Coil - Another Brown World / Baby Food LP

Label: Sub Rosa

Our Review:

At the height of England's hidden reverse, Coil (alongside Current 93 and Nurse With Wound) were tireless contributors to various experimental / industrial compilations hither and yon. The two lengthy tracks on album represent what Coil offered to Sub Rosa. A suitably scatological recoloring of Brian Eno's classic, "Another Brown World" was featured on the 1989 compilation Myths 4, alongside Current 93 and Cheb Mami. While built upon an insistent, haunted synth line, this particular track is darkly-lit labyrinth of divergent musical ideas: a repeating phrase from a fuzzed-out guitar, eerie flares of electronic trickery, and various cut-ups from ethnographic studies recorded at the Animist Monastery at the summit of Mount Popo in Burma. In the same year, Coil contributed a track called "Contains A Disclaimer" to a Pathological Records compilation which used many of the same elements -- that guitar freak-out and that reductive Goblin-ish synth motif. While these tracks are clearly linked, it's always been unclear if "Another Brown World" is the lysergic dub of the other or if it is the early exploration of ideas later ratcheted into submission. It's always been a corker of a track, no matter how anybody looks at it.

"Another Brown World" is coupled with the 1993 track "Baby Food" which finds Coil in their post-rave guise. From here, the Balance / Sleazy duo also delivered their iconic Worship The Glitch album a few years later. This particular track looks forward actually to what Aphex Twin would produce on his seminal Selected Ambient Works, Vol 2. It's a psychoactive track of rounded acid tones shaped into a hypnotic / aquatic percolation. It's a beautiful and melancholy example of Coil's take on '90s electronica, easily bettering most of their peers at the time.