A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room
Nestled between their experiments with acid house and the esoteric Time Machines identity, Black Light District (and ELpH before it) were temporary monikers in which to tinker, delve deeper into what made Coil tick without being overshadowed by the crippling claw of context. An elemental approach that vividly paints possibility, seems to be pawing a significant other.
Its clanking carriage feeding you to a destination unknown as a diaphanous drone hypnotically pulls at you, and the reverb fills your mind like an obsessive thought. It’s a wondrous beast, the drama texturally shifting, a trembling embryo of otherness that blurs and stabs in differing focal points. The bubbling aqualungs mimicking the sphericallised distorts of artworks, the ulcerated Christ of the inlay vortexing the infinite space within. A litter of spooky inconsistencies fluttering the betweens, as if the residue from Love’s Secret Domain was in the process of a cold cell comedown, infecting the rest of the album in shards of its DNA like a river of broken mirrors.
“Refusal Of Leave To Land” becomes a squid-like refraction of the previous, in which that transportive teeter is transformed into a seascaped cavern, the purr of tidal water lapping at limpet-encrusted walls. A salty saturation that slowly creeps into a synthetic chattering that spirals a hurdy gurdy’s rub. A harmonic flood as John Balance’s fragmented vocals cherry that all-essential spinal rush. A master of economy, he doesn’t need to say much to tilt the axis, as his repeated phrases catch the available light, beam iridescent, iris your consciousness in shivering sand. In hindsight, a lot of Coil’s future seems wrapped in this track’s fabric, a sense that “Stoned Circular I” and its companion “Stoned Circular II” sitar further. The latter is an abstracted amalgam of ratcheting rat tails that launches into a gamelan of melody, John’s vox licking its sabreing solidity, as if the acid haus beat of Love Secret Domain‘s “The Snow” were liquefied, made a molten plaything to trip the living daylights out of you.With less of a club-like verve, the prism-shot delight that is “Cold Dream Of An Earth Star” angels the architecture in reversing propellers. It bleeds over you like an Austin Osman Spare picture that suddenly reveals some hitherto hidden detail, one that fixates then fissures in some sense of otherness, a slow, delectable transfer that creeps in uninvited, conjures brief phantoms that dance on the tongue.
As a bit of light relief, the electronic jivers of “Blue Rats” crack a ray of lightness to the proceedings, pitter-pattering into the deconstructed chug of “Scratches And Dust”, two tracks that pale into comparison when met with the divine distillation of ‘London’s Lost Rivers’. One of my all-time favourite Coil tracks which would later turn up cosmetically altered on Ptolomaic Terrascope magazine’s Succour compilation – the diaristic addition of some Victorian’s memoirs atmospherically pulling the track to greater heights. Here, its lyrical content is stripped right back to the bare minimum as the music surrounding it stretches its languid limbs in a yawn of semi-opaques and music box convulsives. A forlorn flux that ensnares “Chalice”’s Enochian vapours to a final sign off, that “Die Wölfe Kommen Zurück” echo of the start reprised into slo-mo fireworks, like a continuously fired distress flare purpling the sky.Can’t recommend this enough, it’s an absolute must-have.
Worship The Glitch
This is starkly minimal in comparison. A spooky ambience derived from splinters in a machine’s supposed consciousness. A mixture of abstracts that were left to create themselves and happy accidents, this remains one of Coil’s most enigmatic projects, one that gently corrodes in a half-light of rotting rotaries, feathery chirps and pendulum(ed) spasm.
“Dark Start” nails it straight off with an eerie seance flickering with semi-opaque utterances, a gloriously sinister experience made more so by the knowledge that this may be the wife of Aleister Crowley (sourced from old sound reels by Peter Christopherson). On the sombre processional of “Opium Hum”’s combed rub, the mournful tenderness that holds to the odd tap dance of “Caged Birds”, the sounds here have been processed to buggery, floating like pixilated plankton spinning in a darken void. “The Halliwell Hammers” bell-like melody (far removed from the violence of Joe Orton‘s crushed skull to which the title refers) dances with a delicate sense of oblivion, twists in fragrant fragmentation on the slow-roasted second version. The third and final take is left to eavesdrop on the aftermath, as if the calamity were replayed in distorted expulsion, pinpricked in a bleak typewritten stiletto.
Worship The Glitch‘s simplicity plays on/with your mind and shines with a troubling brilliance (although “Decadent And Symmetrical”s Pinky And Perky vocals do grate a bit), and even when played in the background it still manages to hook into you, its tendrils seemingly surfing the shadows. “Hydlepark” is one such gem, its dead eyes glinting with numbed suggestion, “Hysteron Proteron Jewel”’s leaking halo and “Mono”’s rewriting of Nancy Sinatra‘s “Bang Bang” too all leaking a Musick To Play In The Dark ambience. A nocturnal journey terminating on a gentle serenade that claustrophobically caresses – a lithe-cut lilt on the “briefness” of time (another from Leah Hirsig?) where (if you listen closely) you can hear the thump of Coil’s dark heart.Dais have done a terrific job in resurrecting these two dusty gems from Coil’s back catalogue. Lovingly remastered and beautifully packaged, like the recent Time Machines re-release, they’ve kept the faithful glow of the originals alive for future generations to come. Makes you wonder what else is lurking round the reissue corner.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
