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These two very different releases are the first formal full-length albums from Michael Jantz's solo guitar project, but he already has a lengthy discography behind him that spans many of cassette culture's most revered labels (Stunned, Housecraft, Digitalis, etc.).  While he covers a wide stylistic range, Jantz never seems like a tourist: he brings an assurance and a laconic charm to everything from banjo playing to neo-krautock.  In fact, he might be one of the only artists that I can think of that can seamlessly bridge the gulf between the rootsy steel string folks and the newer wave of loop-y, laptop-enhanced experimentalists.  He is not infallible though.
I had heard at least one Black Eagle Child tape (Poland?) prior to Lobelia's release this spring and I liked it, despite the fact that it hadn't left a particularly large impression on me. A lot of people seemed very enthusiastic about this project, so I figured I had probably just picked up one of Jantz's lesser releases–I maintained high expectations for Lobelia.  In one way, it succeeds admirably: Micheal’s rustic and lazily ambling banjo and guitar instrumentals sound far too accomplished and melodic to be emerging from the cassette underground.  There are several pieces that easily could be mistaken for subtly experimental '60s or '70s major label folk (there are nature recordings in the mix, as well as a gurgling child). That isn't a dig: Jantz is a skilled guitarist and there is lot to admire here.  Michael keeps things enjoyably airy, spacious, and organic throughout and knows how to craft strong melodies and tight, intelligently arranged songs.  Also, I enjoyed the bittersweet, sitting-on-a-porch-swing-in-the-dying-days-of-summer feel of pieces like the opening "Crandon."
Unfortunately, the problem with making such a pastoral and pleasantly melodic album is that it winds up sounding almost indistinguishable from a lot of other able guitarists making nice music.  Lobelia lacks character.  It also lacks bite–this is simply too polite and weightless for someone as maladjusted as I am.  That said, there are a couple of excellent departures, such as the woozy, melancholy shimmer of "I Forgot" and the muted burbling of "A Different River."  Jantz, at his best, is extremely talented and wrangles an unexpected amount of emotion out of his guitar.  On Lobelia, unfortunately, he is not always at his best: he seems quite content to play it very straight about ¾ of the time.  That is not a very high success rate, I'm afraid.  I'd classify this album as a handful of excellent songs regrettably embedded in a pleasant and inoffensive misfire.
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Although Pages On A Plane followed Lobelia by just a few months, Jantz overtly sounds like a completely different artist.  For example, there is nothing that sounds particularly folk-influenced nor is there any banjo or field recording present (though his daughter makes another brief appearance).  In a deeper sense, however, Michael is very much himself (only perhaps more so).  These five songs are characteristically unhurried, sun-dappled, and melodically strong.  And they're great.  All of them.  Naturally, part of this album's success is simply due to intelligent self-editing and sequencing: Pages On A Plane clocks in around a rather lean half-hour, but there is no wasted time.  Also, Jantz seems to have made a savvy leap forward in both his composition and studio techniques, as he deftly uses tricks like repetition, delay, and layering to give pieces like "I Am A Bunny" pulse and depth.  His use of processing is particularly effective near the end of "Long Reflector," where digitally mangled notes seem to fall to the ground and decay like leaves.
Those ravaged notes might be the only element of the album that could be construed as "bite" or "grit," but Pages On A Plane unexpectedly offers something even better (and significantly more rare): a palpable sense of playfulness and wide-eyed wonder.  The most successful example of this is the beautifully snowballing lattice of ringing arpeggios in the aforementioned "I Am A Bunny," but I am also quite partial to "Cycle To The Moon," which sounds like vibrant, loose-limbed, and fun detournement of a Neu! song.  The first two songs ("The Lost Button" and "Spring") didn't hit me quite as hard as the rest of the album, but they are still both pretty unimpeachable in a shimmering, ambient way.  I can't complain–Pages On A Plane is a flawless, oft-amazing effort.  I now understand why Jantz is held in such high regard, as he seems singularly able to tap into something pure and innocent when he is at the top of his game.
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Stunning and devasting from beginning to end, this Triosk member's solo debut emotes relentlessly, unrestrained by any prescribed genre boundaries. To futilely classify this pensive meisterstück, as some critics are wont to do, defies sense, as the piano-driven music in effect speaks for itself, in despondent whispers and virtual screams.
