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Coil

Live One

    Whilst there had been abortive attempts at live shows in the early 1980s, this concert is universally considered the veritable COIL live debut.

    With a line-up of John Balance, Peter “Sleazy“ Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra and Ossian Brown, COIL took the RFH stage decked out in their custom designed fluffy polar Teletubby suits to perform a supremely hypnotic set, somewhat reminiscent of their seminal Time Machines release but adding variation and tension largely absent from that drone masterpiece. Balance's vocal delivery on “Queens of the Circulating Library“ is still a very controlled but effective affair and quite different from his later manic outbursts.

    The show itself as well as the long-out of print and now much sought after 2003 CD release were extremely well received and became the cornerstone of a quick succession of COIL tours in the intervening four short years until Balance's untimely death.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Everything Keeps Dissolving
    2. Queens Of The Circulating Library
    3. Chasms Pt1
    4. Chasms Pt2

    Coil

    Backward - 2025 Reissue

      After the ground-breaking release of 1990's "Love's Secret Domain" album, Coil were not dormant; the main project was "Backwards", which was started in 1992, updated considerably between 1993 and 1995, and transferred in 1996 to New Orleans, where it was finished in the magic of the Nothing studios of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). The album saw the fruition of Jhonn Balance's recent vocal coaching, producing haunting, passionate vocals, while reaching new heights.23 years after its initiation, these tracks have been beautifully preserved by Danny Hyde and are finally available in highest quality audio. Differing substantially from the later, remixed incarnation, "The New Backwards" (2008), "Backwards" contains the original versions of Coil's much-loved tracks; 'A Cold Cell' and 'Fire Of The Mind', which have appeared on various compilations over the years, and are now presented as originally intended. This album is the essential bridge between "LSD" and the later "Musick To Play In The Dark" series. It is an essential conduit, to understand the journey that was taken. It was to be released… it should have been released… but because of issues with grey men it wasn't. It is now, so enjoy. (Danny Hyde).CD in 6-panel matt-laminate digipak.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Intro
      2. Backwards
      3. Amber Rain
      4. Fire Of The Green Dragon
      5. Be Careful What You Wish For
      6. Nature Is A Language
      7. Heaven's Blade
      8. CopaCaballa
      9. Paint Me As A Dead Soul
      10. AYOR (It's In My Blood)
      11. A Cold Cell
      12. Fire Of The Mind

      Coil

      Black Antlers - 2025 Reissue

        In the late-1990s, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson moved with Jhonn Balance - his partner in life and in Coil - from London to the rural Weston-super-Mare, creating an environment for all things "musick, musick, musick!" with a revolving door of new members, including Thighpaulsandra. Coil's discography nearly doubled, and in the midst of this fruitful period Thighpaulsandra asked the simple question: why doesn't Coil play live? After a 16-year wait, thanks to the rapid technological advancement in the form of MacBooks, DAWs, VSTs and plugins, Coil were able bring their music to the stage as always envisioned. With performance, they could embrace the risks and freedoms of real time sonic manipulation, as noted by Sleazy: "Reshap(ing) the show minute by minute... the direction is very spontaneous, not so much in the way of like jazz improvisation but in a kind stream of consciousness… Thighpaulsandra brought us his wisdom, and he was able to convince us we could do it." Playing live, Coil was "like a snake shedding its skin," transforming into something "completely different" every six months; in preparing for 2004’s "Even an Evil Fatigue" live series, Coil began work on their next period-defining masterpiece 'Black Antlers'.

        The music became more rhythmic, with a greater emphasis on beats: "the songs we did tend to be more... not rock in any sense of a word, but you know, more conventional in terms of structure, but now what we're doing is sort of within an 'electronic' genre." Black Antlers's sound is an intoxicating energy, combining Thighpaulsandra's advanced synthesis, Balance's poetic lyricism and Christopherson's flirtations with jazz and Ableton-aided PowerBook maximalism. Rounding out the trio were renowned hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton on a "specifically commissioned" electric variant, to merge into the band’s "strange and other-worldly music"; Royal Academy of Music trained percussionist Tom Edwards (who also appeared with Thighpaulsandra in Spiritualized’s live band); and European and Near East winds specialist Mike York on pipes, bombarde, duduk and balalaika. Initially released as an "album- in-progress" in June 2004, a post on the Threshold House website noted, "Please remember that September will see Coil recording the album "Black Antlers (Proper)"." Jhonn Balance passed away that November; Christopherson reunited with Love's Secret Domain collaborator Danny Hyde to complete 'Black Antlers' by May 2006.

