"Musick To Play In The Dark²"

$38.99

Product Options

About "Musick To Play In The Dark²"

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 Dark² 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.” Fully remastered by Josh Bonati.

Tracklisting

  • 0
    Something
  • 0
    Tiny Golden Books
  • 0
    Ether
  • 0
    Paranoid Inlay
  • 0
    An Emergency
  • 0
    Where Are You
  • 0
    Batwings

Formats

  • Glow In The Dark Vinyl 2xLP | 200 edition
  • Gold / Black Smash Vinyl 2xLP | 300 edition
  • Silver / White Smash Vinyl 2xLP | 400 edition
  • Black / Purple / Clear Vinyl 2xLP | 500 edition
  • Cloudy Orange Vinyl 2xLP | 600 edition
  • Red Insomnia Vinyl 2xLP | 800 edition
  • Clear Blue Vinyl 2xLP | 1000 edition
  • Clear Orange Vinyl 2xLP | 1500 edition
  • Clear Vinyl 2xLP | 2000 edition
  • Gold / Silver / Clear Splatter Vinyl 2xLP | 200 edition
  • Silver / Black Smash Vinyl 2xLP | 300 edition
  • Black / White / Clear Smoke Vinyl 2xLP | 500 edition
  • Cloudy Purple Vinyl 2xLP | 500 edition
  • Black Vinyl 2xLP
  • Compact Disc
  • Digital

Release date

April 08, 2022

Catalog No.

DAIS184