Words by Sean Victory
When Sean Victory isn’t writing music or writing about music, it’s likely he’s listening to music. As a lifelong artist, his current projects are Nightmare Frontier and World Hum, having also contributed to the groups Famished Ghosts, Future Toys, and Owl & Swan.
Properly digested, the meat of everyday life can be richly filling to the spirit. The error most often made stems from the belief that it all must be devoured at once. Scarcity demands it. Productivity demands it. FOMO demands it. However, in hastiness, one might find themself halfway through a bucket of KFC’s “Oops, All Beaks!” before remembering to switch out of autopilot. Constant information and stimulus without surcease make it hard to get off the ride—or to notice that you’re on a ride at all. It takes quite a bit more than a reminder to slow things down, remember that no one can truly multitask. It’s just quickly shifting attention maintaining an illusion, while giving no one thing the space it deserves. Better to handle things seriatim, in the order in which they arrive. Oh, but there’s never enough time, you rube. This is the function of properly good art, literature, and also terrorism—when all else fails. This is the extreme, and we see it in our public places across the country.
Alternatively, the rise in popularity of Marcus Aurelius and other stoic philosophers is connected to our current conditioning. The way our media interacts with us is not dissimilar to the mind of the depressed or anxious person. Haunted by intrusive information, arriving on its own schedule, with motives that aren’t always so clear. We must either take note of these elements individually, acting deliberately, deciding what gets our attention and emotion. It’s either that or be buried in a deluge of data, an overflowing inbox where the sheer bulk makes it impossible to know where to start. It’s too much to take in, and then everything shuts down and before we know it we’ve got a stomach full of beaks.
It takes something like a solar eclipse—where fundamental elements are brought to the foreground, totally changed, to get us to finally remember to see what has been there all along.
Speaking of planets, disruption, and ritual….
Moon’s Milk by Coil (Dais Records)
“We did record at the correct astrological time to the best of our admittedly limited knowledge. If mistakes were made they are excused by the fact that we remained faithful to the spirit of the adventure. The bones are all shown there and they are all bare or partially concealed by after-work and tidying up. Yes, we did record passages and then set them aside until time was again right. They were left to ferment with Moon Juice.” —John Balance
Moon’s Milk (In Four Phases) collects EPs that Coil released on their in-house Eskaton label across 1998. They were initially recorded during corresponding lunar cycles, set aside, and released after their completion during the same cycles the following year. This 3LP box set from Dais, is the first reissue of the material since its creation.
Coil were always concerned with ritual, the occult, and the power of unseen forces. Aside from copious amounts of drugs to help open the door, they used magick coupled with sound to create states where these ethereal winds could briefly flicker across our perceptions. Chronologically, Moon’s Milk falls right before Musick to Play in the Dark (1 and 2), and in many ways this collection bridges the gap. At this stage of their career, John Balance was focusing more on using his voice as an instrument. From whispers, to chants, to falsettos, he explores the various ways he can affect the songs with his performance. To again mention the chronology, he explores these elements on this album, and finds his best vocal performance on the last track of Musick to Play in the Dark 2, “Batwings (A Liminal Hymn)”.
Moon’s Milk also provides context to the various other elements Coil were working on at the time. The heavy drone of Queens of the Circulating Library, the faltering electronics and deeply affected vocals on Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil, are both on display in this collection. Disc 2 contains a version of “Amethyst Deceivers,” with pitch shifted vocals, acoustic guitar, a synth whooshing across the speakers like a meteor shower. It’s a much looser composition than when the band revisits the song in 2006—now titled “The Last Amethyst Deceiver,” on their final album, The Ape of Naples.
The content on these records is incredibly dense, even without taking into consideration the two and a half hour runtime. I’ve listened through it numerous times since its release on March 15, and for a good while I was convinced I didn’t care for it. However, the truth is that this music deserves the listener’s full attention. It’s best to shun car-listens, or relegating it to the background during other activities. It is incredibly dynamic, and if it is not the central focus, it will intrude oddly on whatever event you’ve scheduled over it. A fitting companion to a solar eclipse, for example. Given that this material was originally released across several EPs, it’s much wiser to listen to each disc on its own.
I won’t say that it feels incomplete or even transitory, but it does feel like a top down view of their creative processes. The time constraints of working solely in the window of the moon’s cycles, and with those same cycles as the focal point, we see a band that is capable of creating an environment conducive to the realization of their end goal.
All that said, improvisation is the central focus of this collection. Letting the light of the moon guide the performances, the lyrics were freely associated, much of the music was captured on the first take, and shelving the tapes for a year in order to revisit them when the moon falls correctly upon them again, all point to Coil’s ability to channel their creativity through both spontaneity and intention.
It’s always exciting to duck below the banal noises of everyday life, press an ear to the ground and listen to what the future sounds like. Historically, the backdrop of industry, working class communities, and the black experience have combined to imagine an alternative to the road ahead. The end result becomes manifest in the present, as ripples radiate from these inventions a new path becomes possible. Detroit and its auto industry gave us The Underground Resistance and Drexciya, and in short order the sound was shipped all over the world, imitated, repackaged, and expanded by innumerable artists. Gary, IN and its steel industry add another artist to this formula with JLin. Whereas the pioneers of techno discovered their singular sound within the bounds of their own experience, JLin’s music reaches out and magnetically pulls influences and collaborators into her orbit.
Akoma bears the marks of her work ethic and hints at the impact her unique sound will have on electronic music. She has worked with Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion Ensemble, composed a string quartet for Kronos Quartet in a tribute concert to Philip Glass, and apparently there is a forthcoming Sun Ra tribute album from Kronos and JLin as well.
Akoma has guest appearances by Kronos Quartet, Bjork, and Philip Glass. These are big names, hugely influential artists, but JLin isn’t intimidated by their presence. A less confident voice would find a place behind these guests to gently interject a paltry tambourine rattle now and again. However, JLin strikes a balance, allowing these artists to show up exactly as themselves while she sculpts her sound from their unique contributions. She folds her rhythms into the shapes created by her collaborators, lifting up snippets—sampling them, and placing them within the context of her hyper-focused compositions. These classically-trained musicians don’t ever sound out of place because the raw materials she works with are so varied. Excluding the strings of the Kronos Quartet and Philip’s piano, the sonic content is comprised of marching band snare drums, tambala, 808s, 909s, synths-O-various, etc, all expertly woven together into a tapestry that manages to be both fully synthetic and undeniably organic.
JLin ratchets individual steps of a sequence in tandem with micro-looping samples in order to create a push/pull of frenetic rhythm that gives breath to the music she creates. This is another trick she uses to stand on the line between synthetic and organic. She has a keen ear for dynamics, and while she doesn’t necessarily use loud/quiet changes she achieves the same effect by using rhythmic elements to fill a space with barrages of 16th and 32nd notes, alternately using spare elements to stretch out a canvas that guides the ear to the negative space.
These little touches are easy to miss as her songs can be so densely packed with sounds and textures. Listen close enough, and individual elements will begin to regain their definition, their timbres start to betray their source. Having noticed—thoroughly examining any one piece, and placing it back within the context of the music only makes the song that much more impressive.