        Revitalized energy marked Black Antlers's recording, paired with the group's signature wordplay and humor (the name came from a series of imagined adult film titles). At their "Evil Fatigue" tour opener in Paris, Jhonn Balance presented the revised "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" as, "an updated version of one of our older-never 'hits.'" The song, about the energy generated by "two teenagers, or old age pensioners" rapidly pulses, with Edwards's marimbas electronically modified and arpeggiated by Christopherson. Album opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is hypnotic and hallucinatory, recalling Coil's 90s period, with a potentially uneasy air, filled with repetition, distorted vocals, and Thighpaulsandra's modulated drone. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One)" reveals the potentials of the 2004 lineup, as it writhes and glides through an imagined conversation with the legendary composer, building into overdrive. On the complementary piece, Christopherson & Hyde's "Part Two - Sigillaricia", the song evolves into a throbbing ouroboros of glitches and free flowing energy. One highlight is "The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris", an expansion of the song's first release as "(From Montreal)". "Of Paris" takes Thighpaulsandra synthesized warmth and Christopherson's PowerBook manipulations & stylizations from the original, adding full band samples from live multi-tracks - including Balance's vocals from the Paris show - fully realizing Christopherson's desire of "taking the (electronic) genre to a place that people would find unexpected, and more challenging." Adding to the unexpected, and building upon their own uncompromising legacy, Coil delicately cover the traditional African American lullaby (and "friend's song") "All The Pretty Little Horses", with Balance's vocals soothing the listener in an almost hushed whisper.


        TRACK LISTING

        1. The Gimp (Sometimes)
        2. Sex With Sun Ra (Part One – Saturnalia)
        3. The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris
        4. All The Pretty Little Horses
        5. Teenage Lightening (10th Birthday Version)
        6. Black Antlers (Where’s Your Child?)
        7. Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two – Sigillaricia)
        8. Departed
        9. Things We Never Had

        Coil

        A Guide For Beginners - The Voice Of Silver / A Guide For Finishers - A Hair Of Gold

          Out of print on CD for almost two decades, Cold Spring are proud to announce the official reissue of a much sought after 'Best Of' set by the acclaimed esoteric experimental pioneers Coil, with 'A Guide For Beginners - The Voice Of Silver' and 'A Guide For Finishers - A Hair Of Gold' being made available together in one deluxe set. Officially licensed from FEELEE, this edition spans Coil's entire career, featuring tracks from all their major albums. They were hand-picked by Coil to represent their best work and originally released to mark their first performance in Moscow in 2001. The artwork (text in English and Russian Cyrillic) sympathetically features the rarest of the images previously used in the original Russian and English editions and is packaged in a deluxe, glossy 8-panel digipak with spot matt-laminate varnish. All artwork for the Cold Spring edition has been approved by FEELEE.

          TRACK LISTING

          Disc 1 - A Guide For Beginners: The Voice Of Silver
          1. Amethyst Deceivers (6:33)
          2. The Lost Rivers Of London (7:41)
          3. Are You Shivering? (9:38)
          4. Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini) (6:21)
          5. Where Are You? (7:51)
          6. At The Heart Of It All (5:12)
          7. A Cold Cell (5:58)
          8. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn) (11:09)
          9. Who'll Fall? (5:15)
          10. The Dreamer Is Still Asleep (9:41)

          Disc 2 - A Guide For Finishers: A Hair Of Gold
          1. Panic (4:18)
          2. First Dark Ride (10:50)
          3. Further Back And Faster (7:55)
          4. The Anal Staircase (3:57)
          5. Red Skeletons (7:32)
          6. Scope (6:35)
          7. Solar Lodge (5:36)
          8. Blue Rats (3:08)
          9. A.Y.O.R. (3:11)
          10. The First Five Minutes After Violent Death (4:59)

          COIL VS ELPH

          Born Again Pagan - Extended 30th Anniversary Edition

            Infinite Fog are delighted to present another piece of the intriguing COIL puzzle. In the mid 1990s the core team of John Balance and Peter Christopherson were continuing their exploration of the outer reaches of electronic sound production as exemplified by the "Born Again Pagans" release, originally an EP only, featuring both the hugely danceable "Protection" smash which had Danny Hyde's influence writ in large letters all over it, as well as the first outings of their intriguing more ambient/glitch-based ElpH material, probably their most haunting and haunted works. This new 3LP anthology re-edition collects all of the ElpH material which didn't appear on their later "Worship the Glitch" album, namely the pHILM #1 10", a host of very rare compilation tracks as well as a number of at the time unreleased pieces in the same vein. The stunningly presented release also features the ElpH entity's last ever appearance originally available as part of raster noton's award winning 20' to 2000 series of releases, the "Zwölf" EP.

