Name: Musick to Play in the Dark
Brand: Coil

Tax rate EU

Default:19

Supplier EU

375 Media

Total Cap

Format detail

Colour details

Discogs ID

Limited edition

Colour

Format Music EU

Extended format

Extended format: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Download code

Download code: No

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Release date

2023-07-21

Format multiplier

Catalogue number

142274

UPC / Barcode

11586670884

Artist

Coil

Label EU

Dais

Genre EU

Experimental / Avant-Garde / Industrial / Noise

Dais Records is an independent American record label founded by Gibby Miller and Ryan Martin in 2007. Based in Los Angeles, California and New York, New York, Dais Records operates as a genre-agnostic label with a focus on experimental and avant-garde music. The label represents both emerging and established active artists while also curating rare and out of print material for reissue projects. Dais Records exclusively distributes its releases through Secretly Distribution.

Formed in London in 1983, Coil was initially a solo side project by John Balance, who was also a member of Psychic TV. In 1984, Balance joined forces with Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, another founding member of Psychic TV and former Throbbing Gristle member. Tragically, John Balance passed away in 2004, leading Peter Christopherson to decide that Coil would not continue. Sadly, Peter Martin Christopherson also left us in 2010 at the age of 55.

Newest Listed Items

The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Westonsuper-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

Musick to Play in the Dark

Music EU