From his dedication to 'heavy metal fans all over the world' on "Iron" and his recombination of '80s synth pop on "Love Uncut," Coh (aka Russian electron engineer Ivan Pavlov) has presented some unusual concepts to guide his post-techno explorations. Less likely to invoke readings as a piece of irony, the "Netmork" album is a speculation on the hidden language of the telephone, specifically stated as "digitally encoded human emotions running through solid darkness ('mörk') of telephone wires, electromagnetic ghosts of Love and Hate haunting the network after all conversations are made, merging, interacting, turning into each other, disappearing and reborn again." Coh actualizes his concepts through buzzing feedback that gets sequentially darker and more intense over the course of the album. At the album's onset, the electronic squiggles glisten and shimmer with occasional pinpricks of glitched digital feedback, giving way to perhaps those sounds' source material - the indeterminant dialing of a series of numbers on a phone (which made Byram think that Pavlov got bored with the prettiness of those sounds and just called up some friends to get a beer). Instead, the album takes a turn towards the darkside through incrementally building arpeggiations similar to early PanSonic, making for a fine album with an intriguing conceptual framework to match the well-executed electronics.
The glitchy, streaming rhythms from Russian electronic musician Ivan Pavlov (aka Coh) have always been difficult for us to write about because they are so immediate and just simply work so well. Yeah, our purple prose benefits from the context of elfin types scurrying around the forest with contact mics and then overlaying those sounds with some fucking heavy doom riffs that aim to crack the skull of Odin; so when a prolific technician like Pavlov constantly churns out an extremely consistent body of work we can be at a loss for words. Don't dismay, we'll do our best to blather on about this brilliant 24 minute EP. Over the past six or seven years, Pavlov has released tons of recordings for heavy-weight avant electronica labels such as Mego, Raster-Noton, and Eskaton (one of the labels run by Coil); and many of these recordings do essentially the same thing: generate tense yet hypnotic electronic pieces which smartly synthesize a number of electronica references. There's the futuristic Moroder arpeggiations, the erratic digital pixel smears of Stilluppsteypa's glitch-n-drone, the extravagant audio alchemy worthy of comparisons to the best Coil recordings, and the release-and-stop dynamics borrowed from the finest Model 500 techno. Given how druggy these repetitive algorithms are, it's no wonder that the sidereal psychonauts Coil were so taken by Pavlov's work. Like pretty much everything he touches, Patherns is extraordinary.
Of all the glitch guys, as I like to call them -- Noto, Komet, Byetone, and the entire Raster-Noton raster -- Coh's Ivan Pavlov, has always been the one to take the glitch into uncharted territory. See Coh's bizarre 'Love Uncut' record from a while back and his bizarre 'metal tribute' record 'Iron' which was decidedly non-metallic. So while this latest record is not necessarily a surprise, it is surprisingly beautiful and once again shows Coh to be truly original. The glitch takes a back seat on these 4 seasonal recordings. Instead the computer is used Oval-style, to take organic sounds and transform them. 'The Colour Of Beauty, Summer Is Red' is by far the most beautiful track Pavlov has ever recorded, with creaking swells of violin, warm and thick, with a definite 20th century classical vibe, lots of space and dynamics. Dreamy but also ominous. Quite reminiscent of Oval's 'Diskont', but chopped up and spread out into a glacial rhythm of throbs and pulses, dramatic swells and vaccuum like silences. So nice. 'Winter Brooding Underneath' is another winner, a massive drone sculpted from slowly bowed cello, huge, rumbling, slowly-shifting low end, with the timbre of the cello stretched as far as (in)humanly possible into an oscillating sea of lower register vibrations. Breathtaking. 'As Ripe As Autumn's Tears' is a totally spare pleak-scape of single reverb drenched piano notes ringing out into space, bookended by field recordings of rain. Skeletal and lovely. Finally, 'Springs Come Shooting: Make Love, Make War', is a Pavlov guitar solo, clattery and scratchy and noodly, but chopped and recontextualized into some decidedly non-guitar-like sounds. This track is as close as this record gets to actual 'electronica' or 'techno', with a steady, gradually mutating, electronic rhythm sounding a bit like a super lo-fi Kraftwerk.
Comes on MASSIVE 180 gram vinyl in a gorgeous, super thick gatefold sleeve, with a painting for each track.
As we've mentioned in the past, the music of Coh, aka Ivan Pavlov, is quite difficult to describe. Which is probably why he tends to be one of our favorites of the many modern electronic minimalists. He releases records on Raster-Noton, yet his sound manages to both embrace R-N's signature minimal glitch and click, while at the same time subverting it, creating something simultaneously warm and familiar, alien and totally original. Every record is thematically and sonically unique, whether he's collaborating with other musicians, or simply creating a song suite based on some random idea, even a whim, once it works its way through Pavlov's brain into the computer onto disc and into our stereo, the resulting sound is more often then not transcendent, minimal in sound sure, but with maximum impact, his music emotional and personal where others creating similar sounds are cold and clinical.
For Strings, Pavlov has decided to take the sounds of certain stringed instruments, which played some part in his musical upbringing, and in some way to enrich and expand those sounds, to twist and transform, allowing the instruments to be recognizable, and sound like they sound, but to create a whole new setting for those instruments. The focus here is on the 4 instruments that Pavlov played throughout his life: piano, guitar, saz and oud.
The opener is all piano, and sounds the most at home on Raster-Noton, simple melancholy melodies are suspended in smeared shimmers of reverb, the notes stretching, stuttering, blurring into washed out whirs of dreamy chords and long drawn out tones. Sounds bent and stretched, layered and allowed to hover in long expanses of distant high end flutter. Hushed and gorgeous, the digital manipulation deftly applied so as not to distract from the gorgeous hushed drift. Really quite lovely. The piano continues on into the second track, where the sounds are much more manipulated, looped and layered, but this time into a swirl of Melnyk-like flurries, which are augmented by a stuttery techno like pulse, the whole thing skittery and hypnotic, peppered with streaks of buzzy squelch, until the final few minutes when the beat drops out and the various notes are allowed to swirl like sonic snowflakes.
The next few tracks are like a suite, beginning with what is either a saz or a lute (sorry we can't tell for sure), locked into s super rhythmic strum, and processed into a propulsive minimal almost-techno, which is soon wrapped in thick sheets of low end buzz and glitch, almost synthy sounding fuzz, eventually building to an almost metal riff, all blown out and wreathed in crumbling distorted buzz, finally erupting into a confusional tangle of crunchy riff, processed hum and rumble, and Middle Eastern sounding melodies. This leads directly into a lumbering doomy digitized metal workout, the main riff grinding its way through clouds of swirling effects and smears of squelch and buzz, distant soaring sort-of-strings, all very dramatic, until the guitars fade, leaving just a skeletal rhythm, and super dramatic slow burning electronic swell and skitter.
