This week, I decided to jump from Coil's first album sixteen years into the future (2002) and listen to something I've been curious about for years. It's called The Remote Viewer and is made up of five tracks (Remote Viewing 1-5), totaling just over an hour with the longest track (RV3) clocking in at a hair over twenty minutes and the shortest track (RV2), just a hair under eight minutes. There are no lyrics, only sounds. I was expecting some of that unlistenable clangor I keep mentioning, but I was surprised to find little, if any, on the album.
Remote Viewing 1 - Melodic, beautiful and sad. The insectile harmony in the background seems to fade away once the more musical elements are introduced. The bagpipes are abrasive, no doubt, but not intentionally so.* After the halfway point, things separate a bit and open up as the track starts to feel huge and expansive, a vast darkness, like a mine. The fact that this doesn't feel like twenty minutes is a credit to how solidly it's constructed.
Remote Viewing 2 - Okay, so, in the future presented here in The Remote Viewer, the sewer system of whatever megalopolises exist are run by computers. RV2 is the program error that bursts all the pipes and lets the sewage out and the rats in. The electric rats. Then, once we've dripped down and underneath these torn pipes and sparking rats, we find a tribal ceremony...and also a guy making a flobbery lip noise into some machines.** This is a lot more restrained and subdued than the proceeding track, more ambient.
Remote Viewing 3 - This is a dystopian future remix of the first track. The pervasive flutter and flicker of noise sounds like Coil produced and engineered an audio error by extracting badly damaged, almost unreadable data from a hard drive then converted it to sound. Then, the melody comes in and it begins to feel like the neo-Middle East.*** Things change noticeably when a scrambled vocal sample and a new melody are introduced and even more so when the bass comes in. This is a really spectacular moment. After spending some time bouncing around inside this weird place it's created, RV3 blips itself to death.
Remote Viewing 4 - A malfunctioning, robot minister preaches to its glitchy, broken congregation, which responds by raising its voice in unison until the beat comes in and the service begins: heavy, industrial and, like RV 3, slightly Middle Eastern. At one point, everything cools down and fades away in a tide of not-quite-static before those omnipresent bagpipes kick in, and that awesome, driving beat picks back up. Eventually, things finally dissolve into a cloud of dark strings. This is the most immediately engaging track here; while there is some unpleasant noise, it's far less unpleasant that anything else on the album...which is a horrible way to get someone to listen to something, but, there you go.
Remote Viewing 5 - This starts out darkly mischievous, like a prank that will inevitably result in mutilation. Then the fake guitar/keyboard piano comes in and, at first, kind of ruins the mood; it sounds so dated, like a bad Bond movie score or 80's Depeche Mode...but, upon further listens, it works very well with the rest of what's going on, it just seems a bit incongruous with everything that's come before it. The beat is really great. RV5 sounds cold, anachronistic and Siberian.
As a whole, The Remote Viewer was more than just listenable, it was really great; fully realized, well assembled and featuring some very melodic arrangements. RV5 was a slightly disappointing conclusion to what ended up being a surprisingly good and deep album.
If I had to throw out some themes for this album, they would include: insects and robots in church, the Middle East, technology gone wrong, bag pipes...hm, these aren't really themes so much as the sounds that make up RV. Okay, let's try this: the theme is hidden beauty; that, sometimes, you have to sift through the noise and chaos to find the soft, melodic center of things, you have to earn it.
Yeah, I like that better.
The Remote Viewer, when stacked up against everything else I've heard thus far is so shockingly different...it's internal and reflective...miles away from the likes of "Panic", "Circles Of Mania" and "The Anal Staircase".
To put it another way: Normal people might actually enjoy some of this.
Of which I am not one, so, maybe I'm completely wrong.
Ah well.
Thanks for being here.
* I think. My tolerance for Coil might just be getting higher
** I never said this narrative made sense, this is a Coil album.
*** Whatever that is.
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