Musick To Play In The Dark (Reissue)

Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and collaboration, enhanced by recent advancements in synthesis and sampling. Fittingly, at the summit of the decade's long, intoxicated arc, their divergent strains of interstitial ritual congealed into one of Coil's most celebrated and hallucinatory creations: Music To Play In The Dark. Convening at Balance and Christopherson's vast Victorian house / studio in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, they began a series of ambitious sessions aided by inner circle associates Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowell.

Although the creative process was admittedly “iterative” and “a bit of a drug blur,” the results are astoundingly inventive and well realiSed, winding through shades of divination dirge, wormhole kosmische, noir lounge, ominous humor, and black mass downtempo, guided by Balance's cryptic lunar muse, which he announces on the opening track: “This is moon music / in the light of the moon.” What's most remarkable about the album 20 years after its release is how brazen, insular, and unpredictable it still feels.

TRACKLISTING:

LP SIDE A:
Are You Shivering?
Red Birds Will Fly Out of the
East and Destroy Paris in a
Night

LP SIDE B:
Red Queen
Broccoli

LP SIDE C:
Strange Birds
The Dreamer is Still Asleep

LP SIDE D: vinyl etching art: pine tree branches rendered by the band in Bryce software in the 90s for the original album art.

RIYL: Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV