Name: Musick To Play in the Dark
Brand: Coil

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

DAIS155LP

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Remastered, Restored and Etched on D-Side.

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Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2021-02-05

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

011586670884

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Total Cap

2 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

DAIS155CD

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2020-12-04

011586670891

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Coil

Genre GB

Experimental / Avant-Garde / Industrial / Noise

Label GB

Dais

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.

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.

Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry, both embodying and alienating parallel currents of their peers. The late 1990's in particular were a fertile era for the duo, embracing chance, chaos, and collaboration, enhanced by recent advancements in synthesis and sampling. Fittingly, at the summit of the decade's long, intoxicated arc, their divergent strains of interstitial ritual congealed into one of Coil's most celebrated and hallucinatory creations: Musick To Play In The Dark.

Convening at Balance and Christopherson's vast Victorian house / studio in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, they began a series of ambitious sessions aided by inner circle associates Thighpaulsandra and Drew McDowall. Although the creative process was admittedly “iterative” and “a bit of a drug blur,” the results are astoundingly inventive and well realized, winding through shades of divination dirge, wormhole kosmische, noir lounge, ominous humor, and black mass downtempo, guided by Balance's cryptic lunar muse, which he announces on the opening track: “This is moon musick / in the light of the moon.” 

What's most remarkable about the album 20 years after its release is how brazen, insular, and unpredictable it still feels. The songs follow an allusive, altered state logic all their own, warping from microscopic ripples of glitch and breath to widescreen warlock psychedelia and back again, as much hyper-sensory as interdimensional. Even within a catalog as eclectic as Coil's, Musick is a mystifying collection, oneiric evocations of desire, decadence, dinner jazz, and dietary advice, far beyond the pale of whatever gothic industrial ambiguity birthed such a journey. The record closes with a slow, starlit shuffle, bathed in seething sweeps of spectral texture and high cathedral keys, like approaching the altar of some arcane temple. As the trance thickens Balance's voice rises, processed into an increasingly eerie, gaseous haze, but he resists these unseen forces, intent on delivering a final sermon: “Through hissy mists of history / the dreamer is still dreaming / the dreamer is still dreaming.” 

LP - Reissued for the first time in over 20 years, for the first time on double LP with the original, unedited tracks in vinyl format. Completely remastered and restored audio and artwork. Side D of the double LP includes vinyl etching art: pine tree branches rendered by the band in Bryce software in the 90s for the original album art.

Musick To Play in the Dark

Music GB

Buy Coil - Musick To Play in the Dark (Vinyl, CD) now from Rough Trade - independent purveyors of great music, since 1976.