fuck, Leigh Bowery is walking towards me... Further Back and Faster... Minty are playing, I think... soundchecking to... this?

A grin is sliding across my face like an open razor... Leigh Bowery looks mental of course but I'm freaking him out I think... I find myself mouthing the words of the song: "Fingers of the left hand, spell..."

I need out of here.

This music is way too much away from my little psychedelic cocoons...

Much later, on the beach at Brighton on Christmas Day: Chaostrophy blasting onto an empty beach, the perfect Christmas song.

Later, Derek Jarman's Blue premiers on TV... Coil blends... all Coil... the blue suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.. the fact there are all these people, out there, listening to Coil while I'm listening...

There's a glimpse, it seems. A new world. Coil on TOTP. Coil on Richard and Judy. Coil switching on the Christmas Lights...

But...

1994-1998

...Coil music thin on the ground... music itself losing significance a little... finding new things: work taking over, drink taking over... just obsessively scanning the Coil fanlist letters, looking for evidence that all is not lost...

played LSD to someone and they hated it: barely checked fury... music ebbing away...

The Glitch gets worshipped, though it takes it's spacetime to find its right place.

A car, going dead slow in the snow, The Solar Lodge is making a comeback. In the trees, odd figures that will reappear on the Moon's Milk CD just a few years away... for a little while, this Essex backwoods is flipping into Apocalypse Now...

1998

The Solstice singles start creeping out - these will eventually coalesce into my favourite album of the noughties, will eventually make all the sense of the world...

they soundtrack all seasons equally, as such suck air in in all kinds of ways... hot becomes cold, cold becomes hot... this is weather-baiting music...



A car journey full of flashing speedcamera lights and allCoil... I'm deranging the girl who's driving, kinda hoping for a crash.... I'm in an odd place...

1999

Kate Bush appears, as she always threatened to... this is a waves... this is a disappointment at first... not as sparkly as the Solstice singles, too windswept... but it grows... they always grow...



2000



Music To Play In The Dark is played in the dark. Another new direction that no one saw coming. This has been ages in coming.

Eyes closed, sucking it all in. A new child gurgling in the background. Perfect. Moon Musick at a time when the moon is always out; perpetual dawn.

Lots of mushrooming. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night takes over. This track will creep, will creep forever now. Begin to understand Thighpaulsandra.

Discover Salvia. Time Machines is the only CD I can listen to while this plant takes hold. Everything else is impossibly intrusive. All words shriek. Flashback to pleurosy/shingles time.

2002

See Coil live, with the wrong girl. The tubes on strike, everything circling.

2003



The live albums keep spilling... each one is a different mystic beast... they will go on and on and on... Coil will live forever...

2004

They. Don't. Fuck. ImBalance. This is the first rock star death that I feel. I'd just managed to have the courage to go an innerview him. He'd been very nice on email and over the phone. He lived just up the road. I sent the questions and then he was gone.

Gutted.

What can we see in the entrails, Roman?

Then: Shards, fragments, totems... there must be more product out there, mustn't there? Thousand of unreleased gems from when Jhonn was alive. It'll all come out now, won't it? There must be ghosts of vocal tracks lying dormant on harddrives, elPHing out, waiting in the shadows...

2005

Oh Christ, the multiverse... Chaostrophy reemerges. For a brief moment, things might be alright...

The Ape Of Naples comes and... it's not enough. It's great, but it's not enough. The harddrives aren't there - is this machine recording?



There's shards, fragments, totems but...

"Some of the songs from Backwards are here too; mostly in much improved versions from the bootlegs that crawled the Russian cracks in the net... mostly in versions where the vocals rise and fall, clambering to get out because he knows it's almost time for words to end...

So far, we've had Boy In A Suitcase and Broccoli but, now this is out, the question remains: will Peter sing again?"

2006-2010

I hear hidden things. An odd sort of hope.

Peter Christopherson is regrouping, getting ready, coming up with some brilliant angles. It's not Coil but it's a breathlike, a tangible, a skew. He's gaining in confidence, the Thresholds being met allover again. He's going to release something immense soon...

These tickles, these treats.

I can't believe he's gone. There must be more. Collaborations, compilations, missing tracks, oddbins, entrails, humchatter...

RIP Sleazy

Oh, FFS.

My last proper musical hero has gone and it's way too soon. Rest in peace; your music has changed my life and made lots of crazy days brighter and more demonic. At least 5 of my 10 favourite records of all time were in part produced by Peter Christopherson. A true genius.

Wounded Galaxies

White vinyl, snake's tail thick; an exquisite package... the cover, the inserts, the poetry, the fact that Stephen Thrower's starting to look a little like Kempernorton (who's been churning goodies all over the shop)... this is a real release, in all senses of the word...

Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window is quite beautiful and out of alltime.

I have plenty of records that try to sound like this; there's thousands out there and almost every one of them should look at this and start over... this is music for people who know, who understand where this music comes from, who get that this music is sometimes out there, waiting to be heard; it's music you might glimpse out of the corner of your eye, to synaesthesise a little... music that just is, is found in fragments and then pieced together majestically...

