Fun Stuff > BAND
The "wink wink" Thread 2010: This Time It's Personal
KvP:
Seeing as how Peter Christopherson has shuffled off this mortal coil (hurr... sigh) I figured it be best to repost all the stuff I have from him and his work with Coil, my favorite band. These went up originally in January of this year. Reading back on what I wrote is bittersweet.
Coil - The Golden Hair With a Voice of Silver
I first got into Coil the way that a lot of people have (though they might be reluctant to admit it) - through Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor counted Coil as a major influence and for his Broken and Downward Spiral releases he enlisted Coil for extensive remixing of his work, the results of which showed up on the albums Fixed, Closer to God and Further Down the Spiral. Those remixes were certainly more in the noisy industrial vein of Coil's output at the time, and they were so removed from Reznor's pop sensibility that I found myself immediately intrigued by them. However, even at the time, during the advent of filesharing, it was exceedingly difficult to find Coil albums, and it wasn't until a trip to Paris in November of 2004 that I actually found a physical Coil album, and this is the one I found. Along with Aphex Twin's I Care Because You Do... it was the soundtrack to my Paris excursion. It only occurs to me now that Jhonn Balance likely fell to his death shortly before or during my discovery of this album.
As the AMG review indicates, this is an exceedingly good "entry level" compilation for would-be Coil fans. The first disc entitled The Silver Voice collects some of Coil's more contemplative cuts from early releases but mostly leans on Coil's late-period output, which featured a lot of drone and folk. Most of the songs feature Peter Christopherson and company's pretty and dark melodies (and weird tape effects) behind Jhonn Balance reciting poetry and singing. The first disc is unassailable as far as I'm concerned. Every track is excellent and different. My favorite tracks are probably the mournful almost-jazz of "At the Heart of It All", and the hymnal-esque "A Cold Cell".
The second disc (A Golden Hair) contains Coil's more avant-garde output from the 80's and early 90's. Along with some loud industrial-punk ("Panic", "The Anal Staircase") there's some indelibly weird acid house cuts ("First Dark Ride", "Further Back and Faster", "A.Y.O.R.") that some might find disagreeable, as well as some more subdued instrumental cuts that are nonetheless too dirty and disturbed for the spooky, blue-tinged Voice of Silver ("Red Skeletons", "First Five Minutes After Violent Death") and then there's "Blue Rats", which is almost synth-pop.
While it doesn't cover everything, this is as perfect a primer to Coil as I've found. It gives a good impression of the weird, dark, cultish sensibility of the band.
--- Quote from: Allmusic ---This 2-CD set is a widely available reissue of two Russian collections released by Feelee in 2001: A Guide for Beginners -- The Voice of Silver and A Guide for Finishers -- A Hair of Gold. Only two of the 20 tracks, "A Cold Cell," and "A.Y.O.R.," were previously unavailable at the time ("A Cold Cell" soon turned up on The Wire Tapper, Vol. 6 released by the British magazine The Wire), although some were a bit hard to find. Seasoned fans will feel the repetition (after all, this is not the first Coil "best of" to hit the stores) but newcomers will be treated to a first-class tour of John Balance and Peter Christopherson's realm. Disc one focuses on ambient tracks, the melodic, murmuring, slightly frightening kind Coil do so well. It draws heavily on the two volumes of Musick to Play in the Dark (including the grippingly beautiful "Batwings"), but also goes back to early efforts like Scatology ("At the Heart of It All") and Horse Rotovator ("Amethyst Deceivers"). Disc two presents the flip side, throwing together more aggressive, noise-based pieces that are often upbeat. The rough industrial stance of "Panic," "The Anal Staircase," "Solar Lodge," and the like, make this disc more difficult to listen to, if only because it leaves little chance to breathe. The set concludes marvelously with "The First Five Minutes After Violent Death." Every fan will have one of his or her favorite tracks missing, but the casual listener will find in The Golden Hair With a Voice of Silver the perfect place to start. There is one downside to this collection though: the total lack of liner notes means that you will have to plough your way through the All-Music Guide database to find where each track was taken from.
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A Guide for Beginners: The Silver Voice (Disc 1)
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A Guide for Finishers: The Golden Hare (Disc 2)
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Coil - Ape of Naples / The New Backwards LP
The very last Coil album is, perhaps ironically, the best entry point for neophytes into Coil's cohesive works. Made over the course of nearly a decade, The Ape of Naples marked what would have been a progression of Coil's sound further away from the abrasive industrial noise of their early career, deeper into electro-acoustic composition in the band's middle age. The Ape of Naples is a beautiful record, a far cry from the glitch experimentation of albums like Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, released only a few years prior to this album. There's always a sadness hanging at the edges of the music, perhaps informed by but not entirely because of the circumstances of the band at the time of release.