For Be Still, Sydney-based pianist Adrian Klumpes has constructed a severe, deeply isolationist soundtrack to depression, a complex feeling that grips so many these long autumn nights. Not even loosely related to the creative avant-jazz of the artist's primary band, "Cornerned" sets this self-abusive ritual into motion, with backwards loops like shards of broken glass amid the ivories. Glitchy ambience plays a larger role on "Weave In And Out" to the point where intently following along could lead to unintended strain. The far more minimal title track returns a uneasy calm which gradually and quite naturally builds into something almost fiery and provoking, a characteristic that reappears as an all-out tantrum during the album's frantic centerpiece, the ten minute opus "Unrest". A queasy interlude named "Why" follows before segueing into "Exhale," which plays out more like unhealthy venting than much-needed release.
Though we are led to assume that Klumpes is pouring out his emotions here, he still finds enough time to toy with ours as well. The last few beautiful seconds of the otherwise atonal "Give In" tease or, rather, torment with a freshly tinkling, and cruelly fleeting, pattern relieved of the atmospheric weight that precedes it. Closer "Passing Pain" bitterly refuses to acquiesce to the demands of those transiently clean moments, the now-familiar palette of black and white keys producing a frigid tonal climate assuring much misery even after waning.
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The next installment of the enthralling collaboration 'twixt h3o and those likely lads Autechre is ready to see the
light of day on Die Stadt and Simply Superior. This should make the previous two glow again with renewed
ardour, and provide a couple of answers, but many, many more questions.
This release will come in a special format: double DVD (5.1 Audio Version), in a custom die-cut, printed
envelope. Each disc features 2 hours of 5.1 surround sound, in both Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks. Due to
the special nature of the format this title will come in a limited edition of 1000 copies.
To experience this work as intended, you will need:
- A 5.1 surround amplifier and speaker setup. A DTS-ready system will provide the best quality experience.
- A DVD player capable of playing PAL format video, or capable of converting PAL to NTSC format video.
A television or video monitor is optional.
Release Date: August 29, 2011
Suggested Retail Price: 25 EUR/37 USD
Disc 1 - "ah³eo"
Region: 0
Duration: 120 minutes
Media: Replicated Dual Layer DVD-Video
Soundtracks: Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, PCM 2.0
Video Resolution: 720x576 (PAL)
Disc 2 - "ha³oe"
Region: 0
Duration: 120 minutes
Media: Replicated Single Layer DVD-Video
Soundtracks: Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1
Video Resolution: 720x576 (PAL)
Web Sites:
http://www.diestadtmusik.de/
http://www.simplysuperior.org/ae3o3.php
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I don't believe Sleazy for a minute when, in interviews, he calls Love's Secret Domain a "positive" recording. After making Horse Rotorvator, sounding more positive was probably as easy as finding something softer than a hammer. If there is a positive thread running through Coil's third full-length, songs like "Things Happen" and "Titan Arch" dye it black; if anything purely positive is left over, "Further Back and Faster" and "Chaostrophy" obliterate it entirely. I've been listening to L.S.D. for 15 years now, and I'm convinced that it is Coil's most beguiling record, a fun-house mirror that warps and subverts everything held up to it. Calling it their acid album is just insulting, because there's much more to it than the drugs that helped spawn it.
"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love's Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton's artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil's finest moments.
When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love's Secret Domain.
Like many, my first exposure to Coil was via their Nine Inch Nails remixes in the early 1990s, which, as a middle schooler, perplexed me more than anything else. It wasn't until I was a bit older and had exchanged some mix tapes that I heard Coil properly, and "got" it. While I might be in the minority by not ranking this album as my favorite from them, Love's Secret Domain still stands as a distinct and creative album that is artistically, as well as technically fascinating.
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When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think I managed to hear Love's Secret Domain until 1994, by which point I had already accumulated several other Coil albums as consolation purchases.  Despite that, the album was still enough of a departure from what I had heard to make a huge impact on me.  Sleazy jokingly described it as the band's "party album" for a reason, as there is a great deal of fun, kitsch, and wry comedy lurking amidst the darkness.  It most overtly manifests itself in the lysergic exotica of "Teenage Lightning" and "Disco Hospital," both of which brilliantly approximate a bizarre cabaret of the damned.  "Disco Hospital," incidentally, is probably my favorite opening track from any album ever, sounding like an unholy collaboration between a VCR eating a Looney Tunes episode, a swirling blade, and a relentlessly cheery organist.  Then, of course, there is Annie Anxiety's faux-Nicaraguan prostitute stream of consciousness rambling in "Things Happen."  Still more amusement lies further beneath the surface, as Balance appropriates the entire chorus of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" for the title piece and the album's cover art is actually the door of Stephen Stapleton's outhouse.