The next track is all Middle Eastern melody, laced with bits of glitch, a muted electronic throb, a bit like a slightly more techno Muslimgauze, but as the track develops, the sound becomes more digital, the original melody chopped up and wrapped around a propulsive beat before fading out into a shimmer of pixilated piano, which gives way to the record closer, beginning again, with moody, simply strummed strings, before being swallowed whole by a massive buzzing electronic drone, gorgeous and layered and so thick, while the strings below continue to unfurl. The track gets all old school techno briefly, skittery and stuttery, clipped notes, until again, near the end, that howling buzz drenched drone returns, this time all chopped up and even more corrosive and blown out.
It sounds all over the map, and it is, but all the tracks, as disparate sounding as they are, slip in and out of each other so perfectly, a definitely sonic suite, with more in common than just the stringed source material. The second disc features a single 17 minute track, that starts out sounding like Machinefabriek, all dark bell like tones and deep blackened shimmers, soft whirs, stretched out almost-melodies, some strings do pop up part way through, sounding again quite Middle Eastern, and again wreathed in a brittle techno stutter, before a long drawn out stretch of near silence, and a brief coda of soft strings over distant drone. So awesome. Maybe the best thing we've heard from Coh, which is saying a whole lot.
And the packaging. Holy moly! Super elaborate, die cut fold out multi panel printed sleeve, the cds held in place by various slots and slits, revealing the curved silver edges of the discs as part of the design!
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Coh's take on minimalist electronica isn't all that different from his Raster / Noton labelmates (Noto, Komet, and the 20' to 2000 artists) with a pure tone bliss borrowing heavily from neo academic Germanic techno, but Coh has always had a thing for pop music. And with vocal assistance from Annie Anxiety (ex-Crass) and Coil's Sleazy & Balance, Coh's electronic modulations get even closer to a new form of twisted avant-pop.
Ivan Pavlov (aka Coh) has been making a minor career of collaborating with the kingpins of Industrial Culture. Jhonn Balance of Coil had appeared on a number of Coh tracks over the years, Peter Christopherson and Pavlov have recently begun a project together called SoiSong, and now there's this joint venture with Cosey Fanny Tutti. We would imagine that a Chris Carter / Coh duet for old synthesizers would make for a kick-ass record; but for Genesis P-Orridge, hmmm. Anyway, the Pavlov / Cosey album began with a dialogue between the two artists, out of which Cosey supplied spoken word tracks for Pavlov to use as the source material for the album. The first few tracks are tentative collages of Cosey's breathy, sexually charged voice cut up into airy constructions that recall some of the sparse digitally treated voice pieces of AGF. By the middle of the record, Cosey & Coh quite literally say "Fuck It," and the hammering electrical streams of post-Moroder arpeggiation, digital distortion, and effortlessly simple sequencing of monophunk meets electro-crash dynamics. These latter tracks are certainly worth the price of admission, but one has to wonder why the earlier tracks don't pack such a punch. Even if they were meant to be moody and dark, those could have been pushed much farther.
Alice Cohen is one of the cofounders of the Portland-based Olde English Spelling Bee label and here on her second release offers up an intense sketchbook of sonic seances. Recorded from home, these recordings were originally made as a musical diary, not intended for release. But their home-spun nature revealed, through a process akin to automatic writing, a kind of ghostly songcraft that would otherwise not have been created through a normal studio recording. Swathes of burning guitar, rockish organ and disembodied layers of vocals culminate in shadowy perfumed murk. Bits of fuzzy song-structures peek through the miasma reminding us of times of a more carnivalesque Grouper or a more freeform Azalia Snail. Drifting and shimmery but at times woozily unsteady or blithely romantic in it conjuration. building up to rapturous peaks and then sinking into sullen valleys. Truly exploratory music!
Never heard of Charles Cohen? Neither had we. Which is really not surprising, considering this composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer (he's one of the few Buchla masters in the world), managed to remain largely unknown outside of Philadelphia, where he spent the late seventies and eighties composing for dance performances and art installations, famously refusing to record, concerned with the 'ephemerality' of his music, and being somewhat of a recluse outside of his music making. But oh the music he made! In a world and time where pretty much any unheard record is considered reissue-able, very little of it truly is, and yet Cohen's music is so well deserving of a wider audience, especially considering how sonically prescient his music truly was.
A mix of musique concrete, kosmische new age, electronic krautrock, alien exotica and layered dronemusic, the sounds collected here are at once all over the map and unpredictable, but also all somehow also sonically linked. It's impossible to describe two discs' worth of Cohen's music in shorthand, but too daunting two go through each of the 22 tracks, one by one, but imagine, a fluid soundscape in constant flux: murky, lo-fi flurries of percussion wreathed in swirling electronics, almost like some alien gamelan - weird abstract dub, all glitchy and spaced out, almost industrial, but also sort of dreamy and ambient - very Kraftwerk sounding propulsive electro grooves, squelchy and shimmery, but hazy and psychedelically cosmic - Les Baxter like electro-exotica, maybe as envisioned by Nurse With Wound, and that's just the first four tracks. From there on out, it just gets cooler and weirder, more mysterious and even more abstractly beautiful.
"Sonomama" sounds almost like Asian folk music, again as re-envisioned by someone like the Residents, especially the second half when the sounds become more frantic and chaotic. Some tracks almost sound like eighties Carpenter soundtracks, check out the "Velcro Dance", which totally sounds like it could be playing as the credits roll on some old VHS tape, but then seconds later, there's the darkly delicate "Sunrise Women-Men", which almost sounds like Morricone, a wistful, cinematic sprawl, laced with muted melody and occasional percussion, before transforming surprisingly into something way more futuristic! At this point, we essentially are going track by track through the whole collection, but it's hard not to. Every track here is a mysterious gem, sonic surprises lurk around every corner, some short bursts, others, long, slow building epics, some playful and almost goofy, others somber and haunting, even sinister, but again, every second of sound here is utterly stunning.
There's tons more info in the liner notes, lots of rare photos and different writers and fellow composers offering their impressions of Cohen and his music, much of it truly fascinating, but like all great music, even knowing nothing about its provenance, doesn't take away from the magic and power of the sounds here. A truly fantastic discovery, and no doubt a contender for reissue of the year!
