Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
These two very different releases are the first formal full-length albums from Michael Jantz's solo guitar project, but he already has a lengthy discography behind him that spans many of cassette culture's most revered labels (Stunned, Housecraft, Digitalis, etc.).  While he covers a wide stylistic range, Jantz never seems like a tourist: he brings an assurance and a laconic charm to everything from banjo playing to neo-krautock.  In fact, he might be one of the only artists that I can think of that can seamlessly bridge the gulf between the rootsy steel string folks and the newer wave of loop-y, laptop-enhanced experimentalists.  He is not infallible though.
I had heard at least one Black Eagle Child tape (Poland?) prior to Lobelia's release this spring and I liked it, despite the fact that it hadn't left a particularly large impression on me. A lot of people seemed very enthusiastic about this project, so I figured I had probably just picked up one of Jantz's lesser releases–I maintained high expectations for Lobelia.  In one way, it succeeds admirably: Micheal’s rustic and lazily ambling banjo and guitar instrumentals sound far too accomplished and melodic to be emerging from the cassette underground.  There are several pieces that easily could be mistaken for subtly experimental '60s or '70s major label folk (there are nature recordings in the mix, as well as a gurgling child). That isn't a dig: Jantz is a skilled guitarist and there is lot to admire here.  Michael keeps things enjoyably airy, spacious, and organic throughout and knows how to craft strong melodies and tight, intelligently arranged songs.  Also, I enjoyed the bittersweet, sitting-on-a-porch-swing-in-the-dying-days-of-summer feel of pieces like the opening "Crandon."
Unfortunately, the problem with making such a pastoral and pleasantly melodic album is that it winds up sounding almost indistinguishable from a lot of other able guitarists making nice music.  Lobelia lacks character.  It also lacks bite–this is simply too polite and weightless for someone as maladjusted as I am.  That said, there are a couple of excellent departures, such as the woozy, melancholy shimmer of "I Forgot" and the muted burbling of "A Different River."  Jantz, at his best, is extremely talented and wrangles an unexpected amount of emotion out of his guitar.  On Lobelia, unfortunately, he is not always at his best: he seems quite content to play it very straight about ¾ of the time.  That is not a very high success rate, I'm afraid.  I'd classify this album as a handful of excellent songs regrettably embedded in a pleasant and inoffensive misfire.
Although Pages On A Plane followed Lobelia by just a few months, Jantz overtly sounds like a completely different artist.  For example, there is nothing that sounds particularly folk-influenced nor is there any banjo or field recording present (though his daughter makes another brief appearance).  In a deeper sense, however, Michael is very much himself (only perhaps more so).  These five songs are characteristically unhurried, sun-dappled, and melodically strong.  And they're great.  All of them.  Naturally, part of this album's success is simply due to intelligent self-editing and sequencing: Pages On A Plane clocks in around a rather lean half-hour, but there is no wasted time.  Also, Jantz seems to have made a savvy leap forward in both his composition and studio techniques, as he deftly uses tricks like repetition, delay, and layering to give pieces like "I Am A Bunny" pulse and depth.  His use of processing is particularly effective near the end of "Long Reflector," where digitally mangled notes seem to fall to the ground and decay like leaves.
Those ravaged notes might be the only element of the album that could be construed as "bite" or "grit," but Pages On A Plane unexpectedly offers something even better (and significantly more rare): a palpable sense of playfulness and wide-eyed wonder.  The most successful example of this is the beautifully snowballing lattice of ringing arpeggios in the aforementioned "I Am A Bunny," but I am also quite partial to "Cycle To The Moon," which sounds like vibrant, loose-limbed, and fun detournement of a Neu! song.  The first two songs ("The Lost Button" and "Spring") didn't hit me quite as hard as the rest of the album, but they are still both pretty unimpeachable in a shimmering, ambient way.  I can't complain–Pages On A Plane is a flawless, oft-amazing effort.  I now understand why Jantz is held in such high regard, as he seems singularly able to tap into something pure and innocent when he is at the top of his game.
