Label: Dais
Reissued 3/22/2024, Originally released 2002
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)").
Track listing:
- Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull (Part One)
- Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull (Part Two)
- Bee Stings
- Glowworms/Waveforms
- Summer Substructures
- A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz)
- Amethyst Deceivers (Live In Europe 2001)
- Regel
- Rosa Decidua
- Switches
- The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant
- Amethyst Deceivers
- A White Rainbow
- North
- Magnetic North
- Christmas Is Now Drawing Near
- Copal
- Bankside
- The Coppice Meat
- Ü Pel (Incense Offering)