We made the recent double cd career retrospective from Charles Cohen, a composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer, our Record Of The Week earlier this year. Group Motion is one of the records included in that collection, now repressed and available again on vinyl!
Never heard of Charles Cohen? Neither had we. Which is really not surprising, considering this composer and master of the Buchla Music Easel synthesizer (he's one of the few Buchla masters in the world), managed to remain largely unknown outside of Philadelphia, where he spent the late seventies and eighties composing for dance performances and art installations, famously refusing to record, concerned with the 'ephemerality' of his music, and being somewhat of a recluse outside of his music making. But oh the music he made! In a world and time where pretty much any unheard record is considered reissue-able, very little of it truly is, and yet Cohen's music is so well deserving of a wider audience, especially considering how sonically prescient his music truly was.
A mix of musique concrete, kosmische new age, electronic krautrock, alien exotica and layered dronemusic, the sounds collected here are at once all over the map and unpredictable, but also all somehow also sonically linked. Imagine a fluid soundscape in constant flux: murky, lo-fi flurries of percussion wreathed in swirling electronics, almost like some alien gamelan - weird abstract dub, all glitchy and spaced out, almost industrial, but also sort of dreamy and ambient - very Kraftwerk sounding propulsive electro grooves, squelchy and shimmery, but hazy and psychedelically cosmic - Les Baxter like electro-exotica, maybe as envisioned by Nurse With Wound...
A truly spellbinding, yet mysterious gem, with sonic surprises lurking around every corner, some short bursts, others, long, slow building epics, some playful and almost goofy, others somber and haunting, even sinister, but again, every second of sound here is utterly stunning.
There's tons more info in the liner notes, lots of rare photos and different writers and fellow composers offering their impressions of Cohen and his music, much of it truly fascinating, but like all great music, even knowing nothing about its provenance, doesn't take away from the magic and power of the sounds here. A truly fantastic discovery, and no doubt a contender for reissue of the year!
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The year 2000 looks to be a busy year for Coil, after so many moons of sonic hybernation. "Astral Disaster" is the follow up to "Musick to Listen to in the Dark" and is equally as limited (only 2000). But that number is better than the original edition of "Astral Disaster" (a vinyl edition of only 99 copies!!!). Originally recorded on Samhain under the Thames River, "Astral Disaster" has been reworked into four lengthy pieces of Coil's techno-pagan ritual music that falls between the Coil aesthetic of the Solstice series of 1998 and "Time Machine"'s droning.
This album gives us chills; and for those of you acquainted with the turbulent history of Coil, you will probably have the same jaw-dropping reaction. Almost two years ago, Coil's psycho-pharmacologically inclined founder Jhonn Balance tumbled over a bannister in his home whilst on a several week long vodka binge. When his partner Peter Christopherson found him shortly thereafter, he was unconscious. Despite a quick response from the local authorities, Balance died from his injuries. Death has always surrounded Coil: from the post-industrial recordings of Scatology and Horse Rotovator, when themes of AIDS, the apocalypse, death, and homoeroticism all melded into a nightmarish kaleidoscope, through the later records which held an amorphous mysticism pushed to the brink by Balance's prodigious chemical abuse. But as Balance growls that "most accidents happen close to home" on Black Antlers' "Sex With Sun Ra," the words strike with such a clarity as to make us wonder if Balance himself had any foresight into his own demise. As potent as the lyrical content is for Black Antlers, it's Coil's exquisitely darkened electronica which makes Black Antlers a such an exceptional recording. To be completely honest, we've not always loved much of Coil's material after the seminal 1991 recording Love's Secret Domain; but their final recordings (Black Antlers, Remote Viewer, and The Ape Of Naples -- all of which had been completed / reworked by Christopherson after Balance's death) show just how great they really were. Black Antlers is riveted by blood-stained electronics, tensely rendered arppegiations, and sinister atmospheres that often teeter into melancholy. And yet another minor-key, marimba-driven version of "Teenage Lightning" appears on Black Antlers (marking at least the fourth time that Coil has returned to this song). Altogether, Black Antlers is a brilliant if tragic affair.
A version of Black Antlers appeared a couple years back as a limited edition cd-r, but for this 2006 cd edition, Christopherson has expanded that supposedly rougher mix with additional material and a polished production.
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This has been a very productive year for Coil, with mixed results coming from so much activity after the long hibernation. "Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil" is a drastic turn for Coil away from their lunar drones and towards a more abrasive sound, with what sounds like manipulated recordings of rumbling diesel engines or malfunctioning amplifier tremolo. The clatter of cutlery and an intrusion of John Balance's seductive voice breaks up (adds to?) the dissonance of this noise production. Definitely better than the last couple of offerings from Coil, but their quality control could still see some improvement overall...
Packaged in one of those plastic clam shell cases (a la the 20' to 2000 series).
We here at Aquarius haven't agreed with the critical acclaim that's greeted the recent output of Coil; however, we do agree that their second proper album "Horse Rotovator" should still be viewed as one of the great electronic albums of the 1980s. Immersed in Industrial Culture's transgressive ideologies, and thus intended as perversions of contemporary media and politics, Coil produced
With bands like Peaches and Trans Am trawling the '80s solely for the purpose of irony, Coil's work from that decade may appear today as excessively bombastic, too homoerotic, or downright dated. However, "Horse Rotovator" and the criminally unavailable "Love's Secret Domain" undeniably stand at the apex of Coil's extensive career.
A splendid live album! Actually this is the first in a series of four volumes of Coil live recordings. And if this cd is any indication of the other three, I can't wait! The series begins with the last two concerts (in Prague and Vienna) of their 2002 tour. As opposed to most of their recent studio recordings, each of which has had a considerably singular - primarily drone-based - focus, this presents a much wider scope of Coil's sound. Incredibly vivid soundscapes, meticulous collages, grand dramatic melodic orchestrations, seething minimal spoken word. Coil expertly traverse through all of these. If you're at all acquainted with their work, you'll hear a number of familiar segments, but they're all wonderfully incorporated into the album as a whole. I'd even venture to say that this live album makes for quite a nice introduction to Coil. That said, the one track that absolutely floored me was "Amethyst Deceivers". Although the audio sample only offers a mere glimpse, please do check it out! Of course it's all beautifully recorded, and the roar of the crowd is kept contained to in between songs - allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the performance that's in turns visceral, whimsical, and totally captivating. Recommended.
