Threshold House
For a group whose music is so implicative of a richesoteric heritage, the death of Jhonn Balance, while certainly tragicand accidental, seems somehow wholly appropriate, a corporeal sacrificein pursuit of some higher pitch of magickal experience. These omens andbeckoning mythologizations are all over ...And the Ambulance Died In His Arms,which documents a unique Coil performance at the Camber Sands HolidayCentre, part of the Autechre-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival,weekend of April 6, 2003. I was in the audience during thisperformance, and have been repeatedly listening to a fan-recordedbootleg of the show in the two intervening years, so this material isvery familiar to me, and brings back gloriously hallucinogenicmemories. This official release is superior in many ways to both mymemory and the bootleg, boasting a higher quality soundboard recording,song names, track separations and packaging containing fantastic photosfrom the performance. The front cover is a particularly choice snapshotof Jhonn Balance in his Victorian madman costume, sporting a D.H.Lawrence/Will Oldham beard and hair combed sharply sideways. After abrief introduction of the now-familiar Coil-trademarked electronics—allshuddering gurgles, ripples, dimensional buzzes and distorted analoguemelodies—the lengthy, seemingly improvised "Snow Falls into MilitaryTemples" begins. The song is all icy ambience: a chillingly glacialcombination of distorted, sidereal synths, unidentifiable percussiveclatter and irregular trills on the marimba. Jhonn Balance pipes inwith a series of nonverbal ululations and incantations, eventuallysettling on the mantric repetition of the song's title. Then Jhonnreveals the guiding principle behind this uniquely understated Coilperformance: "We're doing a quiet set today...we've had too muchshouting over the past year." And a quiet set it is, at least whencompared to the Constant Shallowness-era, baptism-through-noiseset I'd witnessed a couple years earlier in NYC. However, quiet in thiscase does not suggest that it is any less powerful, and in fact, thereis a simmering, deliberate intensity to this material that brings itcloser to the group's Musick To Play in the Dark phase than anyof their other live appearances. "A Slip in the Marylebone Road" is anaural dowsing rod, Jhonn Balance recounting hazy memories of a druggedrobbery near the aforementioned tube station that left him bereft of avaluable green notebook full of ideas and song lyrics. The story istold in freeform style over a quiet rhythm punctuated by Sleazy'ssampled Speak-and-Spell spitting out computerized nonsense syllables.The last two lengthy tracks seem the most prophetic of all, "TripleSons and the One You Bury" ("I drank a cup of mercury...If you're goingto bury him, bring him home first.") and a radically retooled versionof "The Dreamer Is Still Asleep." Subtitled "A Somnambulist in anAmbulance," a reference to Balance's alliterative mantra, impossiblenot to read as an eerie portent of tragic events to come. This is anindispensable live document, a set of songs never performed before orsince, with a uniquely atmospheric mood steeped in morbid augury.samples:
- A Slip in the Marylebone Road
- Triple Sons and the One You Bury
- The Dreamer Is Still Asleep - A Somnambulist in an Ambulance
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