Stunning and devasting from beginning to end, this Triosk member's solo debut emotes relentlessly, unrestrained by any prescribed genre boundaries. To futilely classify this pensive meisterstück, as some critics are wont to do, defies sense, as the piano-driven music in effect speaks for itself, in despondent whispers and virtual screams.
For Be Still, Sydney-based pianist Adrian Klumpes has constructed a severe, deeply isolationist soundtrack to depression, a complex feeling that grips so many these long autumn nights. Not even loosely related to the creative avant-jazz of the artist's primary band, "Cornerned" sets this self-abusive ritual into motion, with backwards loops like shards of broken glass amid the ivories. Glitchy ambience plays a larger role on "Weave In And Out" to the point where intently following along could lead to unintended strain. The far more minimal title track returns a uneasy calm which gradually and quite naturally builds into something almost fiery and provoking, a characteristic that reappears as an all-out tantrum during the album's frantic centerpiece, the ten minute opus "Unrest". A queasy interlude named "Why" follows before segueing into "Exhale," which plays out more like unhealthy venting than much-needed release.
Though we are led to assume that Klumpes is pouring out his emotions here, he still finds enough time to toy with ours as well. The last few beautiful seconds of the otherwise atonal "Give In" tease or, rather, torment with a freshly tinkling, and cruelly fleeting, pattern relieved of the atmospheric weight that precedes it. Closer "Passing Pain" bitterly refuses to acquiesce to the demands of those transiently clean moments, the now-familiar palette of black and white keys producing a frigid tonal climate assuring much misery even after waning.
The next installment of the enthralling collaboration 'twixt h3o and those likely lads Autechre is ready to see the light of day on Die Stadt and Simply Superior. This should make the previous two glow again with renewed ardour, and provide a couple of answers, but many, many more questions.
This release will come in a special format: double DVD (5.1 Audio Version), in a custom die-cut, printed envelope. Each disc features 2 hours of 5.1 surround sound, in both Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks. Due to the special nature of the format this title will come in a limited edition of 1000 copies.
To experience this work as intended, you will need:
A 5.1 surround amplifier and speaker setup. A DTS-ready system will provide the best quality experience.
A DVD player capable of playing PAL format video, or capable of converting PAL to NTSC format video.
When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think I managed to hear Love's Secret Domain until 1994, by which point I had already accumulated several other Coil albums as consolation purchases.  Despite that, the album was still enough of a departure from what I had heard to make a huge impact on me.  Sleazy jokingly described it as the band's "party album" for a reason, as there is a great deal of fun, kitsch, and wry comedy lurking amidst the darkness.  It most overtly manifests itself in the lysergic exotica of "Teenage Lightning" and "Disco Hospital," both of which brilliantly approximate a bizarre cabaret of the damned.  "Disco Hospital," incidentally, is probably my favorite opening track from any album ever, sounding like an unholy collaboration between a VCR eating a Looney Tunes episode, a swirling blade, and a relentlessly cheery organist.  Then, of course, there is Annie Anxiety's faux-Nicaraguan prostitute stream of consciousness rambling in "Things Happen."  Still more amusement lies further beneath the surface, as Balance appropriates the entire chorus of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" for the title piece and the album's cover art is actually the door of Stephen Stapleton's outhouse.
Probably the most important thing about this album, however, is the fact that it contains the utterly mesmerizing "Love's Secret Domain," which still sounds completely deranged, fresh, and unique even two decades later.  Despite their vast discography, it was pretty rare for Coil to record actual focused, structured "songs" and "Love's Secret Domain" might be the most single most perfectly distilled example of Coil's genius ever released.  Few songs have had as massive an impact on me as that one, as a Blake-quoting Englishman instantly made most of the "extreme" music that I had been listening to sound dull and dogmatic by comparison.  Blast beats, de-tuned guitars, raspy "industrial" vocals, and squalls of feedback were not nearly as scary and heavy as whatever the hell it was that John Balance was channeling.  Rarely has the massive gulf between style and substance been so starkly illustrated for me: the song sounds like a wounded and wrenching dispatch from somewhere well past the edge of sanity.