MPEG Download: "Amethyst Deceivers" [/audio/coilamethyst.mp3]
Attention Coil fans... The fourth and final volume in this series of live documents has finally arrived, and it's a double cd set. A characteristically ever-evolving, dramatic montage with heaving drones, wheezing strings and sputtering electronics punctuated by John Balance's guttural shouts and moans and other ghostly effected voices. Visceral, beautiful and deeply moving. Yet another version of "Amethyst Deceivers" (one of Cup's favorites) is included on the second disc - a slower, quieter and much more minimal rendering. Furthermore, with the recent dissolution of John Balance and Peter Christopherson's personal and artistic relationships, perhaps this will mark one of the very final releases from this astoundingly groundbreaking and deeply influential British duo. Well... then again, they've probably got a secret vault filled with as yet unreleased Coil recordings.
CD A, titled "The Industrial Use Of Semen Will Revolutionise The Human Race" features three tracks from their April 2000 performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London (please note: this UK live recording was originally released as the Time Machines limited edition cd).
CD B contains six tracks from their Barcelona concert two months later. Coil's perfoming line-up for these dates was Balance, Christopherson, Ossian Brown, and Thighpaulsandra, plus viola player William Breeze joined on in Spain.
Here is the second release in this series capturing the magic of Coil in the live setting. This one presents their April 2002 performance at the Teatro Delle Celebrazioni in Bologna, Italy. For this performance Coil were Jhon Balance and Peter Christopherson; Ossian Brown, Mike York and Cliff Stapleton as well as Pierce and Massimo of the Black Sun Productions collective. Nine tracks: "Anarcadia/All Horned Animals", "Amethyst Deceivers", "Slur ", "A Cold Cell", "Broccoli", "Paranoid Inlay", "Sick Mirrors", "AYOR", and "Backwards".
Yes, we know... although the title of this cd is Live Two, this volume is actually the third to be released in this series of live Coil recordings. To get you oriented, Live Four - the one I (Cup) have listened to most so far - was an excellent document of their most recent performances Prague and Vienna in 2002. It very effectively captured the many facets of Coil. Live Three features their Bologna, Italy concert. This is Coil's presentation in DK Gorbunova, Moscow, Russia in September of 2001. It was a much more scaled down affair in terms of personnel (as opposed to their 2002 lineup) with just four men: Jhon Balance and Peter Christopherson; Thighpaulsandra, and Tom Edwards. However in a sense it's the most raw and testosterone pumped of this series so far, and the crowd responded in kind. Six tracks in all: "Something/Higher Beings Command", "Amethyst Deceivers", "What Kind of Animal Are You", "Blood from the Air", "The Green Child", "Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil".
MPEG Stream: "What Kind Of Animal Are You" [/audio/coilwhatkind.m3u]
The re-issue of "Love's Secret Domain" from 1991 is not unlike unearthing a long lost exquisite treasure. Obsessively coveted and revered over the last decade, it re-emerges still sounding fresh and current. Sadly and strangely, this album was often
During the construction of this album, Coil's core duo -- Peter Christopherson and John Balance -- had immersed themselves in the acid house culture of the UK that flourished around The KLF (I don't care what you think of "What Time is Love," The KLF were geniuses in the art of pop subversion), 808 State, and even the early bleep techno from Warp Records. To Coil, the UK rave culture reflected many of their own ideas of transgression through almost pagan rituals of communities uniting around liberating music, sexual exploration, chemical enlightenment, and the release of hidden dark energies from the body and spirit.
"Love's Secret Domain" embodied a near-perfect harmony between the dark, occultish overtones from their previous albums "Scatology" and "Horse Rotovator" and the technological futurism at the heart of rave culture. Within this synthesis, Coil has not just created a handful of singles (although "The Snow" and "Windowpane" off of this album still make great dancefloor fodder), but has articulated the entire album as a sonic narrative. Swelling through the sampledelic abstraction on "Disco Hospital" (recently covered by admitted Coil fans Matmos) and the surreal tension of "Things Happen" (with Annie Anxiety Bandez' obtuse guest vocal appearance), Coil offers "The Snow" as a magnificient techno track, with creepy cut-ups of choral elements, constantly shifting and reforming melody patterns, and an 808 techno pulse. "Windowpane" in turn is far more seductive in its low slung bassline and downtempo pace. The rest of the album continues through a darkened path of hallucinatory electronics, intricate instrumentations, and occasional bursts of subverted pop sentiment. Unlike a lot of electronica records, nothing on "Love's Secret Domain" ever feels like filler.
This is a marvelous record that even after a decade has very few rivals.
During the past decade, Coil has undergone a drastic metamorphosis that began with the extravagantly dark electronica of "Love's Secret Domain" and continued up to the kosmische ambience of "Musick To Listen To In Dark Vol 2." With all of the albums since
Coil intended to thematically correspond these songs' droning poetry to the solstices and equinoxes corresponding to when they were made. Mostly they center around a miasmic abstraction of spartan, dirge arrangements for a few instruments (cellos, church organs, spanish guitar), maintaining their solemn pursuit into sonic alchemy. For the most part, Coil's John Balance hushes his voice into mere whispers of his pagan recitations, which barely stand out of the lulling instrumentation, although "The White Rainbow" track from the Winter single stands out as a eulogaic song dominated by Balance's rich singing. The album works much better than as a collection of singles whose original release format seemed far too abrupt for the extended atmospheres that are common throughout the whole series.
And to piss off everybody who bought the original series, Coil included a bonus live track.
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While Coil has released a plethora of side-projects (Black Light District, Elph, Time Machines, etc.), soundtracks, and limited singles (including the solstice/ equinox series from 1998) since 'Love's Secret Domain' of 1992, they have finally released the fourth 'proper' Coil album. Dark brooding beatless synth chords and field recordings are slowly unveiled as John Balance delivers a menacing voice-over. Thighpaulsandra (Julian Cope's psychedelic sidekick) joins the band for this album, to effective means, with his Conrad Schnitzler-esque arpeggiated synth attack on 'Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night'. There's been much discussion as to whether 'Musick' holds up, as one of Coil's finer moments. But remove the pressure of the 'Coil legacy', taking it on musical merits alone, and you'll find it to be quite beautiful; a dark, brooding record of 'night music'.
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"Musick To Play In The Dark, Volume Two" is ... not as good as volume one. Obviously these are all of the newagey dregs that didn't make the cut the first time around. Sure, Coil is said to have put on one hell of show at Spain's Sonar festival with ultraviolet strippers and techno-pagan rituals, but that doesn't give them any excuse to release an album as unnecessary as this. I'm turning in my fanclub badge. More dedicated/diehard fans than I will of course want this, badly.