The material here is made up of some new material and live favorites but also many revisions of past songs and demos, some drastic some not, but all good. "The Last Amethyst Deceiver" strips away the original version's digital sheen in favor of a more organic feel, to the song's benefit. "It's In My Blood" slows down the acid house gatecrasher "A.Y.O.R." to a pulsing crawl, and "Cold Cell" likewise stretches its namesake out, making it more plaintive. "Heaven's Blade" takes its name from a song recorded during Coil's time working with Trent Reznor, but is otherwise unrecognizable, a woozy piece of post-industrial groove music (it's a good song but truth be told, I favor the original) My favorite track is probably "Triple Suns", which as versions of the song goes is indeed criminally short, but the mixing is incredible. And then there's the epic closer "Going Up", which is an incredibly sad rendition of the song, befitting its status as the last song Jhonn Balance ever performed. The only song I don't personally like is the Gallic and sort-of-cartoonish-to-my-ears "Tattooed Man". But a lot of people really seem to love that song, and even as I dislike it doesn't detract from the sad brilliance of this album.
The New Backwards LP is the most recent and possibly last Coil release even as it isn't really a proper album, per se. It was an extra LP bundled with a vinyl edition of Ape of Naples (a record store near me has a mint condition copy and Christ I want it) It's made up of finished versions of demos created during Coil's aforementioned studio time with Trent Reznor, and they're a bit harder-edged than the often-delicate cuts from The Ape of Naples, drawing more from Coil's past forays into acid house. Most of them are muscular instrumental pieces (the average song length is 6-8 minutes) but Jhonn Balance contributes a shamanistic vocal performance on "Nature is a Language". Aside from that track, there are two I really love - "Careful What You Wish For", which features a sinisterly altered vocal sample and some interesting programming, and particularly "Princess Margaret's Man in the D'Jamalfna", which features evocative strings and brass, and guitar over a propulsive rhythmic loop. As a gestalt unit it doesn't work quite as well as Ape of Naples, but it certainly comes from the same space as that album, and they compliment each other well.
Actually in researching New Backwards on Discogs it appears that there's a CD release with other unreleased songs. I'll have to track it down!
--- Quote from: Stylus Magazine ---It’s perhaps unavoidable, but every single phrase here comes steeped in prophecy; every melody line leads the listener inwards towards reflection. The first line of opener “Fire of the Mind”: “Does death come alone or with eager reinforcements?” Its chapel-organ-like tones bring an immediate air of finality, hanging heavy over this final Coil studio album. Ian Johnstone’s gorgeously funereal white card packaging, striking photographs, and his stark cover artwork (which is either an angry ape or a figure post-castration, depending on which way you look at it) gives a quiet, contemplative, eerie, peace to the contents, which veer from maniacal lunacy to spiritual deliberation.
It’s unclear what the late Jhonn Balance’s completed vision would have been for the posthumous The Ape of Naples, and this album is a gathering of unreleased work from his last days and earlier material culled from uncompleted sessions. It was an odd combination of Balance’s deterioration, Promethean genius, and human warmth that made him one of the most unique frontmen ever; this LP stands as a testament to those qualities. There’s something slightly peculiar about the album in that at times Balance doesn’t seem fully visible even when he’s in full voice. On several occasions, his vocals sound somewhat shrouded. Is there lassitude in Balance’s voice, or is there a purposeful remoteness on the performances of “Triple Sun” and “Amber Rain”? Or is it just the hindsight of what happened investing his vocals with foresight?
Some of the material here will be familiar to Coil fans from live releases and gigs, and “The Last Amethyst Deceiver” (as near an official Coil classic as its possible to get), “Triple Sun” (the version here is criminally short but elegantly detailed) and “Teenage Lightning 2005” are already well known in Coil circles. But their place on this album and excellent production cannot be undervalued, as each helps to show Balance at his visionary best. The many Coil affiliates (Ossian Brown, Tom Edwards, Cliff Stapleton, Mike York, Danny Hyde, and Thighpaulsandra) that have helped Sleazy to realize these performances into gorgeously disturbed beds of music should receive praise, too; The Ape of Naples sounds truly out of time and delicately beautiful in places. The poise of electronic sounds and beats with warm live instrumentation (such as marimbas) gives the music a human heart, making the atmosphere of loss all the more conspicuous. “Tattooed Man”, either a song of love for his current partner or a piece of ugly self loathing, features a hurdy-gurdy, lending the track both a Gallic and sea-faring feel. How did these so-called Industrialists end up somewhere as charmingly sweet as here?
In contrast, they punch out a version of “Heaven’s Blade” that is as untethered, drugged, coherently dark, and deliciously vehement as anything they’ve done previously, even during their Ecstasy-overdosing era. A track from their aborted Backwards sessions at Trent Reznor’s Nothing Studios, this is a jilting, buzzing, jittery furrow which wolves whisper, swirl, and snarl around in hopes of fresh blood. Balance is slyly conspiratorial and loosely clings to the thin line between angelic transformation and madness; coupled with a magnificently understated backing track, this is likely to be seen as one of their pinnacles.
“I Don’t Get It” is creepily damaged, sounding like the unwinding of some sick child’s melted toy as organic twisted sounds bubble under the surface. Balance’s torn up, sped up, and fucked up vocals are cast into the mix without a thought for their malign influence on the sweet string and horn arrangements. Like some sleep-deprived remake of Randall and Hopkirk: Deceased, this foggy detective-thriller theme shows glimpses into a mangled psyche through the spitting, screaming, snarling Balance. The song attempts to pulse and strain under its own tight structures, but somehow remains in one piece to its creaking, rubber-gagged end.