            All the material has been lovingly remastered by Jessica Thompson with re-imagined design-work by Oleg Galay and including a replica of the original St. Sebastian on acid poster.



            TRACK LISTING

            1. Protection
            2. Glimpse
            3. Crawling Spirit
            4. PHILM #1 (Vox)
            5. Static Electrician
            6. Red Scratch
            7. If It Wasn't Wolves, Then What Was It?
            8. Static Electrician (Symphonic)
            9. Untitled
            10. Untitled
            11. Untitled
            12. Untitled
            13. Untitled
            14. Untitled
            15. Untitled
            16. Untitled
            17. Gnomic Verses
            18. Untitled
            19. Untitled
            20. Glisten#2
            21. Zwol

            Coil

            Moon's Milk - 2024 Reissue

              First compiled as a double CD in 2002, Moon’s Milk (in Four Phases) is a suite of four EPs that Coil released seasonally via their in-house Eskaton imprint across 1998. The line-up for these sessions were John Balance, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, Drew McDowall, and William Breeze. Recorded primarily at their home studio in Chiswick, London on the eve of a permanent relocation to the small seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, the collection has long loomed as a pivotal and pinnacle work in the group's discography, but has never been officially reissued, or repressed on vinyl. Time has only ripened its tapestry of regal strangeness.

              Arranged sequentially in tribute to the equinoxes and solstices, Moon's Milk captures Coil at a revelatory crossroads, leaning deeper into improvisation, spontaneity, and sound design. "Moon's Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull" initiates the proceedings on Spring Equinox, a two-part netherworld organ séance woven from vocal drones, cathedral keys, seasick strings, and opiated undertow. From there, Summer Solstice skews lighter but no less incantational, with Balance embracing his voice-as-instrument across lucid dream torch songs ("Bee Stings"), purgatorial spoken word ("Glowworms/Waveforms"), sultry chamber pieces ("Summer Substructures"), and falsetto ravings ("A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)").

              Autumn Equinox exudes more of a pensive and twilit mood, from the Rose McDowall-sung folk ballad "Rosa Decidua" ("I hear your voice sing near to me / I've put away the poisoned chalice (for now) / And lie down amongst the flowerbeds") to hall-of-lords hallucination "The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant” to the liminal string-plucked classic "Amethyst Deceivers," featuring excellent alien guitar by Breeze layered with Balance’s oft-quoted couplet: "Pay your respects to the vultures / For they are your future."

              The album’s final chapter, Winter Solstice, is its most swooning, remote, and ceremonial. Opener "A White Rainbow" stirs strings, layered choral vocals, and shivering rhythm into an imploding burial hymn. "North" oscillates bleakly, a ghost in the machine murmuring opaque prophecy ("This black dog has no owner / This black dog has no odour"), while "Magnetic North" is its inverse, a guided meditation of gently flickering software and surreal chakra poetics ("Red rose filling the skull / Yellow cube in the lower pelvis / Silver moon crescent below the navel"). The suite fades to grey with a traditional English carol ("Christmas Is Now Drawing Near"), rendered like an executioner's song by Rose McDowall’s doomed, beautiful voice.

              The Dais box set includes the entirety of the rare Moon's Milk Bonus Disc CD-R / 2019 Threshold Archives Copal CD, which includes three collaborations with Thighpaulsandra. This material is as rich and intoxicating as the previous four phases, ranging from electro-acoustic singing bowl rituals ("Copal") to dissonant electronic recitations of visionary Angus MacLise poetry ("The Coppice Meat") to ominous classical melancholia ("Bankside"). Once again, Coil confirm the vastness of their confounding, infinite alchemy, explored and refined across decades of experimentation – both sonic and bodily. From postindustrial to post-everything, theirs is an art untethered, in the wilds of its own design.


              TRACK LISTING

              LP 1 - SIDE A:
              Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet
              Skull (Part 1)
              Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet
              Skull (Part 2)
              Bee Stings

              LP 1 - SIDE B:
              Glowworms / Waveforms
              Summer Substructures
              A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)

              LP 2 - SIDE C:
              Regel
              Rosa Decidua
              Switches
              The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant
              Amethyst Deceivers

              LP 2 - SIDE D:
              A White Rainbow
              North
              Magnetic North
              Christmas Is Now Drawing Near

              LP 3 - SIDE E:
              Copal
              Bankside

              LP 3 - SIDE F:
              The Coppice Meat
              Ü Pel (Incense Offering)

              Lacuna Coil

              Shallow Life (RSD23 EDITION)

                THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2023 EXCLUSIVE, LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

                Released on limited vinyl in 2009 but sold out for years, Svart Records brings out an offiicial reissue wrapped in a gatefold jacket and pressed on clear vinyl, limited to 1500 copies in Europe only.