Probably the most important thing about this album, however, is the fact that it contains the utterly mesmerizing "Love's Secret Domain," which still sounds completely deranged, fresh, and unique even two decades later.  Despite their vast discography, it was pretty rare for Coil to record actual focused, structured "songs" and "Love's Secret Domain" might be the most single most perfectly distilled example of Coil's genius ever released.  Few songs have had as massive an impact on me as that one, as a Blake-quoting Englishman instantly made most of the "extreme" music that I had been listening to sound dull and dogmatic by comparison.  Blast beats, de-tuned guitars, raspy "industrial" vocals, and squalls of feedback were not nearly as scary and heavy as whatever the hell it was that John Balance was channeling.  Rarely has the massive gulf between style and substance been so starkly illustrated for me: the song sounds like a wounded and wrenching dispatch from somewhere well past the edge of sanity.
There are some other great songs as well ("Chaostrophy," for example), but the album admittedly has some flaws as a complete and coherent artistic statement.  However, I don’t feel that they are especially damning ones.  The first is that it is a bit bloated, featuring no less than 3 versions of "Teenage Lightning" and few less-than-amazing pieces that maybe should not have made the cut.  The original version of Love's Secret Domain (on Torso) only had 9 extremely well-chosen songs though and I would rather hear the bonus material (especially "Lorca Not Orca") than not hear it.  This was a hugely fruitful creative period (Stolen and Contaminated Songs was also culled from these sessions), so I don't mind the extra material, even if it comes at the expense of sequencing a bit.
The other oft-cited issue is that the album is stylistically all over the map and that some of those styles have not aged particularly well, primarily the straightforward club beats of "Windowpane" and "The Snow."  To a certain extent, I agree– I rarely listen to those two songs at all.  However, it wasn't like Coil tried to make house music and failed miserably.  "The Snow" was a pretty unusual and innovative take on what was happening in dance music at the time.  Despite the pedestrian beats, they brought some uniquely queasy and spectral textures to the form–Coil were not a band that cheerfully relied on factory preset sounds, nor were they content to let anything make it onto an album without at least some hallucinatory studio-tweaking.  Certainly, Coil was a bit fractured and scattered direction-wise at this point in their career (and a bit over-prone to embracing trends), but their inventiveness and sheer otherness was apparent no matter what they tried.  Love's Secret Domain is an eccentric grab bag rather than a solid, deliberate album, but the low-points are more due to the vagaries of changing tastes over time rather than any egregious artistic failings.
Love's Secret Domain is not Coil's greatest work and it is rare for me to listen to it in its entirety these days, but I still love it.  I would not hesitate at all to describe it as a masterpiece.  It is not perfect by any means, yet there is no denying that it was (and is) an audacious, wild, passionate, and gutsy effort that sounded like absolutely no one else around (and even made oboes sound cool).  It is very difficult to hear this album for the first time and not emerge startled, changed, or moved in some way.
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My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love’s Secret Domain.
The album is a seminal one. Steve Stapleton captured this feeling in his brilliant cover art, painted on a wooden door. The door is also emblematic of the songs, and to unlock their full meaning it is necessary to pass through various gateways and gatekeepers: the skeleton of death, the pentagram of the five elements, the chemical pills which open various neural pathways of perception. As the group were huge fans of eccentric British occultist and draughtsman Austin Osman Spare it should be noted that the hand with an eye in its palm is a symbol of Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus. (Zos being the body or hand and Kia the eye or sight, the image conjoins the desires of the body to the internal imagination. Astute readers will also note that Zos Kia was also the name of a musical project John Balance and Peter Christopherson were involved in for a brief time in the early '80s, before devoting themselves fully to Coil.) The winged penis can be seen as an expression of the male virility at play within the group and as a metaphor for the power of astral flight developed by those who practice sexual magick.
It was 1998 when I was at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio when I first saw and heard this album. I saw a lot of other things while listening to these songs in the darkness of my dorm room, lying on a mattress with my eyes closed, concentrating on the sounds. The disc belonged to another kid named Justin who had a record collection I was very envious of. After he played it for me once I wanted my own copy. While there were people with CD burners all around campus, I didn't have one of my own and for some reason didn't copy the disc that way. I probably just wanted to listen to it again while I transferred it to a cassette. But before I could, I had to finagle my friend to let me borrow it from him. He was very protective of the disc, and reluctant to let me take it out of his sight. In the end our shared enthusiasm for music decided in my favor. (I eventually did snatch up a copy of Thighpaulsandra's remastered version.)
