Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil

Description

The turn of the millennium marked the beginning of a visionary phase for the esoteric English duo Coil. By leaving the city for the tranquility of the Weston-super-Mare coast, they were able to devote themselves to even more marginal obsessions, totally detached from the influence of their peers. In a single six-month period in 2000, they released the infernal underground sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, the obscure drone peak Queens Of The Circulating Library, and an hour-long exorcism of a malevolent synthesizer prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the band's most miasmatic and hallucinogenic creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of psychoactive, shivering noise, undulating with the nausea of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra describes the album as an exercise in brutality, born from a spiky area in his modular unit that Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson found fascinating. The transformation of this electronic piece into a ravaged labyrinth was a process of trial and error, aided by Christopherson's sense of sound visualization, which stretches and manipulates sound for maximum spatial disorientation. Frequencies crawl giddily across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experience. The centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribal sea shanty, "I Am The Green Child," guided by John Balance's sung-spoken free prose about revenge, oblivion, and madness, culminating in its memorable chorus. But the rest of the record seethes in disorganized instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called "Tunnel Of Goats." Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player's shuffle mode, the track pulses, thrashes, and soars in compressed frenzies of warped synthesis, at the gates of a bottomless, forbidden, and unknown purgatory.