COVER IMAGE
2LP released: Apr 08, 2022

Tracklisting:
1. Something
2. Tiny Golden Books
3. Ether
4. Paranoid Inlay
5. An Emergency
6. Where Are You?
7. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)
COIL
MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK 2
Label: DAIS RECORDS
Cat No: DAIS184LP
Barcode: 11586672123
Packaging: 2LP

After leaving London in 1999 for the sleepy seaside retiree town of
Weston-super-Mare, Coil co-founders John Balance and Peter "Sleazy"
Christopherson set up shop in a palatial eight-bedroom estate to pursue
the outer reaches of the group's heightening cabalistic chemistry. Among
the staggering string of late-era masterpieces they produced is lunar opus
Musick To Play In The Dark, widely hailed as an artistic zenith upon its
release. The sessions that birthed it were in fact so fruitful that a second
LP took shape during the creation of the first one.
Aided by the recent addition of Welsh multi-instrumentalist engineer
Thighpaulsandra, Coil mined further into the recesses of surrealist eldritch
electronica Balance termed "moon music" - post-industrial spellcasting at
the axis of narcotic and nocturnal energies. Musick To Play In The Dark
spans a full witching hour of bad acid sound design, synthesizer voyaging,
opiated balladry, Luciferian glitch, and subliminal hymnals, alternately
ominous, oracular, and absurd. Scottish gothic icon Rose McDowall guests
on vocals for two tracks but otherwise the album is a hermetic affair,
tapping into the group's limitless insular synergy.
Opener "Something" is stark and incantational, a spoken word experiment
for windswept voids. "Tiny Golden Books" unspools an aerial whirlpool of
cosmic synth, both whispery and widescreen. "Ether" is an exercise in
funeral procession piano and intoxicated wordplay ("It's either ether or the
other"), while "Where Are You?" and "Batwings - A Liminal Hymn" lurk like
liturgical murmurings heard on one's death bed, framed in granular FX and
flickering candlelight.
As a whole the collection skews more muted and remote than its
predecessor, as if having grown accustomed to the nether regions of
these darkening seances. But music box hallucination "Paranoid Inlay"
captures the group's oblique comedic side, always glimmering beneath:
over a warped, wobbly beat Balance intones an opaque narrative of
serenity, Saint Peter, and suicidal vegetables, accompanied by spiraling
harpsichord and stuttering squelches of electronics. "It seems concussion
suits you," he repeats twice, like a macabre pickup line, before dictating a
dear diary entry about risks and failures, finally concluding with as close to
a self-portrait as Coil ever came: "On a clear day I can see forever / that
the underworld is my oyster."

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COIL MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK [2LP] (CLEAR ORANGE VINYL) LP DAIS RECORDS
COIL MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK 2 CD DAIS RECORDS
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