Love’s Secret Domain is the third, proper full length album by the UK experimental electronic group Coil, and was released in 1991, closing up their “80s” period of more aggressive, angular and noisier style industrial music that had forged them in the consciousness of listeners with albums such as Scatology (1984), Horse Rotorvator (1986) and numerous EPs (such as their 1984 debut How To Destroy Angels).
The album has its moments indebted to acid house (“The Snow” and the main single “Windowpane”), sonic glitch experiments and even a foray into disaffected proto-eurotrash with the track “Things Happen” — the vocals provided by American singer/performance artist Annie Anxiety. It was also an album that was recorded during when the members of the group were undergoing a period of intense experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and as a result were undergoing heavy sleep deprivation at the time. As the band have been mythologized — especially with the passing of core member John Balance in 2004 — by their fans and listeners, there are likely far more people out there “up to speed” with the back story and facts about this group, thus I won’t really touch on that here.
What I will write here — and is the purpose for putting in this little Track Of The Day entry — is about one of the tracks on this album entitled “Dark River”. When discovering Coil in my early 20s, I then became more familiar with this album a few years later on, during a period of transition for myself in the mid-2000s in the 1-2 years proceeding a massive move over to the UK. I was hanging out with different groups of people and in turn finding myself at more electronic music events. This album wormed it’s way into late night listens and the track “Dark River” I totally attached too. For me it almost has some strange magical qualities, transcending the human realm of those who wrote it, which I’m absolutely sure is a connection to the group’s music that they would have wanted.
The electronics in the track are glassy, mysterious and sound like the equivalent of breathing in and out in an icy landscape. Sounds of reversed cymbals and resonating glass weave in and out of each other, giving the feeling of secrets hiding in the deep, shadowed snow. There’s a rhythmic lead line that maybe was modelled after a harpsichord but sounds like a crooked old fingernail of a non-human entity plucking at a razor sharp wire.
On occasion there’s a scene from Ridley Scott‘s 1985 film Legend that comes to mind when I’m listening to this track, where the house of the aunt of Mia Sara’s princess character gets frozen over in ice. And in more recent years my mind has subconsciously paired up this song with some visuals of Czech new wave fantasy films, most notably the strangeness of Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (clip below). The mind does weird things sometimes. Perhaps because they’re images that already exist and can be referenced of what my mind wants to conjure up for the sound design of this particular track. I have no idea why this happens.
I’m one that loves going on solo winter walks when there’s no-one else around — as I did the other day — through frozen, icy landscapes and on the occasion where I might bring headphones along this is a track I’ll have playing as I do some exploring. It conjures strong images and feelings for me, and is one I’ve placed on a number of mixes over the years that feature more instrumental or atmospheric sounds, such as this old one an more recent playlists like this one.
Coil were always good at conjuring supernatural feelings across a myriad of styles, and their more understated “ambient” leaning work as always been for the most part — at least for me anyway — some of their greater work.
Much like their counterparts in Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and any number of projects in that general networked world, Coil in more recent times have been elevated a bit into a slightly more mainstream world of library archiving, journalism and theory in both the music and art worlds — especially here in the UK — now on the other side of the “coin” as it were from the earlier days of these projects when the music and art worlds had placed them all more in the “wreckers of civilization” camp.
I believe there’s a number of music promo films done for this album, most notably for the track “Windowpane”, but no official ones exist for “Dark River” with exception of a third party film (or at least what I think is the case) done by an filmographer named Mark Nugent of “Dark River”. It’s a bit grainy, mainly as it was uploaded close to twenty years ago when video compression tech wasn’t as good, but it obviously has some good imagery that was likely inspired from visual feelings from that track.