His vocals also strain at the walls of sanity on “It’s In My Blood,” where his yodeling screams and elongated, tortured vowels manage to speak up for the whole asylum ward with the high pitched whine of the title. An oil drum beat, war horns, and Thighpaulsandra’s descending string derangements lead to an off-mic quip from Balance (“Is that enough, Sleaze?”), as if his howls were as normal to him as fish and chips.
Ending with one of the most unlikely songs for anyone to cover, never mind Coil, who’d of predicted the theme to UK cheesy camp sitcom Are you Being Served? being used for anything other than a UK Hip-Hop sample? “Going Up” takes the original’s theme and loops it under a slow waltz, turning it into a very gentle, tongue-in-cheek, open-armed welcome to Death. Balance’s words are dropped low into the mix and Francois Testory’s choirboy vocals are a prayer to the bric-a-brac of everyday life and the escape skywards.
This album catches Jhonn Balance’s many guises in amber and traps them for a generation of explorers to swallow, follow, and then take down their own path. As one of their most unmagikal-themed releases, there might have been commercial avenues for this album that will never be followed up. The summing up of twenty-three years of Coil will be left for the future’s sure-to-come “best of” collection; The Ape of Naples stands as one of their finest albums ever, making it all the more gutting that this is their last.
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The Ape of Naples:
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The New Backwards LP:
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Coil - Horse Rotorvator
Horse Rotorvator is Coil at the apex of their industrial-noise period, or at least it's as close as Coil got to what we normally think of as "industrial rock". It's an album that launched a hundred (a thousand is kind of pushing it) industrial-goth bands. The drum machine stomp of "Penetralia" sounds just like Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey yet it predates that particular watershed album by two years. This is Coil at their loudest, and according to Jhonn Balance at least the album's apocalyptic mood was largely informed by the horrific suffering that was being felt by Balance and Peter Christopherson's friends and the wider gay community that Coil was a part of, due to what was known at the time as GRID (Gay-related Immune Deficiency), now known as AIDS. The weird big band music of "Herald" is inspired by the Mexican Festival of the Dead (the reliably transgressive Balance sought to make Coil's "death album" celebratory, as well as mournful). Even at this early stage in Coil's career with all their blasts of abrasive industrial noise, they indulged their passion for folk music, as evidenced by the superb "Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)". Oddly enough the track known as "The First Five Minutes After Violent Death" on the A Golden Hair With a Voice of Silver compilation is identified here as "Ravenous" (the mix is slightly different as well) while a spoken-word piece is labeled as "The First Five Minutes After Death", which is somewhat confusing. An important album, and a good one if you're any fan of industrial music in general. Otherwise it might be more difficult to get into.
--- Quote from: Allmusic (4.5/5) ---The title Horse Rotorvator is explained in the liner notes as a device large enough to "plough up the waiting world," created from the bones of the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Bay City RollersBalance shares the same haggard, mystic vocal delivery common to fellow explorers of the edge like David Tibet and Edward Ka-Spel, but he has his own blasted and burnt touch to it all. His lyrical subjects range from emotional extremism of many kinds to blunt, often homoerotic imagery (matched at points in the artwork and packaging) and meditations on death. As a result the cover of Leonard Cohen's "Who by Fire" isn't as surprising as one might think. Past guest Marc AlmondAlmond's then-musical partner Billy McGee, adding a haunting, sometimes grating, string arrangement to "Ostia," which is about the murder of radical Italian filmmaker Pasolini, and Clint Ruin, aka Foetus, adding his typically warped brass touches to "Circles of Mania." Paul Vaughan narrates the lyrics on "The Golden Section," creating a stunning piece that in its combination of demonic imagery and sweeping, cinematic arrangements holds a common ground with In the Nursery. All the guests help contribute to the album's overall effect, but this is Coil's own vision above all else, eschewing easy cliches on all fronts to create unnerving, never easily digested invocations of musical power.
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KvP:
Coil - Musick to Play in the Dark Vols. 1 and 2
Recorded in 1999 towards the beginning of Coil's foray into slower, darker mood music (the actual genesis of the shift in sound was the Equinox series, which I'll be getting to soon), Musick to Play in the Dark is more or less what it says on the label. Many of the songs on the subdued first disc of The Golden Hair With a Voice of Silver came from these two albums, but they take on a different feel in their original context, probably because for that compilation they chose the songs that were the least creepy.
The production style for much of the music here is very minimal with lots of reverb, giving the sense of a vast emptiness which Coil uses very well. The music has a hazy, dreamlike quality to it (be it the pitch-shifted samples under the piano dirge of "Ether", or the bass drone of "Broccoli", or the percussive pops of "Strange Birds") and more often than not it is deeply, deeply unsettling. Jhonn Balance repeating one word over and over on "Something" is the least of what it takes to make me uncomfortable, and when Balance whispers menacingly "One day your eggs are going to hatch" on "Strange Birds", you feel like you want to be nowhere nearby when that happens. Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable album, replete with the songcraft of Coil's later works (this is the second Coil album Thighpaulsandra contributed to). Just do yourself a favor and leave the lights on when you listen.
