Coil – Persistence Is All / Megalithomania!

Retractor

Persistence Is All

After putting up with muffled audience recordings of this memorable experience for over twenty-odd years, this recent instalment from Thighpaulsandra’s Coil archive is a total godsend.

Considering the strictness of the staff on the night in question, capturing a personal memento of the gig was nigh-on-impossible, so this crystal-clear souvenir of Coil’s second Royal Festival Hall appearance is way beyond expectation.

Persistence Is All is a soundboard-esque delight swimming in plenty of sonic sourings and all-important audience reactions that give you that contextual bounce.

The “Something” vortex sucking you into the space, caressed in were-winded whirl, quickly giving way to the purring consumption of “Higher Beings Command”, its heavy-winged shadow possessing the space, a terrifically tense manifestation that seems to commune with the “Something” of the previous track.

The altogether lighter “Amethyst Deceivers” seems more butterfly in contrast. A cracking ‘song’ in it’s infancy, then mostly instrumental, the marimba hollow point-skipping that meady melody full of flexing contours and wealing sub-currents. An effervescent beauty that brims with vitality, the lyrics beaming a deadpan prophectic to the twilight of consumerism — remembering the vulture postcards left on our seats suddenly making perfect sense.

I’ve got to say the sound of this whole performance is just amazing, a joy to relive. The dark and magisterial “Titan Arch” wasping your ear in broody percussive and squally guitar worship, Jhonn Balance’s words tarot-torn and twisting like wolf words prowling the ruins. An intense metaphorical circus vividly circling — talk about memories flooding back.

The performance space breathes plenty — a sonically soaked moan and smart that gracefully bleeds into the reactive flickers of “Blood From The Air”; I was completely beside myself when this Horse Rotorvator classic hit, having never ever thought I’d be lucky enough to hear it performed live. An arcane delight to be savoured, its slow kerosene grasp and retracting periphery a sombre serpent blissfully constricting your hemispheres.

Can’t fault this recording at all — that effect-choked vocal of “Green Child” sounding even more demented than I remembered it. It’s surprise resurrected reprise and laughter leading to John screaming out louder-louder-looooooouder as absolute mayhem explodes out of the speakers – an eighteen-odd minute finale that sends me right back there in glorious stereo.

Finally, a disc that does the night justice. If you were there or not – Persistence Is All is essential listening.

Megalithomania! (Coil At Conway Hall)

The second CD is a more ambient affair, a haunted space of chirping insects and dripping cave walls recorded live at the Megalithomania festival.

An amorphous pleasure puckered in elasticated mobile signal, rustling cellophane and a prism-poured sudden clearing of throat, Balance improvising in whispering menace playing with the invisible / visible, words shimming in those shapeshifting shivers.

A twilight of slippery mirage that glows brilliantly in the headphones gargoyled and spewed out. John’s chanting going all Hildegard of Bingen horriblus on sirened whorls, the aural background attentively filling up then rupturing around his psyche, that demonic cough impressively juddering the abstracted.

John marionetting some inner frustration, with his “unlucky rabbit” yells, then goading the audience with pointed whys, somewhere in there dismembering a toy rabbit on stage. The delivery looped and mangled, spitting digital feathers with those “fucccck me” additions a garnish of transformed effect repeat. A lovely savagery that sees John’s howling Bebe Barron-bleached and bubbling, seagull-speared in multiples as skipping apparitions of “unlucky rabbit” carousel then crystalise to a benzoid “they are (not) here” demise.

Megalithomania! is a record of a strange one-time performance that would inform later live shows and Dublin’s “unhappy rabbit” resurrection. I’m really looking forward to what this live archive will unearth next.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-