Audiopile Review: Coil’s ‘Moon’s Milk: In Four Phases’ will do strange things to your perception of time. Stop a second, though. Let’s start by going backwards. Given the relatively high profile their 1980s albums enjoyed at the time, those fearsome industrial works should still define Coil. But with the 1991 classic ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, Jhon and Sleazy escaped their martial beginnings, moving into a lunar phase. Worshipping goddesses as diverse as Kate Bush, Delia Derbyshire, and Lal Waterson, they performed an extraordinary, subterranean second act. Coil became that rarest of beasts: artists whose late-period work aged better than their early breakthroughs. Who would have thought an act as recklessly extreme as Coil would even get to mature artistically? But the two volumes of their ‘Musick to Play in the Dark’ series display a genuine artistic mature and an abandonment to oceanic beauty. The four equinox/solstice-themed EPs collected on ‘Moon’s Milk’ are no less impressive. Indeed, they include some of Coil’s greatest moments. This hefty vinyl reissue may seem imposing, but its tidal pull will be irresistible for seekers of the real deal. Check the version of ‘Christmas is Now Drawing Near at Hand’, a dour, puritanical carol most associated with the goddess Lal Waterson. Far from The Watersons’ austere rendering, this blissed rendition is more redolent of the goddess Kate Bush. The song is shot into lunar orbit, escaping the wrath of a vengeful god, and crossing over into something very other indeed. Elsewhere, radiophonic synths, organ drones, processed violas, and choral vocals conjure an astral utopia where time stands still four times a year. It’s a dark place, but ‘darkness’ never means quite what you expect with Coil. Jhon Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson were troubling, self-destructive characters. The fact that neither of them currently resides on this mortal Coil may be evidence of that. But this late-period moon musick is the strongest evidence available that all their reckless, wrecking extremity was in the service of some fundamental good. In any case, the sounds collected on ‘Moon’s Milk’ are truly unique and deeply affecting. Give them your time.

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 folk 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.