Album: Stolen & Contaminated Songs
Artist: Coil
Label: Cold Spring Records
Catalogue no: CSR276LP/CD
Tracklist:
1. Futhur
2. Original
Chaostrophy
3. Who’ll
Tell?
4. Omlagus
Garfungiloops
5. Inkling
6. Love’s
Secret Domain (Original Mix)
7. Nasa-Arab
8. Who’ll
Fall
9. The
Original Wild Garlic Memory
10. Wrim
Wram Wrom
11. Corybantic
Ennui
12. Her
Friends the Wolves
13. Light
Shining Darkly
It wouldn’t be too much
of an exaggeration to say that the band name Coil and the word ‘seminal’ are
synonymous in many people’s eyes, including mine. I owe them a great debt of
gratitude in introducing me to industrial and experimental music, along with
Psychic TV, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound. The album under review, Stolen & Contaminated Songs, was
originally released in 1992, showcasing outtakes and unreleased songs from the
recording sessions for the album that would eventually culminate in the Love’s Secret Domain album. This is the
first time it’s been issued on vinyl (see below) as well as in CD format.
What amazes me, 27 years
after its release, is that the music still sounds relevant, refreshing,
immediate, and up-to-date, even if there’s still something of a nineties vibe
to it (which is no bad thing). Furthermore, the broad experimentalism that was
a trademark of this project, ranging from the brightest of lights to the lowest
depths of abyssal darknesses, is still very much in evidence, showing above all
that Coil were never content in their musical musings and wanderings, refusing
to let themselves be pigeonholed within any rigid definition of genre, culling
influences and ideas from all and sundry. Boundaries, it appears, were things
that Coil didn’t have much time for, and throughout their output they were
always storming barricades and pushing into territories that lesser outfits
would have feared to venture into.
Let’s dive in at the
beginning, starting with ‘Futhur’, prefiguring ‘The Snow’ single (along with
its numerous remixes, as seemed to be the fashion back then). Sounds, beats,
and samples (including one from The Fast
Show I think) trip, stutter, and cascade over each other with the
appearance of chaos and randomicity, but yet ultimately cohering in the way
only Jhonn Balance could engineer. The following track, ‘Original Chaostrophy’,
has a tinge of the pastoral about it, at least in its initial stages (why does
it remind me of Ralph Vaughan Williams?), although Coil then shift dimensions
and create something unexpected. ‘Who’ll Tell’ is a spoken word effort, voice
loops adding accents to the music in direct contrast to its mirror image ‘Who’ll
Fall’, which appears several tracks hence.
‘Omlagus Garfungiloops’
sounds like something that Roald Dahl would come up with for one of his books,
and in fact the looping voice at the beginning probably belongs in a Dahl tale.
However, Coil then confound expectations by treating us to a laid-back, magical
jazzy number, a warm summer night when the stars are right and the planets have
all aligned. I can imagine those very same stars dripping from the sky and
falling into oblivion. ‘Inkling’ attracts our attention next, a tumbling trill
of tinkles accompanied by a deep drone, a shattering of delicate icicles
turning into powder puffs in frigid air, precipitated by a stalking presence
through a snowbound forest.
Next we’re treated to
‘Love’s Secret Domain’, a disturbed and disturbing treatise on when loves goes
too far, and becomes obsessive and tainted with insanity and darkness, when it
becomes twisted and, to most people, unhealthy. ‘Nasa-Arab’ comes in from a
completely different angle, and is perhaps my favourite track so far, a
strangely and alluringly distorted and treated voice imbued with flavours of
the East, twists, swoops, and soars, leading into a sensuous and hypnotic
rhythm that lulls as it simultaneously engages. It is at once elusive and allusive,
bringing with it the exotic and tribalistic, the earthbound and the mystical.
This is Coil at its most spiritual, freeing themselves and the listener from
materialistic gravity in order to float off to etheric and Nirvanic bliss. ‘Who’ll
Fall?’, the spiritual sibling of the earlier ‘Who’ll Tell?, changes emotional
tack yet again, being another spoken word piece but this time featuring a lone
voice, heard as if recorded on an answering machine, describing the suicide of
a friend’s boyfriend against a backdrop of echoey and haunting guitar
interspersed with old-style telephonic noises and blips, detailing the
immediate emotions and thoughts that are bound to tumble through one’s mind on
hearing such news. It’s affecting, getting right into one’s heart and soul.
Then we have some more
dimension-twisting weirdness in the form of ‘The Original Wild Garlic Memory’,
loops and strange utterances emanating from some alien mind, perhaps a new
classical music beamed back to us from our own future. ‘Wrim Wram Wrom’ is a
pulsing plane (as well as plain) of drone accompanied by blurts and fanfares.
One can imagine ancient ruins dominating a vast plain of arid desert, the
structures towering above all, commanding and leering, inviting yet
threatening. ‘Corybantic Ennui’ (corybantic
means frenzied, agitated, unrestrained), a short piece flavoured with a
sense of an English pastoral idyll, again with a hint of Vaughan Williams (at
least as far as a superficial appearance would suggest), before a rupturing and
guttural growl disturbs the peace, a sign that all is not what it seems.
‘Her Friends the Wolves’
begins with a reprise of the growling from ‘Corybantic Ennui’, raising the
hackles on the back of one’s neck in just the same way that being confronted by
a wolf would do. In fact, as the track progresses the tempo lopes along as if
we’re running with a pack, perhaps through that forest alluded to in ‘Inkiling’
above, only now it’s darkly shaded, with the moon only dimly shining,
fleetingly and fitfully, through the canopy of branches high above our heads.
Out from around the trunks and the obscure depths of the forest bizarre ghostly
voices and snatches of sound emerge randomly, threatening and menacing, urging
us onwards. The album ends on another short piece, ‘Light Shining Darkly’, sounding
like angelic choirs as heard through a filter of spider-webs and poisonous
breath.
Just like Cold Spring’s
other recent ‘classic’ reissue (SPK’s Lamia
Zehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers – review forthcoming) Stolen & Contaminated Songs displays
Jhonn Balance’s and Peter Christopherson’s musical virtuosity, especially
important considering that the vast majority of music available at the time
(and continuing on into the present day) had become increasingly manufactured
and had shifted its focus from content to personality. Yes, I know it’s always
been like that to some extent, but the emphasis appears to have become
paramount. Here the accent is on music, and its ability to affect us on so many
levels. It was revolutionary at the time and, all these decades later, can
still hold its own. Whilst Horse
Rotorvator will always be a benchmark for me on a personal level, this
reissue also acts as a reminder that true artists evolve and innovate – two
things of which Coil were the consummate practitioners.
The Double LP is available now (in bronze-coloured
vinyl from CSR only, as well as an edition in bone-coloured vinyl, as well as
traditional black vinyl) and will be available as a CD from mid-December.
Purchase on the link below:
Psymon Marshall 2019.
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