A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM (RELEASED UNDER THE NAME BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT)

One of the most experimental electronic artists to haunt the 1980s and 1990s, the British experimentalists that made up COIL were relentless in their constant pursuit of innovating the strangest and most alienating sounds that were possible to eke out of as many unexplored avenues as humanly possible. The results added up to a huge expansive canon of some of the most bizarre and unorthodox musical statements that blurred the distinctions between what music properly is considered and what many would consider to be nothing more than random noisy gibberish. By the 1990s the eccentric team of John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowell seemed utterly limitless in how many directions it could pursue the experiments with one album after another delivering a sonic experience that stood apart from virtually anything else ever laid down to recording. Everything COIL released was utterly unlike what came before and a testament to the fertile minds that tapped into strange worlds where no one else dared tread.

By the mid-90s COIL was also adopting strange pseudonyms for various projects with names like ELpH, Time Machines, Sickness of Snakes and The Eskaton popping up randomly throughout the band's run. Yet another one-off moniker was BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT under which the COIL team released this sole album A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM. Characterized by the group's love of dark ambient bleakness and electronic free form texture building, this release showcased a new approach to the COIL playbook by offering a series of rhythmic underpinnings accompanied by a litany of overlapping electronic textures, sound effects, vocal samples and the occasional lyrical output halfway sung and halfway spoken as well as simple poetic prose. The album which featured 11 tracks was a bit on the long side well exceeding an hour's playing time at nearly 73 minutes but provided a stream of consciousness continuity which allowed the tracks to slowly ooze into one another all the while providing a diverse palette of experimentation to keep the album from resembling the more more monotonous undertakings such as performed as Time Machines.

The album begins with the short "Unprepared Piano" which is a tribute to John Cage and establishes a precarious balance between the chaos and order approach that COIL made all their own. While utterly inaccessible from a traditional popular music point of view, the avant-garde approach allows the album to proceed in a similar manner which finds the electronic-oriented tracks like the following "Red Skeletons" creating a consistent rhythmic flow of sound courtesy of strange loops, sonic patterns, scattered sequences and sound effects that seemed to have been sampled primarily from industrial soundscapes and processed through the arsenal of sound-altering devices that COIL had amassed during its career. The entire album flows accordingly with different rhythmic jingles, blurbs, pulsations, beats, bangs, freaky loops or whatever the band could cleverly conjure up in the midst of whatever they did to channel such strange and hypnotic flows of consciousness. The difference between A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM and other COIL releases is the fact that group really put a lot of effort in crafting a diverse roster of tracks that implemented a wide array of sonic textures, timbres, dynamics and unorthodoxies as humanly possible.

Overall this is one of the most playful COIL releases that offered surprises at every juncture with stranger than life sonic textures, beyond bizarre effects, delicately designed rhythms and other musical elements including the occasional melodic touches to interact in some of the most peculiar unconventional methodologies imaginable. Tracks like "Blue Rats" even harken back to the group's more industrial dance days from albums like "Scatology" and "Horse Rotorvator." As BLACK LIGHT DISTRICT i have to say that COIL crafted one of its most diverse sounding albums of its beyond eclectic career and is somewhat comparable to the "Unnatural History" compilations which featured a similar continuity yet scattered with unbridled creative prowess. This is certainly the kind of music only electronic avant-gardists crave and will be completely unintelligible to those who have not conditioned themselves to the COIL universe. This has always been one of my favorite COIL releases but as i listen again currently paying attention with an intense scrutiny like never before i have to conclude that this album displays the perfect balance of detachment, engagement, melodic interplay, human connections, bouts of chaos and atonal freakery. A THOUSAND LIGHTS IN A DARKENED ROOM is without a doubt the perfect display of an avant-garde electronica masterpiece.