Black Antlers [This Version Was Reissued, Expanded & Touched Up In 2006][2 CD's] (2004...a) [Coil...CD-R]

disc 1 [Black Antlers - Modifified & Expanded Version]

01 The Gimp (Sometimes)
02 Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)
03 The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris
04 All The Pretty Little Horses [Traditional]
05 Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)
06 Black Antler's (Where's Your Child)
07 Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two - Sigillaricia)

disc 2 [Bonus CD Of Unreleased/Reworked Material]

01 Departed
02 Things We Never Had

Review...

Jhon Balance and Sleazy are no longer partners. Sleazy's moved to Thailand, and Jhon's moved to London. The physical location of Threshold House, where Coil used to live and record their music, has been abandoned. Jhon Balance has a new lover and collaborator, artist Ian Johnstone, he's grown a D.H. Lawrence-style beard, and seems to have fallen once again into a vortex of substance abuse and insanity. Both Jhon and Sleazy have announced that they are now working on non-Coil side projects. Despite all evidence to the contrary, however, Coil have continued to insist that they are not breaking up. The first evidence of this came with their recent mini-tour through a handful of European cities, their so-called "Even An Evil Fatigue" tour. At each of their concert dates, they've been selling this CD-R entitled Black Antlers. With the exception of a new version of "Broccoli" and a song called "Tattooed Man," (apparently destined for inclusion on the long-ago scrapped Dark Age of Love LP), the songs on this disc mirror the setlist of the recent concerts. In fact, the barebones packaging and low-fidelity recording of Black Antlers leads me to suspect that it is nothing but a glorified concert rehearsal captured on record. According to various sources, Coil have plans to re-record and re-mix this material, and will eventually give it an official release. Therefore, I should probably withhold final judgment on these songs. However, it's hard not to notice the under-produced, impromptu nature of the music and vocals. There is a loose, improvisatory feel to these tracks that I'm not altogether convinced is the final word for these songs. Jhon Balance's vocals are given too much prominence in the mix, overwhelming the Sleazy's laptop programming and Thighpaulsandra's vintage synthesizer squalls. However, approached as a series of "works in progress," the album has quite a lot to recommend it. "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is a spooked, melancholic lament by Balance, set against an eerie backdrop of distorted synthesizers and scattered percussive elements. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part 1 - Saturnalia)" is the best song on the album, Balance narrating an erotic fantasy partly based on Sun Ra's "black folks in space" prophecies as explicated in John Coney's film Space is the Place: "He dreamt of color music and the machines that make it possible/He took me for a ride on a space ship powered by natural music." The music bears no resemblance to the cosmic free jazz of Sun Ra, veering closer to Musick to Play in the Dark-era Coil: gurgling synthscapes with slow, percolating rhythms. "All The Pretty Little Horses" is an unexpected cover of the traditional British folk song made famous (to Brainwashed readers) by Current 93. Coil's version is quite lovely, with expertly played marimba as accompaniment for Balance's best attempt at crooning. "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" resurrects and expands the LSD track, giving it a more open-ended, organic feel than the original. "Black Antlers (Where's Your Child)" ends the disc on a high note, a druggy rave-up full of queasy samples and chopped, distended vocal samples. With a little finessing, this album has the potential to be one of Coil's finest. - Jonathan Dean

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Buy Here

Selvaggina - Go Back Into The Woods (2004...b) [Coil...CD-R]

01 The Gimp (Sometimes)
02 Sex with Sun Ra
03 All the Pretty Little Horses [Traditional]
04 Tattooed Man
05 Teenage Lightning
06 Wraiths And Strays
07 Black Antlers
08 Bang Bang [Sonny Bono]
09 Amethyst Deceivers

Notes...

Recorded live in Jesi, Italy on June 11, 2004. Offered as a download from Threshold House.

Review...