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The timeless electronic swoop of Coil's "Time Machines" repeats itself in the swelling warm drones of mostly analogue synthesis on "Queens of The Circulating Library." John Balance (without Peter Christopherson) had written a poem to be recited by Dorothy Lewis - the mother of Thighpaulsandra who aids in the breathy swells of sound.
Much of the discussion elsewhere on this list about Coil's Black Antlers applies to Remote Viewer as well. This, too, was an album originally released as a limited cd-r, now reissued with considerable remastering, additional production, and even a bunch of new material, more of their signature spectral electronica. Just like Black Antlers, Remote Viewer's funereal tunes warped through the funhouse of chemicals, alcohol, and occultish leanings nowadays take on an eerily prescient quality, as founding member Jhonn Balance died nearly two years ago leaving romantic and musical partner Peter Christopherson with the task of completing the rough mixes found on the earlier cd-rs of Black Antlers and Remote Viewer.
While not really the "moon musick" of Astral Disaster or Musick To Play In The Dark, the slippery tunes of Remote Viewer are mostly devoid of Balance's voice. Instead, hurdy gurdy drones, electrically tinged violin, and sampled bagpipes spiral into an atonal ragas elegantly shifting into deranged and slightly maudlin melodies. As a whole Remote Viewer is much closer to the devilishly sampledelic breakbeat numbers on Love's Secret Domain. Delirious to say the least.
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The Ape Of Naples marks the end of an era for Coil, as the grand finale to a tumultuous career of psychotropic electronica, siddereal ambience, and post-industrial occultations. In November 2004, Jhonn Balance died as the result of an alcohol related accident. In the intervening months, his partner -- both creatively and romantically -- Peter Christopherson resurrected many of the tracks from the ill-fated Backwards sessions as well as unreleased recordings that date back to the beginning of Coil in 1982. It should be noted that Christopherson did not intend The Ape Of Naples to be lumped in with the Stolen and Contaminated series of rare and unreleased material; rather, he shaped the album to reflect his grief and melancholy.
The Backwards sessions were originally commissioned as a follow up to their seminal oblique dance album Love's Secret Domain, which emerged out of Coil's obsession with British acid house and rave culture. In fact, Trent Reznor had brought Coil to his New Orleans studio to record much of those sessions in hopes of releasing the album on his Nothing imprint. Unfortunately, more than a decade went by with only false starts and creative dead ends; and Backwards never emerged. While it's not all that clear if The Ape Of Naples is the album that Coil envisioned when they were making Backwards, The Ape Of Naples stands as a mighty triumph in the Coil pantheon of releases, ranking up there with Horse Rotovator and the aforementioned Love's Secret Domain.
What's so striking about The Ape Of Naples, especially in light of their recent albums of temporal minimalism, is their return to the song structure, and how Jhonn Balance could deliver his beautiful howlings with all of the poetry of Jean Genet. Throughout the album, Christopherson scores elegaic arrangements with an urgent interlocking for marimba and vibraphone, whose gasping repetition serves as a thematic link between all of the material both old and new. The album also features devilish marches of electronic arpeggiation laced with distant throbbing rhythms and Balance's omnipresent vocals, typified by such tracks as "Heaven's Blade" and the reprise of "Teenage Lightning" -- one of the highlight tracks from LSD. A tragically beautiful album through and through.
Issued at the end of 2005, The Ape Of Naples marked the end of an era for Coil. It was the grand finale to a tumultuous career of psychotropic electronica, sidereal ambience, and post-industrial occultations. A year earlier, Jhonn Balance died as the result of an alcohol related accident. In the intervening months, his partner -- both creatively and romantically -- Peter Christopherson resurrected many of the tracks from the ill-fated Backwards sessions as well as unreleased recordings that date back to the beginning of Coil in 1982. It should be noted that Christopherson did not intend The Ape Of Naples to be lumped in with the Stolen and Contaminated series of rare and unreleased material; rather, he shaped the album to reflect his grief and melancholy.
The Backwards sessions were originally commissioned as a follow up to their seminal oblique dance album Love's Secret Domain, which emerged out of Coil's obsession with British acid house and rave culture. In fact, Trent Reznor had brought Coil to his New Orleans studio to record much of those sessions in hopes of releasing the album on his Nothing imprint. Unfortunately, more than a decade went by with only false starts and creative dead ends; and Backwards never emerged. While it's not all that clear if The Ape Of Naples is the album that Coil envisioned when they were making Backwards, The Ape Of Naples stands as a mighty triumph in the Coil pantheon of releases, ranking up there with Horse Rotovator and the aforementioned Love's Secret Domain.
In releasing The Ape Of Naples on vinyl some three years after the original cd, Important Records has bundled the 3LPs of The Ape Of Naples with a fourth LP comprised of Christopherson's further revisitations of the Backwards sessions onto an LP called The New Backwards. These tracks found here may be even better than what's found on The Ape Of Naples. The only drawback is that this 4LP set is a bit pricey, and painfully limited to 500 copies, most of which have already been snatched up.
"The Golden Hare With A Voice Of Silver" collects all of the tracks that been previously released on two Russian compilations, essentially documenting the history of the transgressive British group Coil. Throughout their 20 year career, Coil has defined the pinnacles of both Industrial Culture as well as contemporary electronica through an evolving use of electronics as the vehicle for pagan rituals, apocalyptic languages, plunges into the abject, and celebrations of their homosexuality. While "The Golden Hare" would make for an excellent introduction into the work of Coil as it samples from all of the major periods ("Scatology," "Horse Rotovator," "Love's Secret Domain," "Moon's Milk," "Musick To Listen To In The Dark," etc.), die-hard Coil fans should be intrigued to know that 2 of the tracks ('A Cold Cell' and 'A.Y.O.R.') are rumored to be cuts from their ill-fated 'Backwards' album, which has been long slated for release on Nothing Records since the mid-'90s.
