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)

Pressed using the original Ape Of Naples masters approved by Peter Christopherson. The Ape Of Naples is Coil's highly celebrated final album completed by Peter Christopherson following the tragic death of Jhonn Balance in 2004. Often noted for being a fan favourite, The Ape Of Naples uses Balance's final recordings and material recorded at Trent Reznor's studio in New Orleans to create a deep, heavy masterpiece. This edition is packaged in a heavy duty case wrapped, tip-on style jacket with Ian Johnstone's original artwork coated in a custom spot gloss. Each LP is house in a printed inner sleeve and side D contains all three original etchings. Ape's lyrics are spread across the gatefold.

TRACK LISTING

1/Fire Of The Mind
2/The Last Amethyst Deceiver
3/Tattooed Man
4/Triple Sun
5/It's In My Blood
6/I Don't Get It
7/Heaven's Blade
8/Cold Cell
9/Teenage Lightning 2005
10/Amber Rain
11/Going Up

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.

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

Released on limited vinyl in 2012 but sold out for years, Svart Records brings out an offiicial reissue wrapped in a gatefold jacket and pressed on red vinyl, limited to 1500 copies in Europe only.

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

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

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)

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 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