31 July 2011

Albums and Singles

"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.

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31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

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.

Threshold House

In a 1992 interview published in Option Magazine, Scott Lewis describes the lyrics on Coil's latest record as "lighter" and "more optimistic," and bafflingly, Peter and John concur. In fact, the same thing happens in numerous interviews.

I remember hearing "Love's Secret Domain" and "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and my opinion then was the same as it is now: in the wake of Horse Rotorvator's trials, Coil had opted to embrace deliriousness rather than dive further into the murk of their previous work. Perhaps their music had become lighter in some respects, but that didn't mean they had become lighthearted. Balance wasn't screaming about Nero's long hot tongue anymore, but he was meditating on sick love, quoting William Blake and Roy Orbison in the same song, and Peter was piling sound upon sound, cutting heavily processed vocals with Latin rhythms and caustic bursts of bubbling noise. By working with Little Annie, Marc Almond, This Heat's Charles Hayward, Juan Ramirez, and Billy McGee, Coil opened up their sound and gave their audience a chance to come up for air, but at the same time they became subtler, devious even, and more enigmatic.

On L.S.D., martial rhythms replace dance floor rhythms, and resonant synthesizers replace apocalyptic horns, but Coil's subversive spirit remains intact. The proof isn't in every song, but in the way certain pieces color others. On one half of the album, "Windowpane" and "The Snow" celebrates ecstasy and hedonistic impulses, but the lurch of "Further Back and Faster" scrutinizes both, with lines from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter utilized to blur the line between love and hate. Laden with pounding drums and constantly shifting rhythms, "Further Back" disrupts the playfulness of the songs around it by taking that playfulness to its limit. "Chaostrophy" follows suit; radio signals, distortion, orchestral fragments, frustration, and sadness all fight with each other as one of the most beautiful melodies Peter ever wrote emerges from the chaos, half triumphant and half resigned. Billy McGee's arrangement is stunning, and Julia Girdwood's oboe sounds heavenly among the strings and reverberating noise, but it's resigned, too, almost too pretty for the chaos around it. "Lorca Not Orca" follows, but the Latin rhythms from earlier have lost their vigor, and all that's left is for Jhonn to sing his ode to mad love. As he puts it, "innocence is dripping red."

Thematically, there are numerous reasons to characterize L.S.D. as a foreboding record. Sonically, I think its ominous character is obvious. Play it back to back with Horse Rotorvator and Gold is the Metal with the Broadest Shoulders and the jubilant character it is so often assigned disappears instantaneously. Coil's acid album, or their party album, or their dance record isn't an acid-dance-party record at all. Rather, it exists in continuum inhabited by the albums that precede it, and even by some that follow it. But there isn't another record like it out there; nothing else in my collection successfully combines so many ideas into a single statement.

Personally, I'll always remember hearing "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and being carried away by its density. I remember feeling a little stupid when I discovered that some of the melody was actually a heavily processed voice, and I remember the excitement I felt when I realized what could be done with texture and noise. Coil helped open my brain up, even without the use of drugs, and their influence, largely due to this album, has stayed with me to the present.

Ultimately, Love's Secret Domain changed the way I listen to music; it was the right record for me at the right time, and after 15 years I'm still hearing new things in it every time I listen.

 

31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

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.

Threshold House

 

Looking back, I'm somewhat surprised I didn't hear this album earlier, because not long after the aforementioned NIN period but before delving into their catalog, I was a whore for pretty much anything Wax Trax put out, and I was, in fact, into the label around the time this album came out.Looking back, I would have probably been a bit better off laying off the KMFDM and looking more towards this disc.

Personally, my favorite Coil works tend to be the ones I heard first, which were mostly from mix tapes culled from Scatology and Horse Rotorvator, to this day still my two favorite works from them.While those discs straddled the line between what used to be and what is now "industrial" (for the abstraction of "The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party" there was the catchy "Panic"), LSD flirted with techno and house music, which was a bit less of my "thing".

In hindsight, it's only the two singles, "The Snow" and "Windowpane" that are overtly using stiff 4/4 beats and squelchy 303 synths, and consequently the ones that sound the most of their era.They’re not necessarily dated, but at the same time not as timeless as the other songs either.

