Name: Musick To Play In The Dark²
Brand: Coil

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

DAIS184LPC3

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Colour

Orange

Colour details

Cloudy Orange

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Discogs ID

[r23084393]

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Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

Remastered with Restored Artwork and Etched D-Side.

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-04-29

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

0011586672079

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Total Cap

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

DAIS184LPC7

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Clear

Transparent Clear

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "Transparent Clear"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

0011586672116

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "0011586672116"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

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

DAIS184CD

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "DAIS184CD"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Extended format: No

0011586672130

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "0011586672130"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

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

DAIS184LP

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "DAIS184LP"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Black

0011586672123

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

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.

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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.”

Musick To Play In The Dark²

Music GB

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