TIME MACHINES

The English experimental electronic act COIL was so very, very innovative and always thinking outside of the box with seemingly every album they released. While woefully misunderstood and beyond the the comprehension of most listeners of established musical genres, COIL continued to dabble with new equipment, new concepts and new musical expressions that were hitherto never associated with certain concepts and yet the creative triumvirate of Peter Christopherson, John Balance and Drew McDowall never ceased to meld music and electronic timbres with esoteric concepts such as philosophy, theology and spiritual practices.

1998 was a very productive year with not only the "Moon's Milk (In Four Phases)" set of four EPs each representing one part of each season (equinoxes and solstices) but also found the band conjuring up yet another pseudonym, this time the moniker TIME MACHINES. This one-off released an album of the same name and featured four psychedelic drone pieces each named after a hallucinogenic drug. The titles were presented with a partiality of their scientific organic chemical name thus the opening track "Methoxy-β-Carboline: (Telepathine)" was basically a truncated form of the preferred IUPAC name 7-Methoxy-1-methyl-9H-pyrido[3,4-b]indole but given that the fanbase most likely weren't trained organic chemists, it's doubtful anyone really cared.

The album of 73 1/2 minutes playing time featured four lengthy tracks, the first and last well over 23 minutes in length with the second over 13 and the third only slightly over 10. The album mixed long drones with binaural beats and psychedelic electronic embellishments. The idea of the album was to create temporal slips which were known to occur while ingesting the chemical compounds referred to in the track titles. The inspiration actually stemmed from the hypnotic states created in Tibetan spiritual music only presented in more of a shamanic rainforest leader's way of ingesting psilocybin mushrooms or DMT and telpathine which are both components of ayahuasca. The album was intended to be a 5-disc box set but that idea was scrapped as was another plan to release a 2-disc version later on. A "Time Machines II" has been released archivally only as a Peter Christopherson solo release.

Musically the drone is the primary element but the release also uses binaural beats which refers to the auditory illusion perceived as the listener hears two separate frequencies in each ear leading one to interpret the difference between the the frequencies as one tone thus more effective on headphones. This alone is purported to affect brain waves and in some cases has been promoted as a healing mechanism by various record labels. Psychedelic sounds were created with modular synthesizers and above a consistent tone of a drone, oscillating electronic sounds pulsate like a heartbeat or other rhythmic flow. There are no traces of melody or orthodox compositional musical structures here whatsoever. This is purely experimental electronica designed to alter consciousness through hypnotic trance inducing waves and monotonous tones.

The album was actually performed live at London's Royal Festil Hall in a show called "Time Machines From The Heart Of Darkness" in the year 2000. The positive feedback found the band continuing such performances until COIL's demise in 2004 after the death of John Balance. Overall anyone adverse to non-melodic drone albums will not enjoy this one bit and while such minimalistic music isn't my primary passion, when done correctly it can be mesmerizing and indeed transcendental and the requirement of ingesting the chemical compounds is not a prerequisite in the least. COIL just had a knack for making seemingly boring concepts pulsate with life although one has to meet it halfway and accept it on its own terms. TIME MACHINES has gained a loyal cult following and although not every release in the COIL playbook is a doozy, for some reason this really does resonate on that energetic and subliminal level in a way i can neither comprehend or explain. All i can say is that when i'm in the mood for an effective drone album, TIME MACHINES really does deliver what it promises.