--- Quote from: Dusted ---At the end of its initial phase of operation, Coil had taken its music to a somewhat logical endpoint, a frigid coda where its jarring, industrial phase split between a love/sex/drug fascination and the hollow ring of metal-on-metal collision. Though traditional song structures and melodies shot through the underbelly of their most memorable work (anyone remembering their take on “Tainted Love,” Marc Almond inclusive, will have a hard time denying this charge), Coil thrived on the lurid dreams of the willing set against the chilling actualities of life itself. Our bodies begin and end at discrete points, in temporal, physical, and metaphysical situations, and the weight of this burden strikes a minor, ceaseless chord that resonates throughout Coil’s music.
Originally released around the turn of the millennium, Musick to Play in the Dark featured a restarted Coil at bay, with original members John (later Jhonn) Balance (R.I.P.) and Peter Christopherson joined by synthesist/bassist Thighpaulsandra, and Drew McDowall (replaced by Rose McDowall on the second volume). These are long-form works, collections of mood pieces in several modes, and what’s interesting (and somewhat predictable) is that the patience displayed while shifting in between these modes creates a tension and space that feels … almost removed from music by a step, as if the performance decided to slowly back away from Coil at a respectful, totality-fearing distance (or maybe it was the psychic force of their music that pushed it all back).
Musick the first peaks early on, with the Delia Derbyshire-esque sweep of the excellently-titled “Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night,” but does not sacrifice its ability to intone fear into the audience’s minds, as it does on the seemingly innocent “Broccoli,” its lyrical ramblings holding themselves in the round, turning from absurd to ghoulish as the track drones onward, pitched-down choruses adding to the overall effect. Vol. 2 is its own work entirely, more focused on a set of instrumentation and style that is smaller in scope than on the first volume. Tweaky, inner-ear synth squelch glides icily along its requisite sine waves, Balance’s vocals at first obscured by vocoding and electronic pincers but eventually ebbing back into its deep, reverberating pall. Even somewhat uplifting moments, such as the jumping-jack rhythms of “Paranoid Inlay,” collapse into interminable darkness given a few minutes of runtime. The bulk of what’s left is unreasonably cold, alone, and deadly serious, from the elegant piano tumble of “Ether” to the surgically imprecise puddle of “Where Are You?” leading into the album closer “Batwings (A Limnal Hymn),” a tour-de-force of Guignol imagery and the almost unavoidable, mantra-like denouement amidst electronic cycling and dulcet tones.
Not easy listening here, mind you, but then again, Coil never was. These records don’t merely deserve a full and unimpeded attention span; they require their own environments. Candlelight, blackout shades, red wine and intoxicants of choice are their demands. Anything less and you might laugh. You might still laugh on first listen. It’s just your nerves trying to avoid the inevitable. Listen again, until the cold, humid dusk of their finest hours truly sink in.
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vol. 1
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vol. 2
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Coil - ...And the Ambulance Died in his Arms
Recorded at Coil's performance at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2003, ...And the Ambulance Died In His Arms is a high-quality capture of Coil live and unusually improvisational. Performing at the time with Jhonn Balance on vocals, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson on sequencers, Thighpaulsandra on synthesizers (he also mastered the album) and Tom Edwards on Marimba, the set consisted of 4 songs, 2 of which are, as far as I can tell, unreleased. The extended reworking of "The Dreamer Is Still Asleep" sports Jhonn Balance's occult-flavored chanting (he's clearly tripping on something and greatly enjoying himself). The best thing about this album are the two long versions of "Triple Suns", which would later show up on The Ape of Naples. The first is an instrumental, meant as a sort of introductory song for the band. The second version (which clocks in at a whopping 14 minutes) features a vocal turn from Balance. As subdued as live Coil gets. Great stuff.
--- Quote from: Stylus Magazine (B+) ---Performed, recorded, conceived, and titled before Coil founder / vocalist Jhonn Balance’s untimely accidental death in late 2004, this 2003 concert captures Coil in another of their various live incarnations. This recording sees the bearded Balance in his final incarnation as an Edwardian / Gallifreyan gentleman; the greatest Doctor Who we never had. As with much of Coil’s work out of the post-Industrial shadow, he seems somewhat out of time, coming across variously as scrambled, disassociated but always polite and erudite. He even takes time out to offer sensible advice on jam making before varispeeding his own voice and intoning word associations and eerie rhymes on the set’s closing track.
When Balance comments at the crowd’s request for more volume that “excess makes the heart grow fonder” he makes a valid point. As much as the band were / are loved for their music, his taste for altered states sometimes made him a poster boy for those who get their vicarious thrills through others’ cultural, chemical, and societal barrier testing. As with many artists’ posthumous releases, …and the Ambulance Died in his arms is invested with sadness—the darker, lonelier sections of sound seemingly portentous of his early passing. Balance’s parting comment (“Enjoy the rest of the day”) may have been a polite farewell from the stage at the time; now it’s advice for life.