(not channelled, Christ no...)

Previous Cyclobe albums have been a little dense for me... I've struggled to listen to them all the way through...

(I felt the same about Autotistic, a while back)

I have found that previous Cyclobe tracks worked best in mixes, in amongst other sources of light and air... I liked them but they worked as counterpoint, as a stirring, they only sounded truly beautiful against other songs...

this one is an entirely different proposition...

there's lots of sound, snake tumbling charms, drones, bagpipes, eastern melodies but there's also lots of air and the result is something of an aural eqivalent to Hermes Caduceus, with the melodies and drones winding their way around a central motif - hand drums, flute signatures, pipe hum - occasionally taking gentle flight...



...there's voices here and there, some definitely real, others imagined... there's moments which could be Hermes chastising Pan... there's often a statesmanlike quality to this music... these guys have seen it all, are reflecting on the chasms, not stumbling towards them... they've looked into the void, let it look back and then started to consider what it means to them.... this is clearly music born from Pan(ic) and vine and frivolity but it's never frivolous... there's no Balance in there, running around in a Jester's hat, swinging on the light cords...except for the odd few bars of Jim Foetus-like intensity

(horn stabs as Pan running across the grassland, as Hermes/Mercury remembering their youth?)

Oh fuck it: I love this album, have played it five times right the way through already... if you want an easy reference then of course there's Coil (some of the instrumentals on Scatology, Chaostrophy, bits from Stolen And Contaminated) but these are references of intent and understanding, not sound... Cyclobe have their own slurs and whirls... sound like themselves: truly psychedelic, truly steeped in occult traditions and hidden reverses and truly magnificent...

Gold Blood go Italo

So, Gold Blood. Anyone?

There's the name, I suppose. Gold and Blood being the old, odd Alchymical Twins. And I don't want to judge these guys before I've heard anything by them but, consider this and wonder if someone hasn't just emptied the entire contents of their playlist onto the page...

“A darkly, self-consciously melodramatic and brilliantly OTT mix of Fantomas, Coil, Vex’d and Virgin Prunes.” Time Out

I mean, that would be good wouldn't it? Though it does also describe early Coil so perhaps the part will eat the (w)hole...

Not sure who wrote the Time Out review. Not even sure that it was written; smacks of robot logic, a Pandora Radio review, an amalgam of iTunes or Amazon page views.

“Sounds like White Zombie gone Italo – amazing!” Wanstead Flats

I can see it. Sort of. I think more things should go Italo. Thinking about putting together an Everything Goes Italo megamix...

I'll check them out. I'm curious.

Colour Sound Oblivion (again)

Mental.

Threshold Housings

Well, no one who ever reads this would expect me to let this go without a little comment since Coil mentions make me spin away into a kind of petit-mal fanboy gurns...

Regarding the origin of Threshold House...

Well, a few little inter-digs and here comes Heidegger:

“The threshold is always stony, because it bears the doorway, because it sustains the middle in which the outside and the inside penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between, and pain has petrified it.”

Emphasis mine, of course but this might be as good an origin point for Coil’s label as any and an even better, more apposite, name for Sleazy’s Threshold Houseboys project… “bears the between” seems to resonate with the kind of liminal light that Coil constantly referenced, alongside the idea that Heidegger is seeing the threshold as a complex inter-weave of inner and outer, of Us and Other - which, seems to fit Coil conceptually - cf Penetralia which references a linked theme:

1.The innermost parts of a building, especially the sanctuary of a temple.
2.The most private or secret parts; recesses: the penetralia of the soul

Coil - Penetralia

Coil - Penetralia (Version from Unnatural History)

cf that line in Circles of Mania - "Eaten alive by the perfect lover" - (which Kempernorton might remember was always the opening song on our ill-fated, badly-conceived lunch-time radio show on Swansea University Radio)

Coil - Circles Of Mania

Of course, I'd love it if it really did come via Doctor Who - Coil don't really mention Doctor Who in interviews but that kind of reference is hardly necessary - those old soundtracks are implicit in a lot of their work, you don't need to read a reference to hear one... and I don't think this is a product of Coil's esoterrorism; like Throbbing Gristle I think the esoteric aspects of Coil miss the point a little - they always seemed as likely to reference the prosaic (okay, maybe not as likely as TG) and the (Mmm) bog-standard as the occult; in fact, their version of occult seemed very rooted in the reasonably ordinary...

Off the top of my head: the Moomins, Edith Sitwell, Jarry, Dali, The Butthole Surfers, John Dee, Pasolini, Isidore Ducasse...

I'm not convinced they should have made more of the soundtracky stuff though - they're not that much better at this kind of thing than lots of other artists, before or since - and there is a certain absence of intensity in this kind of thing, the kind of intensity that's often thought to be in these kind of electronic sprawls...

On the other hand, I remember seeing the Journey to Avebury film in an art gallery somewhere - perhaps Amsterdam? In that space, there did seem room for the piece to breathe and the tiny electronic squiggles dragged me in...

Coil - Jorney To Avebury

Find your own space...