The whole two year time period of 1998 and 1999 was one of deep musical discovery for me. My tastes had already shifted to a predilection for "experimental" music, whatever that problematic term means. My brain had already been washed after being exposed to the radio-active broadcasts of Art Damage, a community radio show in Cincinnati which remains a stout supporter of strange and eclectic music, providing an outlet for musicians in the thriving noise and art music scene of my hometown. Antioch further influenced my listening habits. It was there I was turned on to the myriad joys of Meat Beat Manifesto. A girl I was friends with actually said to me one night, "I’ll never take acid again" embarking on a freak out and bum trip after my friends and I played her a track with those words in it from Actual Sounds and Voices. Some other people got me up to speed on the Legendary Pink Dots, and much to the annoyance of my dorm mates, the warbling synths of the Silverman and the delectable voice of Edward Ka-Spel could be heard blaring from my room at all hours, especially in my more melancholy moods. Download, Autechre, Merzbow, and Psychic TV were all new experiences and I ate them all up. Current 93 and Nurse With Wound followed in short order.
Love’s Secret Domain was a watershed among all those listening experiences, and in many ways it summed up a number of my musical interests into one album. The garbled collage of "Disco Hospital," with its cut-up voices disarranged towards the incomprehensible played to my love of the abstract, while still laying down a catchy hook and rhythm. The recurrence of expertly treated digeridoos and bossa-nova like beats give the whole album a feeling of completeness, but it still explored a diverse territory. Tracks like "Dark River" branched off into a nebulous ambiance while "The Snow" found anchor on the dance floor among the techno elite. This latter track also has a jazz tinged piano riff that even after countless listens never fails to send my mind spiraling up into heavenly realms. It is hard to pick a favorite here, when all the tunes are touched by genius. In "Further Back & Faster" I hear premonitions of future directions Coil would take in sidereal sound, promises kept on the Musick to Play in the Dark duology. The track has an ineffable quality to it, but the effect is surely atavistic. The use of Spanish guitars on "Lorca Not Orca" foreshadows the brilliant guitar work heard on later tracks like "Amethyst Deceivers."
In considering the twenty year anniversary of this landmark work, I can say with certainty that Love’s Secret Domain is worth falling into over and over again.
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"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love’s Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton’s artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil’s finest moments.
Chemistry and alchemy run through Coil’s back catalog but it is on Love’s Secret Domain where these processes are at their most evident. Peter Christopherson, John Balance, and Stephen Thrower’s experiments with mind-altering substances during these sessions have taken on the status of legend at this point; judging by some reports, it is hard to imagine how any work got done at all at this time. Yet it is obvious that a lot of hard graft went into the music as the fine editing and arrangements throughout the album do not sound like they happened by accident. In saying that, even the "accidents" like Annie Anxiety’s slurred and intoxicated performance on "Things Happen" sound like she was riding the vibe in the studio as much as she was getting hammered on tequila.
While "The Snow" and "Windowpane" have not aged terribly well (I still love them but they certainly sound like the early ‘90s), they are in the minority here. The various permutations of "Teenage Lightning" still sound as alive now as ever. Out of the three versions, "Lorca Not Orca" always has a timeless punch that always takes me aback. The spidery "Dark River," much like "The First Five Minutes After Death" from Horse Rotorvator, may use sounds which should sound dated now but the energy and power of the music transcends this sort of superficial criticism.
At this point in time, it is hard to separate the album from the memories and feelings tied up with it. The memory of playing the album for the first time and wondering if I had the right CD upon hearing "Disco Hospital." The memories of sitting around in college with friends, getting drunk and looking up at the ceiling which was covered in Christmas lights (until the day they caught fire) as "Windowpane" and "Dark River" filled the air around us. Above all, the memory of driving at night to be with my then-fiancée and nearly crashing as Balance ranted and raved through "Love’s Secret Domain."
It was fitting considering the song’s fixation on love and death; Balance combines the words and concepts of Roy Orbison’s hopeful but sorrowful "In Dreams" with the poetry of William Blake; particularly his two poems on love and loss "Love’s Secret" and "The Sick Rose." Balance adds his own thorns to the words and delivers them with a ferocity that never fails to unnerve. The violence and obsessiveness of his delivery of Orbison’s words; in Balance’s hands these lyrics are an oneiromantic threat. This assimilation and appropriation of Blake and Orbison within Coil’s creative process shows them at their alchemical peak.
Like Coil’s other masterpieces, each play through of Love’s Secret Domain reveals a little more each time. The other day, I noticed some sounds in "Windowpane" which I had never attended to before. Out of all the pieces on this album, "Windowpane" was the last one I expected to still yield surprises but there it was. I feel moments like this demonstrates how much depth Coil went to in creating Love’s Secret Domain. From the original ideas and performances down to Danny Hyde’s production, there is nothing here I would change. Indeed, I always found Stolen and Contaminated Songs, the companion CD to Love’s Secret Domain, to be a pale and flawed mirror to the brilliant and bewitching LSD. My affection for this album can be boiled down to one sentence:
"This is mad love, in love’s secret domain."
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