Playing a set of (at this time still) unreleased songs, with the exception of closer “The Dreamer is Still Asleep,” Coil unfurl a dark phosphorus sound which slips insect chatter amongst the drones. Along with a few other tracks “Snow Falls into Military Temples,” suffers from an unwelcome overexposure of intrusive xylophone, but retains a heavy atmosphere with unsteady waves despite the boneshaker melodies. The crash and clatter of Sleazy and Thighpaulsandra’s digital banging provides an unstable bed for Balance’s wordless invocations which are part Knights of Nee part Samoan Rugby player part Diamanda Galás yelping. Where other vocalists search and find their voice Balance seemed happier investigating his voice, remaining open to experience and other less conservative singing styles. The piece’s title merges with the sonic static like a snow drift across the mind’s eye creating images of decayed crumbling armed forces bunkers.
The John Carpenter themed instrumental introduction piece “Triple Sun Introduction” is revisited with a vocal version entitled “Triple Sons And The One You Bury” which sounds a lot warmer as a result. The release’s centrepiece, however, is the sinister “A Slip in the Marylebone Road” which twists the tale of a fall in the street into the threads of a descent into mental illness. The building narrative progresses through ill-omened and distorted imagery of horses ill in a hospital and gaping splits in reality. The music reflects this loosening grip on the existing world as it’s pulled and pixelated along struggling to maintain the circling beat pattern and mini-pulses.
With this live performance Coil manage and manipulate their environment, in this case a cheesy holiday camp setting, fashioning their own rip in reality for over an hour. Since you won’t be catching them live again, this is a must-have document.
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Coil - Love's Secret Domain
Marking the period between the gothy industrial of the 80's and the spooky organic sounds of the band's latter days, the 1991 album Love's Secret Domain finds Coil following their muse into the realm of dance music, specifically the harsh tones of acid house and a certain hypnotic strain of techno, with the straight-ahead dance jams of "The Snow" and "Windowpane". Sleazy attributed this change to the still-present threat of AIDS, which led young gay men to clubs to dance under the influence of drugs instead of having the promiscuous sex they otherwise would be enjoying.
However it wouldn't be much of a Coil album without a bit of dissonant adventure, with tracks like "Chaostrophy" and "Titan Arch" filling that niche quite nicely, or neo-folk, here represented by three different versions of "Teenage Lightning" (1, 2 and "Lorca not Orca"), which would find itself again in yet different form on Coil's last album. Along with Horse Rotorvator, considered one of Coil's best albums.
--- Quote ---="Allmusic"]Though Coil's John Balance and Peter Christopherson were inspired by the acid house revolution of the late '80s, their drug-inspired "dance" album isn't quite as indebted to the style as the contemporary work of Psychic TV. The influence comes through mostly in the deranged effects and vaguely surreal air, though several tracks do increase the rhythmic wattage. For the most part, the duo retained the gothic synth pop of Horse Rotorvator, but with a special emphasis on stuttered cut-and-paste sections rather than organic instruments and environmental sublimation.
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KvP:
Can't seem to find outside opinions on these! Oh well. This series of 4 EPs intended to be released at their eponymous times in 1998-1999 show Jhonn Balance's persistent fascination with mysticism and paganism, without becoming overbearing or self-conscious. Even without the occult angle the EPs are still fascinating to listen to.
The four EPs are rather distinctive in their sound, but Autumn Equinox is the breakthrough. "Amethyst Deceivers" became a live favorite and was reworked for Ape of Naples, but the EP is simpatico to Musick to Play in the Dark, which would be released the following year.
Spring Equinox is another EP with a similar sound to its Autumnal counterpart, but the music is more soothing than unsettling, the first part sliding along on a droning organ line and the second adding an emotive viola melody. It's probably my favorite of the four (I don't want to let on just how much of a geek I am, but Spring Equinox went perfectly as a soundtrack to running around in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind).
The other two EPs, Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice, are more in line with Coil's preceding records, retaining a dark, grimy industrial feel, but there are tracks that ably straddle the line between drone and industrial - "A White Rainbow", which in tone is very similar to the Equinox EPs, and "Summer Substructures", which is a prime piece of Coil mysticism, added by the same bewitching (sometimes overbearing) electric viola that graced Spring Equinox.
Taken together, these works do a good job of demarcating the transition from their more industrial-noise and -techno period in the mid 90's into the more drone-oriented period that would follow in Musick to Play in the Dark and the various instrumental albums (Queens of the Circulating Library, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, etc.) that came about as a result of Thighpaulsandra's induction into the group. Challenging, but very rewarding.
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Coil - Black Gold & Backwards Compilations
On the last day of Coil week I figured I'd throw out the two best of the numerous "unofficial" collections of unreleased Coil material. Both Black Gold and Backwards are largely composed of material that would later become Ape of Naples, although most tracks are in vastly different forms than what they would soon be. "Heaven's Blade" here is a heady instrumental completely different from (and far superior to, in my opinion) its Ape of Naples counterpart. "Spastiche" would later be renamed "I Don't Get It", and "It's In My Blood" is here in its original form, "In My Blood" (elsewhere it's called "A.Y.O.R.") "Egyptian Basses" would later be modified into the more lush "Princess Margaret's Man in the D'Jamalfna", although the cut-up vocal sample here has its own spooky pull.