(And on that note - Mp3s sourced / stolen / referenced from KickabottlePunk.com and DJChronic)

Coming Soon...

Soon is relative, of course.

But...




News from Threshold House
Coil - Chasms

Favourite Album Of Noughties V.2

Well, I've osciallated wildly; flipped back and forward, found myself caught in several ontological traps of my own making: attempts at out-cooling or under-cooling the others, attempts at de-anxietizing or contextualising, at attempting to avoid the obvious and the unheimlich... I've had a number of ideas floating to the service since Gutter's post, each with their own reason, each seemingly prosaic or flabby or otherwise distasteful. The more I think about it, the more this choice seems really like something to send out. Something that might make people click their teeth or eye-roll. A tremendous pressure, building behind the eyes, forcing me to change my mind over and over and over until, finally, I go with the rather predictable (for anyone that reads any of this):



Yeah, I know. Coil again.

It's quite possible that Love's Secret Domain (or here) was my favourite album of the 90s and Horse Rotovator my favourite of the 80s (though I might have chosen The Cure).

But Coil it is and will be. The way the major Coil releases magic mirror my own state of musical mind (Mmmm) is uncanny:

The 80s semi-Goth phase (a half-hearted Goth? Surely that's not Goth enough... I was a Goth afraid of black, replacing it instead with a massive jumper that made me look like a Fly Agaric), Western Lands, Maldoror, Pasolini obsessions through to the...

90s Acid Kid phase (kid becoming less appropriate as the decade wore on) where the only symptom of schizophrenia was delusions of grandeur and everything was seen through the psilotripitarka'd gauze of Glastonbury Festival mushroom socks, trance, Fraser Clarke ("Give us back our treeeees!") and..., well, you get the picture.

And so to the (now) unquestioned album of the noughties: the Moon's Milk compilation of the Equinox EPs. It works better as an album, I think ; it slips between tracks and moods as seamlessly as the British seasons. Moon's Milk evoked the crackling (cf: A Book Of Idiot Dreams) and the twig snapping lycanthropy of my childhood at a time when I was just arriving back in the West Country after 10 years of being away.

Moon's Milk is also apposite because it has a vague folkiness to it; in fact I think it'll stand in years to come as a direction for British Folk music that never quite came off, perhaps akin to the Comus album or the imaginary EPs series of folk classics (Gyre and Joanna Newsom's Duck With Two Backs) or even to my oft quoted (by me) rufflings about the missed Acid House opportunities suggested by Jack The Tab album (also here).

Coil - Amethyst Deceivers

As the decade wore on I found myself getting more and more into folk in all it's various forms - The Sunburned Hands, Ice Bird Spiral, Kemilliaset Ystavat, Devendra Banhart, the Time-Lag contingent, Joanna Newsom (who was Kemper Norton, who outfolked lots of people and will outfolk others in the times to come) - and any album choice needs to reflect this gentle, subtle calming of the psychedelic ways.

Here there be swirls:

Coil - U Pel

Moon's Milk also seems home-made somehow and this has been another theme for my musical decade; the regrowth of folk-art and CDR culture, the return of absolute effort into making musical artefacts; funny that when lots of commentators are talking about the death of CDs and musica as tangible object, my experience of the noughties has been one where the product has often been central; I play Moon's Milk on my iPod yeah but it exists only as a package, within the artwork, even down to the hidden track which presupposes that the CD is somewhere, left running. Lots of little musics existed in beautiful forms with spectacular and necessary artwork. The margins flourished.

So, the music itself. Well, drones rise, electronics nestle up against acoustics, voices rise and fall; this is not just where folk might have gone but also where classical music might end up. It works as a tidal album much better than the on the surface more river orientated Astral Disaster and allows just the right amount of dissonance to creep around the edges of all the beautiful songforms. There's long and short songs. Fat and thin ones. It's a dangerous record too: a breath either way and it's a pretentious, portentous nonsense of a record. Moments of great beauty and slivers of ugliness.

There's even a Christmas song.

Coil - Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

Of Coil's other big releases this decade, The Music To Play In The Dark series had their moments of divine clarity but don't get played right through that often while the hugely anticipated The Ape of Naples felt like a letdown. Moon's Milk took a few breaths to get into but have stayed with me. There's not a month gone by when i haven't played it right the way through and there's very few albums which I can honestly say that about.

Gruff Reese Jones Family

This made me smile - the sugar rush, the protein fix and the psychedelias all in a handy, bite size cupcake...

Pilfered fvia Tara

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Wickerman

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Spacemen 3

Coil & Coh - fffetish

Pilfered from the pinkly mysterious Robot Dreams

Soisong

Well, this is simultaneously weird and exactly the kind of thing you might expect from the Soisong boys. And while it's perhaps viral in every sense, it takes a little while to sink in how odd it is to focus on the actual source of a Soisong voice, especially in this kind of imaginary, hyperstitional ethnography...

Soisong Tangles

I try to buy everything related to Coil / Christopherson / Gristle but 22 english pounds for an object that's more or less certain to annoy the fuck out of me?