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In the early '90s, I (Jim) remember seeing a peculiar cassette listed in the RRR catalogue for several years. It was some sort of collaboration between Coil (who I was enthralled with), The New Blockaders (who I was curious about through their work with Organum), and Vortex Campaign (who I thought had a cool name, but knew nothing about). Foolishly, I never picked up that cassette, especially since the damn thing was limited to 50 copies. Oh well. Thankfully, Important Records is doing their best Vinyl-On-Demand impersonation with a hefty reissue of an terminally obscure piece of early noise culture. There's still no background information as to the identity of Vortex Campaign, other than that they are Belgian and that they invited both Coil and The New Blockaders to collaborate on that one off cassette back in 1984. Since then, Vortex Campaign did make an appearance on the Broken Flag 5lp anthology released by Vinyl-On-Demand; but beyond that, they're still a mystery. Coil had gone on to great things in all realms of occult electronics mired in psychedelic darkness; and The New Blockaders had manifested explosive recordings of hellish noise in their pursuit of anti-art.
This lp collects the two sprawling collaborative tracks from that cassette, leaving off the solo Vortex Campaign tracks - just to make me kick myself even more for not buying that cassette back in the day. These are two complex collages of snarling loops, dragged through shit, vomit, and blood leaving a bruised and stained mess of obsessively repetitive growls, blisters, and blurts of industrial noise. The energy on these two tracks is profoundly negative, and could be easily confused with anything that Prurient or Wolf Eyes might muster in this day and age. Supposedly there was a cd version of the cassette, but that too is out of print, leaving this vinyl-only production from Important as a rare glimpse back at these recordings. Limited to 500 copies. We only got a paltry few and that's IT.
There's a bright orange sticker on this new Coil release says: "WARNING. Contents may make you spazz out." Definitely not the sort of sticker you would expect to see on a Coil record. And most certainly not this one. Coilans find the extended Coil family, Johnn Balance, Ossian Brown, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov, composing for a 1930's mechanical device called the ANS, a machine designed to convert graphic designs into sound. The text describing the machine is quite dense and technical, and some folks here are convinced it's all a big hoax. The liner notes do however reference two works actually composed for the machine, "Flow" by Alfred Schnitke, and Edward Artemiev's music for Tarkovsky's Solaris, which perhaps does lend some credence to the existence of the machine. Whether Coil actually have a version of the ANS machine as they claim, or are merely making sounds that they imagine might be produced by an ANS is still maybe debatable. But it hardly matters, as the results are sublime. Long, slowly evolving pieces spread across three cds. Gorgeous and minimal, hissing distant drones, insect-like shimmers that pulse and throb into warbling sinewaves, and chiming smears of upper register skree spread into keeing sonic ripples of warbling decay. A series of lush minimal mesmers worthy of Coleclough, Mirror, Arcane Device, Sachiko M, Rafael Toral and other practitioners of fragile high end exploration. The DVD is equally as compelling, a series of beautiful and strangely hypnotic animations by Peter Christopherson, that pulse and squirm and slowly shift along with the music. The whole thing is beautifully packaged in a full color box, inner sleeves depicting details of the ANS machine on one side and the images fed into the machine to produce the sounds on the other.
Anybody making field recordings in Chernobyl is gonna get our attention. Couple that with an allegorical framework about the end of time rendered through allusions from the book of Revelation, and we're even more intrigued. Come Kingdom Come is an impressive modern classical record with all of these traits, those flourishes gracing orchestrations of strings, voice, and electronics, not too dissimilar to the likes of a Johann Johannsson or (dare we say?) Arvo Part. Colbert is an American composer currently living in Portugal with a hand in running the Binaural Residency Program, and has slowly been composing this body of work for years now. In fact, she performed a variation of this piece as a multimedia presentation collecting live VLF signals that she located within her glassine electronics and a video triptych (courtesy of Olivia Block) at The Lab in San Francisco back in 2012. For all of these terminal thoughts and ominous overtones, Colbert conjures a spacious, if somber atmosphere that hangs upon the languid swells from Colbert's sparse arrangements for plaintive piano and strings, sporadically accompanied by vocals from Gabrielle Crowe, who in turn alternates between chorale dreaminess and operatic libretto. The electronics and field recordings too are sparsely situated throughout the album, often presented as ghosts and echoes to the clusters of piano or strings or voice. Come Kingdom Come is a lovely album for sure and was released on Celer's imprint Two Acorns.
On one end of the Cold Cave spectrum, there is the blistering terror of low-fi electronics with sparse hints of new wave flecked through a sound better suited to Wolf Eyes; and on the other, Cold Cave can effortlessly toss out a darkly pop-eyed, minimal wave gem that wouldn't out of place next to Depeche Mode or Gary Numan. So far, Cold Cave (aka Wes Eisold) has not done us wrong no matter what he ends up producing. The hyper limited Etsel And Ruby 12" is of the latter, poppier sensibility, in the footsteps of the terminally catchy single The Trees Grew Emotions And Died from 2008. The production values here are a little higher than the gutter-punk scratchiness found on the Cremations collection; and while punchier drum machines and upfront vocals give Cold Cave a gloss with a broader appeal, we seriously hope that he doesn't leave the nastier sound behind.
The A side "Love Comes Close" is a jangly, jaunty number that could very well be a lost track from The Cure's The Head On The Door, with Eisold's croon almost sounding like Stephin Merritt. The first of two B sides finds Eisold handing over the vocal duties to an unknown female singer, whose detached, cold vocals fit perfectly with the Cure / Joy Division basslines laced around the darkened electronics. The cut is like the best Fad Gadget song you've never heard before, with an insistent electroid melody that builds and builds throughout the track. Great stuff. Limited to 300 copies!!! Available only from the label and right here at aQ!
Originally released as an insanely limited cassette tape to coincide with a tour, this collaborative recording is now available as a spiffy, and still limited, lp, and includes a bonus track NOT on the original tape.
What might one expect from this match up, some cool cold wave grooves with howling noise drenched vocals, or better yet some heavy harsh noise shot through with dark moody melodies, and cold synths? Well, the weird thing is, this doesn't sound like either band, together or separate. Instead, this is swirling psychedelic synth space drone ambience, a little blissed out, a little brooding and ominous, all starry shimmer and blackly abstract, but plenty dark and definitely a little malevolent. Huge expanses of muted feedback, processed rumbles and whirs, buried melodies, all softly heaving in deep black swells, shot through with ever shifting textures. The B-side though gets downright poppy, still space-y and abstract, but infused with some seriously shoegazey shimmer, melodies much closer to the surface, glimmery and gauzey, with a distant rhythms, skittery and hushed, that over the course of the side, builds to a fairly aggressive industrial pound, while the sounds around it grow more and more bleak and caustic.
