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COIL

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.

    Lacuna Coil

    Dark Adrenaline (RSD23 EDITION)

      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.

      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

        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 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

            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


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