In comparison, "Things Happen" sound of no era in particular: a hallucinogenic cocktail of difficult to identify songs and rhythms, all of which come together perfectly, polished off with Annie Anxiety's inebriated vocals."Where Even the Darkness is Something to See" carries a similar vibe:a cut and pasted didgeridoo and erratic rhythm come together into a bizarre mutation that is almost unidentifiable.

While the techno/house theme runs throughout the album, it does not define it, nor does it restrict it:"Chaostrophy" makes no concessions to rhythms and instead links swirling layers of noise with a melancholy horn melody to wonderful effect.The closing title track also is, to me, the perfect culmination of the album:John Balance's snarling vocals and menacing electronics beautifully pervert traditional electronic "dance" music.

The "hallucinogenic" tag I mentioned earlier is one that applies to pretty much every song on this album, and given its title, I don’t think it’s accidental.As someone who doesn't use recreational drugs, I cannot say with certainty the relationship of them to this album, but I can imagine the influence, if on nothing else the ideal of experimentation.

That's one of the most amazing things hearing this album today:it was recorded 20 years ago.The idiosyncratic sound of this album is one that, even with an absurd amount of VST plug-ins and technical know-how, would be extremely difficult to replicate.Here, with just rudimentary samplers, MIDI, and analogue tape, Coil created something more original and creative than 99 percent of the world.

It's hard to imagine what experimental and electronic music would be today if this album had not been released.Artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin are indebted to Coil and their willingness to misuse technology and re-contextualize "conventional" sounds to their own ends.Even with its house tendencies, Love's Secret Domain could be released today and it would still be as lauded as it has been for the past two decades.

samples:

• Dark River
• Chaostrophy
• Love's Secret Domain

31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"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.

Threshold House

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."

samples:

• Dark River
• Chaostrophy
• Love's Secret Domain

 

31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

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.

Threshold House

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.

samples:

• Disco Hospital
• Dark River
• Further Back & Faster

 

31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

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.

Threshold House

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.

Samples:

• Disco Hospital
• Snow
• Things Happen

 

 

31 July 2011

Albums and Singles

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.

Read more …

31 July 2011

Albums and Singles

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.

Read more …

31 July 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

In the summer of 1993, my friend Eric showed up at my house with a grocery bag full of CDs that he swore I needed to hear. Among them were Lustmord's Paradise Disowned and Heresy and just about everything available at the time from Coil. I had already been exposed to Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, but this was my first taste of Coil and I started with Horse Rotorvator because I figured that I needed to hear any record that kicked off with a song called "The Anal Staircase" immediately.

Threshold House

By the time I made my way to Love's Secret Domain, I was thoroughly creeped out.It took dance-floor remixes of "The Snow" from Jack Dangers to warm me up to Love's Secret Domain. Those mixes sounded like bits of the Coil track slapped over an extended version of Meat Beat Manifesto's Psyche Out and that was something I could dig. All of the talk of blood and sucking and brains was too much at first, but eventually Love's Secret Domain wound up as the only Coil full length that I owned.

 

I had a cassette copy of LSD that stayed on fairly permanent rotation in my car as I delivered pizzas and traveled back and forth from my apartment to my college campus through the mid 1990s.As I listened to the cassette, I always felt like I was waiting to get to "Windowpane" or "The Snow" or the title track—the more accessible and dance-oriented songs that were surrounded by Coil's more spaced-out compositions. I liked all of it, but the songs more closely-related to the Wax Trax dance aesthetic were my favorites.

But listening back on the album now, it seems absurd to think that those songs were accessible by any standards other than Coil's.If the bad-trip lyrics from "Windowpane" weren't enough to send ravers running for the exit, the absolutely dead-creepy delivery surely was. At the time, I was wrapped up in a subculture where each new band was inspired to outdo the filth and darkness of the band before, and I was perhaps a little blind to just how subversive and menacing this album gets.

One year we opened up our dorm to local disadvantaged neighborhood kids and we decorated the halls with typical Halloween adornments. I got to pick the music for our hallway since most of the guys around me were off getting sloshed, so I stuck on an eerie mix of Lab Report's Unhealthy, early Skinny Puppy, and selected tracks from Love's Secret Domain and watched as kids peered into my dorm room in horror.

It was all clearly too much for a young mind to take.

 

31 July 2011

Albums and Singles

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.

Read more …