Coil - 'Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night' (Official Remastered Audio)

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 inter-dimensional. 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.

Dais Records:

[HobbyAsylum]

I still remember that night when I first heard it. Remembered what the smell was and what shade of darkness the night had. What a masterpiece to cement memories.

[gargiulo]

This track was release 24 yars ago and still sound fresh. If someone listened todsy thinks that was released yesterday, for the sound, production and compositon.
Sometimes i thinks what kind of music Balance and Peter they could have given us away today 😢

[kevinputry]

Wow! This just came out of nowhere. I've heard quite a bit of Coil's music but never anything with the "Berlin School" sound before. Fantastic!

[c.fanger]

Beautiful. Paints a psychedelic landscape in my mind.

[arsennn]

greatest greatest greatest greatest peace of music I've ever heard. 5:27-5:52 part leaunches me straight into space

[PollonPollow]

I am very convinced that Jack Wall listened to this many times when making Mass Effect ost

[MozaiCom]

This track reminds me of Tangerine Dream and that's a delightful fact.

[supercoolguy]

This kinda sounds like the soundtrack of some of the Metroid games.

[MrChiaboy]

In Layman's terms, "Witchcraft" . Lol

[MrChiaboy]

My neighbor bekons Lucifer. Lucifer I shall bring him.

[enjoylife]

i'd say kraftwerk-influenced, which is of course fantastic