Coil’s Massonica

Available only on dates of Coil's Even an Evil Fatigue tour in 2004, Black Antlers is a stopgap release that consists of early studio and live versions of songs that were being worked on for the next official studio album. Due to John Balance's accidental death, most of the tracks on Black Antlers would become final yet unpolished versions. Sounding particularly unfinished is the opener, "The Gimp (Sometimes)," a ballad that never quite comes together over its 11 minutes, failing to mesh the dark, ambient instrumentation with Balance's beautiful and haunting vocals. The second track, however, "Sex with Sun Ra (Part One: Saturnalia)" is a classic late-period Coil track. Balance intones a fictional tale of a conversation between himself and the free jazz legend over a pulsating backing track punctuated by bell tones and sparse industrial percussion…

Recording of Coil's live performance at Megalithomania!, an event which took place on October 12th, 2002 at The Conway Hall in London. Rather than the cathartic onslaught of slowly morphing noise found in the acclaimed Live Two, Megalithomania is quiet and slow. Only about halfway through the album's singular track do vocals appear, and they are distant, primal screams. The sparse vocals that are on this track feel like the band is summoning an ancient rite between ancient farmers and a pagan god, John's timeshifted, relaxed vocals answering to the previous distant screams. The quiet, rippling synths, the samples of running water, the album cover and the use of reverb also all contribute to the music's ancient, cavernous qualities. This disc is an abstract and fascinating peek into coil's neo-pagan aesthetics.

On this limited-edition CD, packaged in a pink C-shell with no other inserts, Coil is stripped down to just John Balance and Thighpaulsandra, with the addition of Dorothy Lewis, a retired opera singer and Thighpaulsandra's mother who adds some spoken word material written by Balance. Released on Mother's Day and dedicated to mothers everywhere, Queens of the Circulating Library represents a lighter, softer version of Coil. The single 50-minute track starts off with Lewis' voice speaking about the wonders of libraries, books, knowledge, and trees over some warm, ambient drones. Loops of her voice become electronically manipulated to add some weird textures to the drones, but even these fade out about a quarter of the way in, and the remainder of the disc drifts off in the shifting drones until it finally fades into silence at the end…

The Unnatural History series puts obscure, collectable, and out of print singles, compilation tracks, and soundtracks on CD, making those ultra-limited works available all in one place.
Unnatural History (1990). The tracks were recorded during the 1983-86 timeline and include not only the classic Balance / Christopherson mind bending electronic surreality as Coil but also include three tracks with Boyd Rice when they were known as Sickness of Snakes which released one EP titled "Nightmare Culture"…

Coil's first official full-length album, Scatology, is one of the essential landmarks in the group's discography and, moreover, one of the '80s industrial scene's more vital and influential recordings. This is the first part of the essential Coil trilogy that also includes Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain. The 1984 album exhibits the group at its early industrial stage, in transition to the undefined genre of astral noise psychedelia that Coil would inhabit for the following decades without peer or precedent. The core duo of Peter Christopherson and John Balance are joined by Clint Ruin (aka Jim Thirlwell), whose role in the production cannot be underestimated, as well as Stephen E. Thrower, Alternative TV's Alex Ferguson, vocalist Gavin Friday of Virgin Prunes, and one Raoul Revere (who is in fact British camp pop legend and Soft Cell vocalist Marc Almond)…

…And the Ambulance Died in His Arms is a live recording of Coil performing at the 2003 All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Camber Sands. On this date, Coil were John Balance on vocals, Peter Christopherson on sequencers, Thighpaulsandra on keyboards, and Tom Edwards on marimba. This combination of musicians appeared on Live Two, recorded two years earlier. Where that set was abrasive and loud, this one is largely subdued, very different from the other recordings of Coil that appeared over the course of the Live series. Balance takes the mic to explain the subdued nature of the material, "We're doing a quiet set today. We've had too much shouting over the past year." Of the five lengthy tracks, four are completely new and one is a radical reworking of "The Dreamer Is Still Asleep" from Musick to Play in the Dark…

"The New Backwards" was conceived by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson in 2007, revisiting stray tracks which hadn't seemed to gel with the material he had chosen for the more somber "Ape of Naples" from 2005, COIL's initial posthumous release, a sort of requiem and a kiss-goodbye to his then recently deceased partner John Balance.

The Angelic Conversation is an extraordinary chapter in the Coil discography, a soundtrack to the 1985 film by Derek Jarman, The Angelic Conversation. Coil took the approach of remixing and reconfiguring orchestral samples; the sound of an orchestra tuning up is used frequently, expanding on the bleak and desolate sound as a perfect accompaniment to Jarman's film. Incidentally, Coil's Peter Christopherson worked as a leading sound designer in the film and created its incidental music - much of which is included here to fill out the CD. Given that the film's sound was made with the Coil touch throughout, the album stands as an entirely cohesive work.

Listening to The Ape of Naples is a bittersweet experience. As the last album recorded during John Balance's lifetime, it serves as a final statement and summation of the band's multi-faceted career. Naples is much more of a "classic"-sounding Coil album (in the vein of Love's Secret Domain and Musick to Play in the Dark, Vol. 1) than more recent outings (such as ANS, Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, or Astral Disaster). Ape is made up of recording sessions that date back to the mid-'90s, recordings done for Trent Reznor's nothing label, and more recent works that were still getting worked out in a live environment ("Triple Sun," "Tattooed Man"). Balance and Peter Christopherson are joined by the likes of Danny Hyde, Thighpaulsandra, Ossian Brown, Cliff Stapleton, and Mike Yorke, depending on the track…

The title Horse Rotorvator is explained in the liner notes as a device large enough to "plough up the waiting world," created from the bones of the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Bay City Rollers this isn't. On the group's second full album, Coil continue the refinement of brute noise and creepily serene arrangements into a truly modern psychedelia, from tribal drumming and death march guitars to disturbing samples and marching band samples and back. Balance shares the same haggard, mystic vocal delivery common to fellow explorers of the edge like David Tibet and Edward Ka-Spel, but he has his own blasted and burnt touch to it all. His lyrical subjects range from emotional extremism of many kinds to blunt, often homoerotic imagery (matched at points in the artwork and packaging) and meditations on death…