There are some other great songs as well ("Chaostrophy," for example), but the album admittedly has some flaws as a complete and coherent artistic statement.  However, I don’t feel that they are especially damning ones.  The first is that it is a bit bloated, featuring no less than 3 versions of "Teenage Lightning" and few less-than-amazing pieces that maybe should not have made the cut.  The original version of Love's Secret Domain (on Torso) only had 9 extremely well-chosen songs though and I would rather hear the bonus material (especially "Lorca Not Orca") than not hear it.  This was a hugely fruitful creative period (Stolen and Contaminated Songs was also culled from these sessions), so I don't mind the extra material, even if it comes at the expense of sequencing a bit.
The other oft-cited issue is that the album is stylistically all over the map and that some of those styles have not aged particularly well, primarily the straightforward club beats of "Windowpane" and "The Snow."  To a certain extent, I agree– I rarely listen to those two songs at all.  However, it wasn't like Coil tried to make house music and failed miserably.  "The Snow" was a pretty unusual and innovative take on what was happening in dance music at the time.  Despite the pedestrian beats, they brought some uniquely queasy and spectral textures to the form–Coil were not a band that cheerfully relied on factory preset sounds, nor were they content to let anything make it onto an album without at least some hallucinatory studio-tweaking.  Certainly, Coil was a bit fractured and scattered direction-wise at this point in their career (and a bit over-prone to embracing trends), but their inventiveness and sheer otherness was apparent no matter what they tried.  Love's Secret Domain is an eccentric grab bag rather than a solid, deliberate album, but the low-points are more due to the vagaries of changing tastes over time rather than any egregious artistic failings.
Love's Secret Domain is not Coil's greatest work and it is rare for me to listen to it in its entirety these days, but I still love it.  I would not hesitate at all to describe it as a masterpiece.  It is not perfect by any means, yet there is no denying that it was (and is) an audacious, wild, passionate, and gutsy effort that sounded like absolutely no one else around (and even made oboes sound cool).  It is very difficult to hear this album for the first time and not emerge startled, changed, or moved in some way.
I don't believe Sleazy for a minute when, in interviews, he calls Love's Secret Domain a "positive" recording. After making Horse Rotorvator, sounding more positive was probably as easy as finding something softer than a hammer. If there is a positive thread running through Coil's third full-length, songs like "Things Happen" and "Titan Arch" dye it black; if anything purely positive is left over, "Further Back and Faster" and "Chaostrophy" obliterate it entirely. I've been listening to L.S.D. for 15 years now, and I'm convinced that it is Coil's most beguiling record, a fun-house mirror that warps and subverts everything held up to it. Calling it their acid album is just insulting, because there's much more to it than the drugs that helped spawn it.
When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love's Secret Domain.
"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love's Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton's artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil's finest moments.
I don't believe Sleazy for a minute when, in interviews, he calls Love's Secret Domain a "positive" recording. After making Horse Rotorvator, sounding more positive was probably as easy as finding something softer than a hammer. If there is a positive thread running through Coil's third full-length, songs like "Things Happen" and "Titan Arch" dye it black; if anything purely positive is left over, "Further Back and Faster" and "Chaostrophy" obliterate it entirely. I've been listening to L.S.D. for 15 years now, and I'm convinced that it is Coil's most beguiling record, a fun-house mirror that warps and subverts everything held up to it. Calling it their acid album is just insulting, because there's much more to it than the drugs that helped spawn it.
In a 1992 interview published in Option Magazine, Scott Lewis describes the lyrics on Coil's latest record as "lighter" and "more optimistic," and bafflingly, Peter and John concur. In fact, the same thing happens in numerous interviews.
