Name: Musick To Play In The Dark²
Brand: Coil

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

DAIS184LPC3

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Colour

Orange

Colour details

Cloudy Orange

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Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes

Extended format

Extended format: Yes

Format detail

Remastered with Restored Artwork and Etched D-Side.

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2022-04-29

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Secre­tly

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

011586672079

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Total Cap

2 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: Yes / Signed copies: No / orange

DAIS184LP

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Black

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format: No

011586672123

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "011586672123"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

2 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

DAIS184CD

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011586672130

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Coil

Genre US

Experimental / Avant-Garde / Industrial / Noise

Label US

Dais

Formed in London in 1983, Coil was initially a solo side project by John Balance, who was also a member of Psychic TV. In 1984, Balance joined forces with Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, another founding member of Psychic TV and former Throbbing Gristle member. Tragically, John Balance passed away in 2004, leading Peter Christopherson to decide that Coil would not continue. Sadly, Peter Martin Christopherson also left us in 2010 at the age of 55.

Back In Stock

Vinyl variants, bonus material and signed editions exclusively available from Rough Trade.

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.”

Musick To Play In The Dark²

Music US

Buy Coil - Musick To Play In The Dark² (Vinyl, CD) now from Rough Trade - independent purveyors of great music, since 1976.