Unfortunately I didn’t get to see this show in its Teletubby flesh, but did catch Coil live the Royal Festival Hall later in the year for their straitjacketed and bulb swinging Persistence Is All performance.
What a show — an evocative extension of their Time Machines release, the prismed tonality of which is best listened to with the lights off, removing all enhances its celestial pull, that slow deferential peel of each layer, the hypnotic tangle of those sine see-saws and daggering overlaps. “Everything Keeps Dissolving” pours like inky neoprene, thorns the darkness in swollen spirals slippery with intent, a tendrilling conversation with that elusive otherness Coil always seemed to be able to connect with unsettling ease.
The meditative “Queens Of The Circulating Library” digs even deeper, Dorothy Lewis’s pre-recorded vocals a focal point, the manipulated skip and stutter a satisfying machine error glitch in the matrix, to which Jhonn Balance adds a haunting addition. That organic bloom of electronics is heady, pervasive, its softly underlined curls and mirror-like seduction bewitching. The underlining green message metaphorically charged, abuzz with nodding agreement – the line “You cut down the trees to make paper disease” still hooking me in some twenty-five years later.
Next up, “Chasms” takes the underling sonics of the previous to slip into an intriguing cold helix. A crystallised ribbon in which Balance’s heavily processed vocal languidly razors “Every man and every woman is a star”, its enunciation pinned to the undulating drift (words suitably inspired by a certain Aleister Crowley). A vocal presence shortly terminated on the unfurling tide beset in deep-flanged booms, digital scars and rotating shivers, a precursor to the “Tunnel Of Goats” agitations that would follow.
An illuminated hum, ending on a previously unreleased lop-lop mash-up of bird song, a possible remix of “Strange Birds” that would never re-surface on their live radar ever again. Live One is a seriously essential disc that documents a strong re-birth for Coil that over the ensuing years would never falter.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
