21 February 2008

Coil - 1996 - Time Machines

Quality: 4.5 out of 5
Trip-O-Meter: 5 out of 5

This isn't so much music as an experience. I wouldn't recommend listening to this album while driving or maybe even while standing. It's really a mind-warping experience of its own and may very well throw off your balance, especially on headphones. I'm actually making lots of typos while listening and typing.

Coil is well known as leading proponents of the industrial drone, and that's pretty much all you'll find here. The entire album consists of analog synthesizer drones pulsing at various oscillating rates. At its heart, Time Machines is a series of somewhat darkly hued sound painting. Fortunately, Coil are quite skilled at this sort of thing and the entire recording seems very smooth and consistent even as tones sometimes whirl off onto the stratosphere. Although this is best used as background music that has the strange side effect of turning your brain into jelly. If you're familiar with the construction of analog synths, you may want to try and pay attention as the band knob twirling is impressively controlled and effective.

There's not much point going over the tracks themselves, but it's well worth noting that they're all titled after synthetic chemical compounds. I don't know my chemistry, but I would assume of the mind bending variety. They're not named lightly as these tracks will indeed perform some sonic surgery on your brain. Time Machines comes across as a slightly dangerous album.

This is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea. If I haven't scared you off already, I think you'll find that this disc contains something a little different than what is generally found on a CD or a piece of vinyl (or an mp3 I guess). Let Coil reprogram your mind if you dare.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://rapidshare.com/files/93578770/Coil_-_1999_-_Time_Machines.rar

Anonymous said...

you can't even imagine how thankful i am!!! thank you so much for this post... this album is truly taking control over me. thank you. greetings from berlin.

Anonymous said...

I have been looking for this for a long time. this is an album of legendary proportions. You are spot on with your guess as to the nature of the compounds- all tryptamines. thnks.

Anonymous said...

Another great obscure coil release with some great drones for the grab: http://fuzzygroinland.blogspot.com/2008/07/coil-moons-milk-in-four-phases-w-bonus.html

Tom said...

Amazing album, great review.

Anonymous said...

I am reading this a bit later than everyone else, but still, thank you for reviewing this work. I have been re-discovering Coil's works as of late, and it was good to see this one acknowledged.

Anonymous said...

Yes, it doesn't get much more trippy than this. Coil were an amazing entity. Hopefully this will encourage further exploration.

Anonymous said...

Of all things I stumbled across this looking at the disambiguation of H.G. Wells Time Machine on wiki. I enjoy drone and stuff like is such as SunnO))) and Earth and Master Musicians of Bukkake. This album is awesome!