I remember hearing "Love's Secret Domain" and "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and my opinion then was the same as it is now: in the wake of Horse Rotorvator's trials, Coil had opted to embrace deliriousness rather than dive further into the murk of their previous work. Perhaps their music had become lighter in some respects, but that didn't mean they had become lighthearted. Balance wasn't screaming about Nero's long hot tongue anymore, but he was meditating on sick love, quoting William Blake and Roy Orbison in the same song, and Peter was piling sound upon sound, cutting heavily processed vocals with Latin rhythms and caustic bursts of bubbling noise. By working with Little Annie, Marc Almond, This Heat's Charles Hayward, Juan Ramirez, and Billy McGee, Coil opened up their sound and gave their audience a chance to come up for air, but at the same time they became subtler, devious even, and more enigmatic.
On L.S.D., martial rhythms replace dance floor rhythms, and resonant synthesizers replace apocalyptic horns, but Coil's subversive spirit remains intact. The proof isn't in every song, but in the way certain pieces color others. On one half of the album, "Windowpane" and "The Snow" celebrates ecstasy and hedonistic impulses, but the lurch of "Further Back and Faster" scrutinizes both, with lines from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter utilized to blur the line between love and hate. Laden with pounding drums and constantly shifting rhythms, "Further Back" disrupts the playfulness of the songs around it by taking that playfulness to its limit. "Chaostrophy" follows suit; radio signals, distortion, orchestral fragments, frustration, and sadness all fight with each other as one of the most beautiful melodies Peter ever wrote emerges from the chaos, half triumphant and half resigned. Billy McGee's arrangement is stunning, and Julia Girdwood's oboe sounds heavenly among the strings and reverberating noise, but it's resigned, too, almost too pretty for the chaos around it. "Lorca Not Orca" follows, but the Latin rhythms from earlier have lost their vigor, and all that's left is for Jhonn to sing his ode to mad love. As he puts it, "innocence is dripping red."
Thematically, there are numerous reasons to characterize L.S.D. as a foreboding record. Sonically, I think its ominous character is obvious. Play it back to back with Horse Rotorvator and Gold is the Metal with the Broadest Shoulders and the jubilant character it is so often assigned disappears instantaneously. Coil's acid album, or their party album, or their dance record isn't an acid-dance-party record at all. Rather, it exists in continuum inhabited by the albums that precede it, and even by some that follow it. But there isn't another record like it out there; nothing else in my collection successfully combines so many ideas into a single statement.
Personally, I'll always remember hearing "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and being carried away by its density. I remember feeling a little stupid when I discovered that some of the melody was actually a heavily processed voice, and I remember the excitement I felt when I realized what could be done with texture and noise. Coil helped open my brain up, even without the use of drugs, and their influence, largely due to this album, has stayed with me to the present.
Ultimately, Love's Secret Domain changed the way I listen to music; it was the right record for me at the right time, and after 15 years I'm still hearing new things in it every time I listen.
In the summer of 1993, my friend Eric showed up at my house with a grocery bag full of CDs that he swore I needed to hear. Among them were Lustmord's Paradise Disowned and Heresy and just about everything available at the time from Coil. I had already been exposed to Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, but this was my first taste of Coil and I started with Horse Rotorvator because I figured that I needed to hear any record that kicked off with a song called "The Anal Staircase" immediately.
By the time I made my way to Love's Secret Domain, I was thoroughly creeped out.It took dance-floor remixes of "The Snow" from Jack Dangers to warm me up to Love's Secret Domain. Those mixes sounded like bits of the Coil track slapped over an extended version of Meat Beat Manifesto's Psyche Out and that was something I could dig. All of the talk of blood and sucking and brains was too much at first, but eventually Love's Secret Domain wound up as the only Coil full length that I owned.
 
I had a cassette copy of LSD that stayed on fairly permanent rotation in my car as I delivered pizzas and traveled back and forth from my apartment to my college campus through the mid 1990s.As I listened to the cassette, I always felt like I was waiting to get to "Windowpane" or "The Snow" or the title track—the more accessible and dance-oriented songs that were surrounded by Coil's more spaced-out compositions. I liked all of it, but the songs more closely-related to the Wax Trax dance aesthetic were my favorites.