                Coil

                Queens Of The Circulating Library

                  Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes.

                  The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all."

                  TRACK LISTING

                  Side A
                  Queens Of The Circulating Library
                  Side B
                  Queens Of The Circulating Library

                  Coil

                  Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil

                    The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Westonsuper-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye.

                    Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

                    TRACK LISTING

                    SIDE A:
                    Higher Beings Command
                    I Am The Green Child
                    SIDE B:
                    Beige
                    Lowest Common Abominator
                    Free Base Chakra
                    SIDE C:
                    Tunnel Of Goats
                    SIDE D:
                    Tunnel Of Goats

                    Coil

                    Musick To Play In The Dark² - 2022 Reissue

                      After leaving London in 1999 for the sleepy seaside retiree town of Weston-super-Mare, Coil co-founders John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson set up shop in a palatial eight-bedroom estate to pursue the outer reaches of the group’s heightening cabalistic chemistry. Among the staggering string of late-era masterpieces they produced is lunar opus Musick To Play In The Dark, widely hailed as an artistic zenith upon its release. The sessions that birthed it were in fact so fruitful that a second LP took shape during the creation of the first one.

                      Aided by the recent addition of Welsh multi-instrumentalist engineer Thighpaulsandra, Coil mined further into the recesses of surrealist eldritch electronica Balance termed “moon music” – post-industrial spellcasting at the axis of narcotic and nocturnal energies. Musick To Play In The Dark² spans a full witching hour of bad acid sound design, synthesizer voyaging, opiated balladry, Luciferian glitch, and subliminal hymnals, alternately ominous, oracular, and absurd. Scottish gothic icon Rose McDowall guests on vocals for two tracks but otherwise the album is a hermetic affair, tapping into the group’s limitless insular synergy.

                      Opener “Something” is stark and incantational, a spoken word experiment for windswept voids. “Tiny Golden Books” unspools an aerial whirlpool of cosmic synth, both whispery and widescreen. “Ether” is an exercise in funeral procession piano and intoxicated wordplay (“It's either ether or the other”), while “Where Are You?” and “Batwings – A Liminal Hymn” lurk like liturgical murmurings heard on one’s death bed, framed in granular FX and flickering candlelight.

                      As a whole the collection skews more muted and remote than its predecessor, as if having grown accustomed to the nether regions of these darkening seances. But music box hallucination “Paranoid Inlay” captures the group’s oblique comedic side, always glimmering beneath: over a warped, wobbly beat Balance intones an opaque narrative of serenity, Saint Peter, and suicidal vegetables, accompanied by spiraling harpsichord and stuttering squelches of electronics. “It seems concussion suits you,” he repeats twice, like a macabre pickup line, before dictating a dear diary entry about risks and failures, finally concluding with as close to a self-portrait as Coil ever came: “On a clear day I can see forever / that the underworld is my oyster.”

                      TRACK LISTING

                      A1. Something
                      A2. Tiny Golden Books
                      B1. Ether
                      B2. Paranoid Inlay
                      C1. An Emergency
                      C2. Where Are You?
                      C3. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)

                      Coil

                      Musick To Play In The Dark

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

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

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

                        TRACK LISTING

                        1. Are You Shivering?
                        2. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The
                        3. And Destroy Paris In A
                        4. Night
                        5. Red Queen
                        6. Broccoli
                        7. Strange Birds The
                        8. Dreamer Is Still Asleep

                        This Mortal Coil was the given name of a strictly-studio project that spawned three albums, conceived and produced by one-time 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell.

                        Over the span of eight years he, along with Blackwing Studios house engineer/ co-producer, John Fryer, and a rotating cast of musicians, created original works, musical links and reinterpretations of impeccably curated songs; introducing a new audience to the talents of a previous generation including Big Star, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Spirit, Gene Clark, Dino Valenti, Rain Parade, Emmylou Harris, Syd Barrett and Colin Newman, amongst others.

                        Released two years after their debut album, This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow (1986) was no less ornate than its predecessor; a double album with each of its four sides a self-contained unit.

                        New faces joined the cast for this record, including a variety of singers Ivo handpicked like Alison Limerick, Jeanette, Dominic Appleton (Breathless), sisters Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski (Sunset Gun), and Richenel.