Selvaggina, Go Back into the Woods is a limited-edition live album, recorded on June 11, 2004 in Jesi, Italy. This appears to be the full set of the concert, and contains a new version of every track from previous studio effort Black Antlers. As such, the question of which has more value to the listener is to be considered. Selvaggina is well-recorded and excellently performed, and some of the kinks of the Antlers versions of the tracks have been ironed out. For example, opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is here a more vibrant and shorter version than its counterpart, but retains its aura of goofy menace. "Sex with Sun Ra" retains the vibe of the Antlers version, but with more urgent vocalizations from John Balance, and animated work from Tom Edwards on the marimba. There's a telling bit of stage banter from Balance about this concert: "We're truncating, we're making shorter the things tonight because we haven't got enough time unfortunately to do the long versions we wanted to do, so apologies for that, but maybe you're being saved from our indulgences, I don't know." The editing that the band does on the songs here is very noticeable, sounding refined and worked-on, improving on the studio versions in every way. Of all of the live albums that Coil released in the last few years of its existence, this is the best, hands-down. This may be one of the harder pieces of the Coil catalog to track down (this was limited to a mere 230 copies), and it is undoubtedly one of the best. How perverse of them, to do that to their fans. - James Mason...From Allmusic

ANS (Box) (2004...c) [Coil...3xCD/1xDVD]

disc 1

1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled

disc 2

1. Untitled
2. Untitled

disc 3

1. Untitled
2. Untitled

dvd (not yet)

Notes...

First mail order edition comes with limited edition prints.

Review...

At first listen, COILANS seems like Exhibit A for the sort of experimental audio that functions as more of an intellectual or conceptual pleasure, rather than the sort of viscerally satisfying music I've come to expect from Coil. It clocks in at well over four hours of entirely unstructured, rhythm-less high-frequency sine-waves and subtly shifting AC hum. Tracks have no beginning or end, no point-counterpoint or resolution, and no tonal consistency. This new three-disc set also includes a DVD of synchronized digital animations for four of the tracks. It's a reissue and expansion of ANS, a limited edition, tour-only CD released last year, minimally packaged in an unmarked black plastic clamshell. This new boxed set comes in a beautiful foldout cardboard package (identical to the recent reissue of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith) decorated with pictures of the disused ANS machine itself, sitting neglected in a basement room of the Moscow State University, rarely used and in dire need of a radical overhaul. It was built in 1958 by Evgeny Murzin, who set out to create a synthesizer capable of producing the full range of audible frequency via a unique photoelectric process. The composer inscribes his visual "score" onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators. In the liner notes, which provide further technical information about the machine, Coil acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice and skill for the user to relate the marks on the plate to the resultant sounds. Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (whose name is misspelled in the notes) spent an entire year of intensive work with the machine to produce his one and only piece of electronic music entitled "Flow." However, Coil spent only a few days with the ANS, so by their own admission, the sounds on these three discs cannot be described as "compositions" in any sense. Instead, the sounds represent an accidental interpretation of Coil's visual art into audible electricity. As such, it is pointless to assess the musical merit of any of these pieces. The soundpieces in the set are the work of various solo and group alignments of Jhonn Balance, Peter Christopherson, Ossian Brown, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov of COH. The notes do not identify which track features which personnel, either because they can't remember or they think it doesn't matter. The CD wallets (and the prints included with the first edition of the set) feature some of the line drawings that were used to make these pieces, but once again, the listener is given no indication which drawings produced which sounds. The drawings operate as Spare-style magical talismans, where occult symbols and "alphabet of desire" glyphs representing words or phrases (such as the tautological "IT JUST IS" on the back of disc B) exist as arcane sigillizations. But the ANS is able to take these occult strategies a step beyond the usual, by transforming them into an entirely exotic lexicon of ghostly electric frequencies. This relation of visual image to sound had the effect of a strange form of synaesthesia on me as I waded through these four discs of unprocessed analog tones; I began to form novel mental connections between sound and vision, thoughts and symbols. Halfway through the third disc I had become like Nikola Tesla, obsessively listening to electronic signals trying to pick out messages he was certain were being transmitted by extraterrestrials. Is it possible for the mind to subconsciously decode this esoteric system of pulsations, throbs, clicks and whirrs? It's impossible to say with any certainty, but the mere suggestion that it might be so makes the sound entirely compelling. At first glance, the DVD animations seemed no more inventive than WinAmp visuals, but I soon noticed the subtle psychedelic abstractions present in each perfectly synchronized schema. By the end of my COILANS adventure, I was tuned into a heretofore unexplored magickal current, a current that sparks and buzzes with vibrations of the manifest spirit. Electricity has truly made angels of us all. - Jonathan Dean