Description

4LPs – limited clear vinyl

First compiled as a double CD in 2002, Moon’s Milk (In Four Phases) is a suite of four EPs that Coil released seasonally via their in-house Eskaton imprint across 1998. The line-up for these sessions were John Balance, Peter Sleazy Christopherson, Drew McDowall, and William Breeze. Recorded primarily at their home studio in Chiswick, London on the eve of a permanent relocation to the small seaside town of Weston-Super- Mare, the collection has long loomed as a pivotal and pinnacle work in the group s discography, but has never been officially reissued, or repressed on vinyl. Time has only ripened its tapestry of regal strangeness.

Arranged sequentially in tribute to the equinoxes and solstices, Moon s Milk captures Coil at a revelatory crossroads, leaning deeper into improvisation, spontaneity, and sound design. Moon s Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull initiates the proceedings on Spring Equinox , a two-part netherworld organ séance woven from vocal drones, cathedral keys, seasick strings, and opiated undertow. From there, Summer Solstice skews lighter but no less incantational, with Balance embracing his voice- as-instrument across lucid dream torch songs ( Bee Stings ), purgatorial spoken word ( Glowworms Waveforms ), sultry chamber pieces ( Summer Substructures ), and falsetto ravings ( A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz) ).

Autumn Equinox exudes more of a pensive and twilit mood, from the Rose McDowall-sung neofolk ballad Rosa Decidua ( I hear your voice sing near to me I ve put away the poisoned chalice (for now) And lie down amongst the flowerbeds ) to hall-of-lords hallucination The Auto- Asphyxiating Hierophant” to the liminal string-plucked classic Amethyst Deceivers, featuring excellent alien guitar by Breeze layered with Balance’s oft-quoted couplet: Pay your respects to the vultures For they are your future.

The album’s final chapter, Winter Solstice , is its most swooning, remote, and ceremonial. Opener A White Rainbow stirs strings, layered choral vocals, and shivering rhythm into an imploding burial hymn. North oscillates bleakly, a ghost in the machine murmuring opaque prophecy ( This black dog has no owner This black dog has no odour ), while Magnetic North is its inverse, a guided meditation of gently flickering software and surreal chakra poetics ( Red rose filling the skull Yellow cube in the lower pelvis Silver moon crescent below the navel ). The suite fades to grey with a traditional English carol ( Christmas Is Now Drawing Near ), rendered like an executioner s song by Rose McDowall’s doomed, beautiful voice.

The Dais box set includes the entirety of the rare Moon s Milk Bonus Disc CD-R 2019 Threshold Archives Copal CD, which includes three collaborations with Thighpaulsandra. This material is as rich and intoxicating as the previous four phases, ranging from electro-acoustic singing bowl rituals ( Copal ) to dissonant electronic recitations of visionary Angus Maclise poetry ( The Coppice Meat ) to ominous classical melancholia ( Bankside ). Once again, Coil confirm the vastness of their confounding, infinite alchemy, explored and refined across decades of experimentation – both sonic and bodily. From post-industrial to post-everything, theirs is an art untethered, in the wilds of its own design.