But listening back on the album now, it seems absurd to think that those songs were accessible by any standards other than Coil's.If the bad-trip lyrics from "Windowpane" weren't enough to send ravers running for the exit, the absolutely dead-creepy delivery surely was. At the time, I was wrapped up in a subculture where each new band was inspired to outdo the filth and darkness of the band before, and I was perhaps a little blind to just how subversive and menacing this album gets.
One year we opened up our dorm to local disadvantaged neighborhood kids and we decorated the halls with typical Halloween adornments. I got to pick the music for our hallway since most of the guys around me were off getting sloshed, so I stuck on an eerie mix of Lab Report's Unhealthy, early Skinny Puppy, and selected tracks from Love's Secret Domain and watched as kids peered into my dorm room in horror.
It was all clearly too much for a young mind to take.
Like many, my first exposure to Coil was via their Nine Inch Nails remixes in the early 1990s, which, as a middle schooler, perplexed me more than anything else. It wasn't until I was a bit older and had exchanged some mix tapes that I heard Coil properly, and "got" it. While I might be in the minority by not ranking this album as my favorite from them, Love's Secret Domain still stands as a distinct and creative album that is artistically, as well as technically fascinating.
Looking back, I'm somewhat surprised I didn't hear this album earlier, because not long after the aforementioned NIN period but before delving into their catalog, I was a whore for pretty much anything Wax Trax put out, and I was, in fact, into the label around the time this album came out.Looking back, I would have probably been a bit better off laying off the KMFDM and looking more towards this disc.
Personally, my favorite Coil works tend to be the ones I heard first, which were mostly from mix tapes culled from Scatology and Horse Rotorvator, to this day still my two favorite works from them.While those discs straddled the line between what used to be and what is now "industrial" (for the abstraction of "The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party" there was the catchy "Panic"), LSD flirted with techno and house music, which was a bit less of my "thing".
In hindsight, it's only the two singles, "The Snow" and "Windowpane" that are overtly using stiff 4/4 beats and squelchy 303 synths, and consequently the ones that sound the most of their era.They’re not necessarily dated, but at the same time not as timeless as the other songs either.
In comparison, "Things Happen" sound of no era in particular: a hallucinogenic cocktail of difficult to identify songs and rhythms, all of which come together perfectly, polished off with Annie Anxiety's inebriated vocals."Where Even the Darkness is Something to See" carries a similar vibe:a cut and pasted didgeridoo and erratic rhythm come together into a bizarre mutation that is almost unidentifiable.
While the techno/house theme runs throughout the album, it does not define it, nor does it restrict it:"Chaostrophy" makes no concessions to rhythms and instead links swirling layers of noise with a melancholy horn melody to wonderful effect.The closing title track also is, to me, the perfect culmination of the album:John Balance's snarling vocals and menacing electronics beautifully pervert traditional electronic "dance" music.
The "hallucinogenic" tag I mentioned earlier is one that applies to pretty much every song on this album, and given its title, I don’t think it’s accidental.As someone who doesn't use recreational drugs, I cannot say with certainty the relationship of them to this album, but I can imagine the influence, if on nothing else the ideal of experimentation.
That's one of the most amazing things hearing this album today:it was recorded 20 years ago.The idiosyncratic sound of this album is one that, even with an absurd amount of VST plug-ins and technical know-how, would be extremely difficult to replicate.Here, with just rudimentary samplers, MIDI, and analogue tape, Coil created something more original and creative than 99 percent of the world.
It's hard to imagine what experimental and electronic music would be today if this album had not been released.Artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin are indebted to Coil and their willingness to misuse technology and re-contextualize "conventional" sounds to their own ends.Even with its house tendencies, Love's Secret Domain could be released today and it would still be as lauded as it has been for the past two decades.