And then there's the extra track, which is easily the poppiest of the bunch, a soft focus M83 / Nadja / Jesu bit of blissy pop ambient drift, swirly and abstract, with wordless vocals adding to soft space-y psychedelia until some super strange vocals come in, a little harsh, heavily processed, distorted and menacing, wrapped around distant grinding guitars, and for a few moments it suddenly does sound very much like we imagined it would.
And of course, EXTREMELY LIMITED.
This mysterious gem was sent to us in the mail, and all it took was a quick listen to be totally smitten, and to know that probably lots of aQ folks would dig this as much as we did. So we got as many as we could, which was the last dozen or so copies of the super limited pressing of 150 copies, and here it is, the first we've heard from Coldstream, aka Daniel Mumford, four extended tracks of thick layered drone music, hazy shimmery drift, and mysterious minimal krautdrone ambience. The opening track is an almost static stretch of thick gnarled buzz, blurred into a slowly shifting expanse of dense drones, deep and mesmerizing, the sort of sound that we could listen to forever. The second track is much more melodic, spacious and abstract, with a cool skittery rhythm that surfaces about halfway through, epic and cinematic, super dramatic and ethereal, laced with muted buzz and soft sonic swells. The next track is also quite cinematic, like the soundtrack to some British nature documentary, hushed and dreamlike, fluttery flute like tones draped over undulating low end pulses, you can almost imagine time lapse images of clouds flitting across the sky, or plants blossoming and the closing up again, a musical dusk, all warm and wispy and dreamlike. Finally, the closing track smolders darkly, laced with minor key piano melodies, a brooding minimal drone ballad, again, haunting, and mysterious, and very very lovely.
LIMITED TO 150 COPIES, these are the LAST ones, housed in a cool origami like cardstock sleeve, with a full color insert, each one hand numbered.
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Coleclough's droning aesthetic was also heard on a collaboration done with Andrew Chalk last year, with an emphasis on surprisingly rich and beautiful tones emerging out of a very dark, quiet amplification. A clatter of distant pianos fades into bleak reverberations that hint at the catacomb recordings of Lustmord with field recordings filtering through. Coleclough's work seems to fall somewhere in between Organum's acoustic drones and Bernhard Gunter's requests for careful listening. Recommended drone work!
While the UK drone ensemble Ora dissolved a little over a year ago, its scattered members have been incredibly active with like-sounding projects: Andrew Chalk has been busy in Mirror, Darren Tate now works as Monos, Colin Potter has been collaborating
Another gorgeous release, both visually and sonically, from Idea records, this time from one of our favorite composers, Jonathan Coleclough. Coleclough has been responsible for some of the most beautiful drone records we have ever heard, and along with occasional partner Andrew Chalk produced one of Aquarius' all time favorite recordings, the breathtaking Sumac. Casino is the second entry in Idea Records series of unaltered field recordings and features two sidelong recordings, presented in their raw, unedited, and unprocessed form. Side one is a recording of a casino in Las Vegas and is a woozy, hypnotic wash of overlapping melodies swirled into a dense polyphony, the clicking and clattering of coins, the whir of slot machines and the rumble of muted conversations. While not necessarily soothing by themselves, all of those disparate elements blend into a dreamy, shimmery soporific whole. Side two is a recording of tree frogs in Antigua and displays a similar, albeit much simpler pattern as the Casino recordings, with a litany of high end squeaks over warbly lower pitched chirps all over a dense bed of shimmery distant scree. The accompanying cd further demonstrates the sonic similarities between the two recordings, by gradually mixing and crossfading the pleasing din of the casino into the latenight clamour of chirping and croaking frogs, and then eventually into the sound of crashing surf. The lp is on audiophile 220 gram vinyl, and the lp and cd are housed in a nice, thick gorgeously designed sleeve!
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After a number of beautifully designed albums (i.e. Period, Low Ground, Sumac, etc.), Jonathan Coleclough appears to have caught the same anti-packaging bug as fellow British drone artist David Jackman, by merely housing a CD in an empty case. Well at least, there's a touch of novelty to it, as he's used the same prest-o-matic plastic case with built-in ejector lever that Raster-Noton employed for the Cyclo collaboration between Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai. As clever as this device is, it nevertheless seems rather cheap. And some of us worry that it might scratch the cd although there has been no proof of that so far.
If you look as the packing design as something which could unduly influence an interpretation of the music within, then design would be superfluous and unnecessary. I say bollocks to that! Give us something to look at while we drool over your music, Mr. Coleclough! And drool we did over the exquisite drones and atmospheres that Coleclough produced for Makruna. Tumbling through a langorous loop of deep piano notes entombed in thick washes of reverb, Makruna is a much darker album than what Coleclough typically produces. Throughout the pieces, Coleclough extracts fragments of those piano tones and elongates them into sympathetic harmonizations amidst additional textures of metallic scrapings and field recordings of bird choruses. Also featured on Makruna is the the entire Minya recording, which originally came out about five years ago as a super limited CDR. Featuring contributions from Colin Potter and Andrew Chalk, Minya is a worthy complement to the bleak isolationism of Makruna as shadowy drones flutter amongst subtle feedback vibrations and ominous low-end frequencies. The questionable packaging aside, this is another Coleclough record that comes highly recommended!
Quite happy in releasing sporadic productions in painfully small pressings, Jonathan Coleclough has been one of Aquarius' favorite dronologist / deep listening composers and one who deserves a place in the experimental ambient pantheon that glorifies the work
One of Aquarius's favorite drone compositions, Jonathan Coleclough's "Period" was originally released early in 2001 as a limited edition piece of vinyl on Anomalous Records and has now been reissued with an extended mix of the title track that is better suited to the CD format. Coleclough began collecting field recordings and transforming them into emphathic dronescapes back in 1989, around the same time he began corresponding with Colin Potter about his ICR cassette projects. Since then, Potter and Coleclough have worked closely on a number of projects starting with Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate in Ora, and culminating more recently with their well-received "Low Ground" collaboration. "Period" again finds Coleclough employing the production / engineering talents of Potter (who has also been working quite intently with Steven Stapleton in Nurse With Wound). Throughout his career, Coleclough has defined himself as a sound organizer, modifying acoustic events and field recordings to enhance the emotional resonance that he finds in those sounds. Here on "Period," Coleclough draws all of his sounds from a Bluthner grand piano, surrounding the spartanly placed clusters of impressionistic notes with a complementary set of delicately fluctuating drones. Coleclough does well to accentuate the sublime reverberant decay that follows the piano's sustained tones. Furthermore, Potter offered his interpretation of the source material entitled "Periodic" which effectively erases the obvious references to the piano and leaves behind a densely tangled web of calm reverberations. As a whole "Period" stands as an amazingly rich and balanced piece of work on par with Brian Eno's "Thursday Afternoon" and the Cindytalk piano improvisations.