                        An intense listen, The Quietus called it “tortured yet oddly euphoric… (music which) could easily rip flimsy souls apart.”

                        TRACK LISTING

                        A1. Velvet Belly
                        A2. The Jeweller
                        A3. Ivy And Neet
                        A4. Meniscus
                        A5. Tears
                        A6. Tarantula

                        B1. My Father
                        B2. Come Here My Love
                        B3. At First, And Then
                        B4. Strength Of Strings
                        B5. Morning Glory

                        C1. Inch-Blue
                        C2. I Want To Live
                        C3. Mama K (1)
                        C4. Filigree & Shadow
                        C5. Fire Brothers
                        C6. Thaïs (1)
                        C7. I Must Have Been Blind
                        C8. A Heart Of Glass

                        D1. Alone
                        D2. Mama K (2)
                        D3. The Horizon Bleeds And Sucks Its Thumb
                        D4. Drugs
                        D5. Red Rain
                        D6. Thaïs (2) 

                        This Mortal Coil

                        It'll End In Tears

                        This Mortal Coil was the given name of a strictly-studio project that spawned three albums, conceived and produced by one-time 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell.

                        Over the span of eight years he, along with Blackwing Studios house engineer/ co-producer, John Fryer, and a rotating cast of musicians, created original works, musical links and reinterpretations of impeccably curated songs; introducing a new audience to the talents of a previous generation including Big Star, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Spirit, Gene Clark, Dino Valenti, Rain Parade, Emmylou Harris, Syd Barrett and Colin Newman, amongst others.

                        This Mortal Coil’s debut album It’ll End In Tears (1984) forged the template; helping to crystallise 4AD’s emerging signature sound whilst shining a light on some of their stable with Cocteau Twins, Colourbox, Dead Can Dance and The Wolfgang Press all involved. The line-up was completed by arranger Martin McCarrick, violinist Gini Ball, Howard Devoto of Buzzcocks / Magazine fame and Cindytalk’s Gordon Sharp.

                        Pitchfork recently named it one of the best Dream Pop albums ever, a moment which “catalysed 4AD’s ascendance from the stilted poetics of goth rock to the kings of gauzy transcendence.”

                        TRACK LISTING

                        A1. Kangaroo
                        A2. Song To The Siren
                        A3. Holocaust
                        A4. Fyt
                        A5. Fond Affections
                        A6. The Last Ray

                        B1. Another Day
                        B2. Waves Become Wings
                        B3. Barramundi
                        B4. Dreams Made Flesh
                        B5. Not Me
                        B6. A Single Wish

                        This Mortal Coil was the given name of a strictly-studio project that spawned three albums, conceived and produced by one-time 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell.

                        Over the span of eight years he, along with Blackwing Studios house engineer/ co-producer, John Fryer, and a rotating cast of musicians, created original works, musical links and reinterpretations of impeccably curated songs; introducing a new audience to the talents of a previous generation including Big Star, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Spirit, Gene Clark, Dino Valenti, Rain Parade, Emmylou Harris, Syd Barrett and Colin Newman, amongst others.

                        Landing at the start of a new decade, after much had happened in both producer Ivo Watts-Russell’s life and with his 4AD label, the final part of the This Mortal Coil trilogy, Blood (1991), felt like a perfect conclusion.

                        Meticulously orchestrated, vocalists Alison Limerick, Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski return from the second album with Caroline Crawley (Shelleyan Orphan / Babacar) and 4AD signees Heidi Berry, Kim Deal (Pixies / The Breeders), Tanya Donelly (Throwing Muses / The Breeders / Belly) and Pieter Nooten all enlisted.

                        “Shedding some of its chillier post-punk components, blossoming into material airy and gorgeous. Covers — many from the psychedelic era — still dominate the material, but they are largely indistinguishable from the originals, so seamless is (it’s) indelible tone. Blood is a treasure.” Consequence of Sound

                        TRACK LISTING

                        A1. The Lacemaker
                        A2. Mr. Somewhere
                        A3. Andialu
                        A4. With Tomorrow
                        A5. Loose Joints
                        A6. You And Your Sister

                        B1. Nature’s Way
                        B2. I Come And Stand At Every Door
                        B3. Bitter
                        B4. Baby Ray Baby
                        B5. Several Times

                        C1. The Lacemaker II
                        C2. Late Night
                        C3. Ruddy And Wretched
                        C4. Help Me Lift You Up
                        C5. Carolyn’s Song
                        C6. D. D. And E.

                        D1. ‘Til I Gain Control Again
                        D2. Dreams Are Like Water
                        D3. I Am The Cosmos
                        D4. (Nothing But) Blood


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