Coil
Musick To Play In The Dark - Vol. 1

In today’s diverse and fast-paced music market, where obsolescence times have become genuinely short, and every release must necessarily amaze an increasingly demanding and easily bored audience, finding a "post" becomes the fundamental imperative for every musician with a decent following, even at the cost of forcing the physiological process of artistic growth (as well-known by artists like Radiohead, Bjork, and Tool, idolized up until yesterday and today forced to reckon with their cumbersome and seemingly unsurpassable past), it becomes interesting to go back and listen to the two chapters of "Musick to Play in the Dark," recently re-released, by the legendary pioneers of dark-industrial Coil.

With these two albums, released respectively in 1999 and in 2000, Balance and Christopherson, assisted by keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Thigpaulsandra (who had already worked with the band since the four EPs "Spring Equinox," "Summer Solstice," "Autumn Equinox," and "Winter Solstice," which inaugurated Coil's ambient era), actually demonstrate that it is possible to revolutionize your sound while retaining a clear identity, without overthinking the evolutionary path to undertake.

With the first volume of this pair, Coil abandon the song format and play the card of instrumental approach, but those who can't do without Balance’s voice can rest assured, as the mad singer will certainly not fail to chill us with dark and unsettling incursions: his deep, narrating voice will indeed be quite present and, like a perverted Charon called to ferry us through the various circles of Hell, it will provide the perfect caption to the unhealthy images that the music here present will be able to project in our minds. Six tracks for a total of sixty minutes, ten on average for each one, if math is not an opinion. The sounds expand, becoming less harsh and caustic, and the noise component fades into the airiness of keyboards and the insane bubbling of more minimal electronics. The atmospheres, as the album title suggests, become murky and nocturnal, without losing the component of unhealthy morbosity that has always characterized the band's sound.

It is no coincidence that the leitmotif of the entire work is the moon itself, placid and silent, in the cover art against the background of a dark night sky, but also a recurring theme in the lyrics accompanying the compositions. The moon, an enigmatic entity, fascinating yet mysterious, sensual yet unsettling, always watched with fascination and fear, beloved by lovers on the most romantic nights, yet feared in the collective imagination as the holder of dark and uncontrollable powers, a harbinger of evil, a symbol of madness, is in fact the ideal metaphor to describe the ambiguity of the music offered here, which is truly difficult to categorize.

Many speak of ambient, but in reality, it is more accurate to speak of post-industrial, where the abandonment of the song format is merely an excuse for Balance and Christopherson to do whatever the hell they want, a way to give more freedom and breath to their ideas, without necessarily having to conform to the narrow times and structured forms imposed by the song format. A hypnotic, never bawdy music, at times fantastic and surreal, studded with the most perverse electronic manipulations. A music made to generate images in the listener’s mind, which I like to call "moon-music" (as suggested by the final verse of the opening song, which reads "this is moon-music, in the light of the moon"). A dreamlike, chiaroscuro journey, seemingly dominated by calm but carrying a "lucid madness" capable of instilling fear precisely because perversion is downsized, calculated, and rationally controlled as only the most dangerous can do. The impression is of a sweet lullaby sung by a serial killer, and the effect is of sinking and falling asleep, cradled, in the arms of your executioner. Coil doesn’t have the rigor of those who really do dark-ambient, nor are they masters of electronics, much less can they be described as excellent musicians or visionary avant-gardists. However, they have the nerve and audacity necessary to gobble up the most disparate musical genres, digest them, and produce something extremely personal.

The opener "Are you Shivering?," for example, amid the angelic choirs of Drew McDowall and the menacing voice of Balance, reveals the band’s most gothic and menacing side. But already the following track, "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night" (a fantastic title!), changes the cards: opening with a hypnotic loop that seems to come from a Tangerine Dream album, it will eventually transform into a sound orgy where the most lysergic techno is violated by the pressing ejaculations of the most deviant electronics, called to simulate a wild orgasm. "Red Queen," instead, is a space jazz that puts wings to Badalamenti of Twin Peaks and brings us back to the twilight tones that the album title imposes, not disdaining certain noir settings that would not look out of place in an album like "Outside" by the Thin White Duke. "Broccoli," which vaguely reminds me of certain experiments by Robert Wyatt on "Rock Bottom," plays on the contrast between a distant and alienated song and the usual dark counterpoints of Balance, resulting in plunging us into the abyss of freezing anxiety. "Strange Birds," however, is an insane minimal noise joke that recalls certain episodes from the band’s more remote past. A perhaps self-serving passage, but one that forms the perfect path to reach the dreamlike ecstasy of the concluding "The Dreamer is Still Asleep," the album’s peak and one of Coil’s finest pieces, closing the dance in the name of a sophisticated and hypnotic pop, where Balance finally returns to sing, giving us one of his most beautiful performances ever.

"Musick to Play in the Dark - Vol. 1" is in my humble opinion a truly indispensable album for its originality, for its estranging power, for its scrupulous packaging, for its truly monstrous sounds. I don’t give it full marks only because giving it a 5 would be a tremendous offense to gentlemen like Klaus Schulze and Florian Fricke, the true masters of music to be listened to in the dark.