Aquarius has also gotten in a limited number of the double CD sets of "Period" which features a third mix of "Period" by both Coleclough and Potter, and a gorgeous track called "Summand," which is a re-working of some of the source material that Coleclough brought to the "Sumac" sessions with Andrew Chalk. There's only 300 of those double CDs in print. Don't blame us when they sell out!
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Jonathan Coleclough has become AQ's favorite newly discovered sound sculptor with three outstanding releases "Cake", "Sumac" (in collaboration with Andrew Chalk), and now "Windlass". In the end, it's probably irrelavant that the source material for "Windlass" is a slow moving crank which controls water flow on a dam, as Coleclough's metamorphosis of the original sound results in a deep sturnum rumbling bass drone paired with field recordings of distant twittering birds (a la Messaien). Swells of slowly churning resonance may be the only sonic reference to the metallic cycling of the source material. Highly recommended!!!
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Released a few years back as a one-sided piece of vinyl, Jonathan Coleclough and Andrew Chalk's "Sumac" has been one of those hidden gems within the deep listening realms of music that has continuously amazing us. Fortunately, "Sumac" has re-emerged from obscurity with this lengthy 70 minute cd version. Andrew Chalk is a veteran of the noise / drone scene who has recorded with Organum, Ora, and Feral Confine. Working with upstart dronologist Jonathan Coleclough, Chalk has conjured a breathtaking memser of bowed metal wires, cymbals, and other pieces of metal with shifting chunks of backward masked slow aerated sound. "Sumac," shrouded in a glistening darkness, is one of the all-time great drone records.
Jonathan Colecough sure does like his collaborations! (And so do we.) We were first transfixed by his luminous dronescaping on the masterful Sumac album (currently unavailable) which paired his talents with Andrew Chalk who later went on to found the equally epochal drone ensemble Mirror. Since then, Coleclough has worked with Colin Potter on numerous ventures, Bass Communion, Tim Hill, and now with Japanese improviser Kuwayama Kiyoharu (aka Lethe). Kiyoharu is best known for his duets with violinist Kijima Rina in which the two respond to the reverberations and environmental ambience of warehouse spaces, highway underpasses, and other industrial zones. As Lethe, Kiyoharu's work concentrates more on the spatialization of actionist gestures in which he scrapes, shuffles, and bristles found objects in various locations and proximations to his microphones. Together, their work operates on a fairly simple trajectory as Coleclough sets forth an underlying drone upon which Kuwayama overlays his clamourous gestures. Starting off with a lulling isolationist tone, Coleclough's subtle shifts settle upon a lumbering sea of low frequencies; Kuwayama quietly introduces his scrabblings. Together, they add more and more sounds upon each other, as Coleclough offers some ring modulated electric frequencies not unlike Klaus Schulze's classic '70s desolation and as Kuwayama increases the density of his aggregate sounds. This builds up to a dramatic climax of clanging metals against concrete floors and psychoacoustically agitated drones that come to an abrupt halt. Afterwards, Coleclough sends the rest of the piece along a steady fluctuation of twin tones, and Kuwayama presents a delicate foray of acoustic clicks. It all makes for a wonderful album!
It's been nearly a year and a half since the venerable British drone composer Jonathan Coleclough has offered us something new; and this collaboration between Coleclough and Murmer (aka Patrick McGinley) is well worth the wait! The two met a couple years back after contributing works to the same compilation. Soon after, Coleclough began making regular contributions to McGinley's weekly radio series Framework for Resonance FM in London; and their continued communication sparked the interest for a collaboration. Much of the music found on Husk originated from semi-improvised sessions whereby the two processed various field recordings, small tactile events, and other electronic devices -- gradually developing beyond the gestural and into a monumental sprawling album which is in the running for best drone album of 2006. The two had cited their source material as refrigerators, thunderstorms, sheep, car horns, ferryboats, windblown sand, and crackling charcoal; and it's a crap shoot to discern which of these electrically blurred drones hails from an overheating kitchen appliance or from farm animals. Not that any of that really matters, as the art of Coleclough and McGinley is in their alchemy, transforming the commonplace into the celestial (albeit, a very dark and very cold heavenly body). Throbbing drones of low end harmonics are joined by secondary sustained timbres which undulate as polyamorous tangles, spreading rhizomes, and slippery knots bristling with tactility and spotted with plenty of hints of the organic. Each of the four tracks proposes a variation on glassine drones counterpointed by rasping textures, at times hedging for the subdued drama of smoldering crescendos and others the sublime stare at glacial immobility. Coleclough's work has always been exceptional, and his collaboration with Murmer is no different! Highly recommended.
Of all of the drone artists that Aquarius has championed, Jonathan Coleclough is one of our (and our customers') favorites. "Beech for John and Miho," another collaboration for Coleclough with saxophonist Tim Hill, does nothing to change our high opinion of this composer, and we highly recommend everybody who has been interested in Coleclough to pick this one up!
Coleclough was originally commissioned to construct a short piece for a private wedding CD compilation alongside Joe Weismann, If Thousands, Jliat, and Space Machine. From what I can gather, there were a few copies of that compilation circulating around eBay at extremely high prices; thus, the release of "Beech" at this normal price should be a welcome relief for die-hard collectors. Furthermore, Coleclough has unravelled the original 15 minutes of sound into an epic 74 minutes, a time frame much better suited to the material at hand. Despite the lack of information about this composition, the sounds that Coleclough and Hill have been able to muster resemble those found on their previous collaborative album with Nurse With Wound's engineer Colin Potter entitled "Low Ground," opening up the possibility that the sources for "Beech" are saxophone and cello. Regardless of origin, Coleclough has stretched out the source material's intrinsic tonalities into a Phill Niblock-meets-Organum piece of maximalism. Coleclough presents a steady flux of sustained drones that may have been doubled, tripled, and quadrupled from a bow rippling across the strings of a cello. It's a beautiful hum that waxes and wanes on top of a constant background field of rapidly streaming glistens, shimmers, and miniature ruptures. This undercurrent of sound clangs like a distant school bell that rattles indefinitely, but situates itself as a transcendent, environmental complement rather than a toxic abrasion. "Beech" ultimately is an exceptional piece of dronemusic that is as good as Coleclough's universally acclaimed collaboration "Sumac" with Andrew Chalk.