Black Gold also has numerous original songs and remixes from before the Backwards sessions were recorded, many of them from obscure vinyl releases only available to those who knew Coil personally. Three songs in particular are really good - "Theme from Gay Men's Guide to Safer Sex" is a sonic departure for Coil that's unlikely anything else in their catalogue. It's a shame that the rip is so low quality. "Blue Theme (Alternate Version)" takes Coil's unusually rave-y theme and adds a bit of sublime surrealist poetry on top of it (I think it's William S. Burroughs, but I'm not sure). "Assassins of Hakim Bey" is worth having for its title alone, but the weird synth sequence and the sitar drones make it another peculiar but welcome foray into undiscovered sonic territory for Coil that is bewitching instead of dissonant and difficult.
--- Quote from: Wikipedia ---Backwards was a studio bootleg recording by Coil. The origin of the source of "Backwards" is believed to have been a leak of the studio demo, in the form of a cassette. However, the entire demo was broadcast when Dutch Radio4, a radio station in Amsterdam, had Coil as in studio guests to coincide with a live performance on the date of 2001 June 01. The program was broadcasted on 2001 June 18 and a four disc CD-R set of the entire broadcast, made by the radio station, was released in an unknown quantity as Dutch Radio4 Supplement. Although part of the proposed album was eventually released as The Ape Of Naples, the material is so augmented that there are very few recognizable samples.
The album was the proposed release on Trent Reznor's former label Nothing Records. However, the release was continuously put off. The Ape Of Naples is considered to be the reincarnation of this demo as it features completely reworked versions of "Heaven's Blade", "A.Y.O.R.", and other songs that are believed to have been originally created around the time of Backwards. "Simenon" and "Bee Has Photos" are built largely on the foundation of the song "Protection" which was released on the single Born Again Pagans.
"Bee Has Photos" and "Eqyptian Basses" are not considered to be officially part of this bootleg as they were released as part of the Songs of the Week download series and not on the supposed original demo. However the version from Songs of the Week is an alternate version, much shorter in length.
On the live Coil album, Live Three, a song called "Backwards" is performed. This song is an incarnation of the songs "Simenon" and "Bee Has Photos".
This bootleg comprises the material for an album with several proposed titles, such as "International Dark Skies", "God Please Fuck My Mind For Good", "Fire Of The Mix", "The World Ended A Long Time Ago" and "Backwards". Other proposed titles are also possibly referenced by this material.
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Black Gold
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Backwards
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KvP:
Thighpaulsandra - I, Thighpaulsandra
The first of three extra Coil-related albums is a solo effort from latter-day Coil member Thighpaulsandra, a classically trained musician (from an accomplished family of musicians) who's probably best known as a key player in acclaimed rock band Spiritualized from 1998 to 2008. Thighpaulsandra joined Coil at around the same time he joined Spiritualized, and his sensibility is all over their later records, particularly when they made forays into drone.
I, Thighpaulsandra is not a drone record, however long the tracks may be (the album fits on two CDs but is just 11 tracks long) but it is deeply weird in the best Coil tradition, and frequently thrilling. Thighpaulsandra draws from the sounds of all his day jobs here, with lots of odd electro-acoustic programming but also an affinity for live drums and electric guitar, as shown in the sprawling opener "Lycraland", and later in the glorious stoner metal of "Home Butt Club" and the straightforward Nine Inch Nails-y industrial rock of "We, The Descending". The highlight has to be "The Angelica Declaration", a weird balls-out rocker that recalls, of all things, Flipper's sludge-punk classic "Sex Bomb". Of course there are plenty of industrial-ambient tracks to round things out, with "Abuse Foundation IV", "Michel Publicity Window", and "Limping Across the Sky" all taking their cues from Thighpaulsandra's work with Coil. A surprisingly accessible record, for how insane it is.
--- Quote from: Compulsion Online ---For years Thighpaulsandra has been an enigma. He's been Julian Cope's mohican haired keyboard player performing on most of the Arch Drude's output since Autogeddon. With Cope he formed the glambient supergroup Queen Elizabeth, filling their eponymous CD and subsequent Elizabeth Vagina CD with deep ambient drone. With Cope switching his attention to book writing Thighpaulsandra joined erstwhile Spacemen Three member Jason Pierce, in his space rock group, Spiritualized, initially as a replacement but now as a full-time member lending his keyboard wizardry to various Spiritualized releases including the Abbey Road EP and the Live at the Royal Albert Hall CD. He survived the Spiritualized schism and has contributed extensively to the forthcoming Spiritualized release with both his keyboard and orchestral scoring skills.
In 1998 he contributed to Coil's (at the time) ultra-limited Astral Disaster vinyl release. He forged an immediate psychic kinship with John Balance and as a result was invited, and duly accepted, John Balance's invitation to join Coil as their permanent fifth member. "Pentagrammatical. Complete," commented Balance. He's since recorded with Coil on the two volumes of the Musick To Play In The Dark series. Last year he debuted with Coil at their magnificent Time Machines performance at the Royal Festival Hall, London, as part of Julian Cope's Cornucopea event. The night before not one but three Thighpaulsandra's (work that one out) joined Queen Elizabeth to perform Temple of Diana.
On Eskaton, Coil's imprint, Thighpaulsandra released his debut EP, Some Head. Black Nurse unfolded through ambient drone, treated vocals, and touched upon world music in an almost 23 Skidoo fashion. Tudor Fruits, meanwhile, ranged from brass deconstruction, massed choirs to spoken words delivered in a random manner. Some Head was imaginative and confusing but gave scant indication of what to expect from I, Thighpaulsandra.
Encased in a lavish fold-out sleeve with a robed Thighpaulsandra brandishing a magickal wand on the cover, and an insert that curiously resembles Crowley's ,"Four Red Monks Carrying A Black Goat" is I, Thighpaulsandra. I, Thighpaulsandra is a sprawling double CD set bursting with inspiration, ideas and versatility. It eschews genre categorisation and is a testament to the imagination and musical dexterity of Thighpaulsandra.
A flickering guitar scale, and the operatic tones of his mother, Dorothy Lewis, opens the album amidst various tinkering tones and ambient drones. It's idiosyncratic, obtuse, and gives way to the rampant funk of The Angelica Declaration. With its abusive anarcho vocal over brass derangements and excited mellotron stabs it announces the arrival of Thighpaulsandra. It's followed by the electronic manipulations of Optical Black featuring a heavily processed John Balance vocal with oppressive keyboard flourishes, aggressive rhythms and deep bass. After the scratching/scraping strings, marimba and clarinet of Abuse Foundation IV, the first of several lengthy tracks appear. Opening with electro buzz it gradually seeps into the space rock of Michel Publicity Window, with funk guitar, bass throb and a Thighpaulsandra pop vocal (sounding not dissimilar to Cope) before dissolving in a haze of electro feedback.
Terrible opens the second disc with the sound of lapping water (recorded by Cyclobe's Simon Norris), a piano and, a moody melodic vocal. We The Descending is another 'out there' pop song, all keyboard beats, soaring guitar fuzz and the occasional bleating sheep. Perhaps the squealing acid rock of Home Butt Club is an oblique reference to the Butthole Surfers. It's certainly as warped. Nestled between is the otherworldly minimal vapour trail of Limping Across The Sky, a sole Thighpaulsandra composition - that originally appeared on the giveaway Cornucopea CD. It then dissolves into the cosmic jam of Beneath The Frozen Lake of Stars with Cope's doubleneck guitar, a theremin and a full-on rhythm section.
I, Thighpaulsandra straddles so many styles of music - experimental, krautrock, space rock, classical, jazz - but ultimately exists in its own universe. It's a shimmering kaleidoscope of sound, as unique as its creator. With Thighpaulsandra's use of Hammond Organ, Synthesizers, Vox Organ and such like it'll take a lifetime to unravel the layers of sound herein - that this review only hints at. Adventurous ears will delight in what Thighpaulsandra has created here, it is truly wonderful. There's little chance of there being a more adventurous CD all year. "A fanfare of trumpets herald my arrival," he boasts on The Angelica Declaration. Perhaps he's right.
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Threshold Houseboys Choir - Form Grows Rampant
The second Coil Week Bonus Round is the solo debut of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, who along with Jhonn Balance was the only other permanent member of Coil. Christopherson is a living legend by this point, having more or less invented industrial music as a cofounder of art/noise freak-punks Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
Form Grows Rampant consists entirely of long-form instrumentals, most of which feature altered recordings of townsfolk that Sleazy recorded in the area of Thailand he calls home (even though he seems quite urbane and pleasant in interviews, I'm sure the implications of being called "Sleazy" and living in Thailand of all places are not lost on him) Christopherson's talents as a composer are considerable, despite his inability to actually play any instruments - he uses sequencers and transcribes melodies he comes up in his head by ear. Stylistically, Form Grows Rampant is very similar to Coil's last albums, particularly The New Backwards LP (which, if you wanted to be really technical about it, could be called a THBC album) and some of the rarer Coil songs (many of them on the Black Gold compilation) that had an odd jazzy vibe to them. It's hard to classify this sort of music - there's very little of the industrial noise sound Christopherson is credited with midwifing. One imagines that at this point Like late Coil, it's mysterious, weird and often very pretty (Christopherson really seems to love melodic percussion, as marimba and xylophone are used often in his later Coil works and in his THBC albums. I happen to love it too.) Not bad for the purposes of ambiance, definitely enjoyable for home listening.
--- Quote from: Regenmag (whoever that is) ---"Choir" is a bit of a misnomer; the only voices on this recording are sampled and digitized. Still, if the literal existence of the choir is questionable, the pedigree of its conductor is not; The Threshold HouseBoys Choir is the new project of Coil co-founder Peter Christopherson, and marks his first new work since the 2004 death of former partner Jhonn Balance. It's hard not to draw comparisons. The arrangements on Form Grows Rampant, especially the use of marimba on "A Time of Happening" and sustained hurdy-gurdy on "As Doors Open into Space," recall the understated majesty of late-period Coil; on a less concrete level, so does Christopherson's uncanny ability to wring a deep sense of bittersweetness from seemingly simple synth arpeggios. The Threshold HouseBoys Choir is its own animal, though; make no mistake of that. An essential part of Coil - Balance's voice - is unmistakably absent, and in its place, exotic chants, ranging from the buzzy, psychedelic monotone to ethereal operatics. There's an obvious ethnic vibe, inspired by Christopherson's new home in Thailand, but this isn't world music by any stretch of the imagination. Form Grows Rampant was originally created as a film soundtrack, not an independent music piece, and it's when the accompanying DVD is viewed that the scope of Christopherson's achievement becomes apparent. Christopherson shot the video footage at the Vegetarian Festival - which has a lot fewer tofu products and a lot more extreme body piercings and self-mutilation than you might expect - in southern Thailand's Krabi Town, and despite the seeming violence of the flagellated bodies, pierced cheeks, and razor-sliced tongues, there's a sense of tranquility in the imagery that's brought out by the gentle bass lines and airy piano chords. Rather than portraying the brutality of the rituals as seen by outsiders, Christopherson's music brings the viewer into the heightened consciousness of the ritual participants. Form Grows Rampant is beautiful; even people that ordinarily shy away from experimental music can appreciate these gentle bass thrums and otherworldly religious chants. Perhaps more valuable though, is this work's ability to communicate to the listener some small sense of that transcendence which inspired it.
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Threshold Houseboys Choir - Amulet Edition
Our final Coil Week Bonus Round is the second and presumably last Peter Christopherson solo album (in 2009 he announced that he was retiring Threshold Houseboys Choir to refocus on Industrial Records and the reconstituted Throbbing Gristle), which is a shame, as it's some of the best work Sleazy's ever done. Amulet Edition is a refinement of the sensibility established by Form Grows Rampant, with many of the same elements - digitally manipulated string samples and recordings of Thai peasants set to music. Christopherson gets more lithe with every release, and many of these songs are outright pretty - "Ikoreek", with its keys, double bass, and manipulated strings / samples, conveys an immense sadness, while "The Hangman's Ball", with its vocoded chant and consistent rhythm, wouldn't sound out of place on some upstart's Warp debut. "Distonto" is a more straightforward throwback to Coil, specifically the cold gothic tones of Musick to Play in the Dark. And "As X is to Geff" succeeds primarily on the tunefulness of its treated vocal recording and odd, twangy guitar. A remarkably assured release, and as melodically rich as anything Sleazy's ever had a hand in.
--- Quote from: Brainwashed ---The set looks pretty special; the four 3” CD-Rs are enclosed in a clear, plastic amulet with a gold band holding the container closed. Also inside is a small, signed piece of paper with the tracklisting and a sticker. A black velvet-like bag keeps the whole thing safely snug. Once I had pried the amulet open and had a listen, I was immediately impressed. While the note with the set clearly states that these are sketches for a new soundtrack Christopherson is working on for a film he intends to shoot about temple tattooing in Thailand, the pieces hang together particularly well.
Overall, Christopherson has continued with the post-Industrial exotica style (to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Dean’s review of the first album) but things are less hectic here. The mutated Thai boys’ voices are again a key feature and Christopherson’s beloved string samples make another appearance but a far calmer course has been taken by this choir. Of course, it is impossible not to compare Christopherson’s current work with the music of Coil and fans of Coil will not be disappointed in his current direction. There are nods to Coil classics, the mood is similar in vein to the Musick to Play in the Dark albums and "Distonto" on the fourth disc is very much reminiscent of “Chaostrophy” (on Love’s Secret Domain). The strings and liquid, nocturnal mood capture the same nightly essence of the LSD album.
However, it would be a mistake to simply write off The Threshold HouseBoys Choir as Coil Mk.2. Christopherson is clearly being affected by his new life in Thailand and this shows in the music. This collection and the Form Grows Rampant album have a far more languid and tropical vibe to them compared to the pastoral and urban directions that Coil went in (and I get the feeling that Christoherson’s exotic side is tempered in SoiSong by Ivan Pavlov’s colder approach to music). What is most striking about this music is the joy that shines through it. “The Hangman’s Ball” starts off as being quite restrained in tone but before long a powerful and undeniably ecstatic trumpet erupts from the heavens (albeit the trumpet sounds programmed but the sentiments still ring true).
Although initially only available at the Brainwaves festival, a further 155 copies are to be made available online for those unfortunate souls who missed out on a rather extraordinary live performance by Christopherson. Those despairing of the limited numbers can take solace in the fact that this music is intended to be finished and (by my reckoning) most likely will appear in a similar fashion to Form Grows Rampant. Completists can head over to the Threshold House store and start hitting the F5 key now...
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Boy is Fiction - Broadcasts in Colour (2010; 320kbps)
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Actress - Splazsh (2010; 320kbps)
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