A review of Coil's "ANS"

I've been dreading this.
Ever since I found out what, exactly, ANS was (^^^ look at that fucking thing...), I've been dreading this.
This is the big one.
Seven tracks, none of them named, each one thirty minutes long, give or take three minutes.
Three and a half hours.
But not three and half hours of dynamic, arranged music with instruments and vocals and fucking bullshit like that...three and a half hours of sound composed using only an ANS synthesizer (you need to read the description if you are to understand what I'm talking about...).
But.
I fucking did it.
I. Fucking. Did it.

1.
Crystal bowl, set atop a generator.
Oscillations.
Irradiation.
Or, perhaps the sound of light, disrupted by a huge fan; massive, the size of a room.
The rough hum of a loose connection is introduced. Something about this feels like Reznor's score for Quake.
The fan finally stops and a high, wavering tone comes in, stays, as does the deep generator. My mind is turned to the sound of the Beams from King's Dark Tower series. This is the sound the doors make.
What I call a "horror wave" enters, like evil light shone through black water.
It strikes me that, while Time Machines was water, this is light.
Things rise and fall, wavelengths change.
More high, decayed notes, shimmering, then fading.
There is almost silence before even higher, more focused, distilled light comes in.
Some knocking in the background, then a chorus of terrible voices comes and, thankfully, goes.
There's a tiny shriek to signal the end of things.

2.
The sound of an apparition. Light coming through it.
High and tense and cold.
Some kind of alarm, reflected back on itself until it degrades.
Then, glass insects, cicadas; a few at first, then thousands.
This is nightfall in the distant future, the far future, when the sun is close to dying.
More creatures appear, then, abruptly, the light dies: these are now night creature.
The tension is worse.
This is like listening to an electric toothache.
More swarms and then a light returns; the moon: brown and dying, spoiled.
The things one sees in the light of this moon are horrific.
Larger beasts make their presence known; howling out to this poisoned moon.
Ululations.
The moon fades away, the things are left in this unquiet dark, waiting.
The apparition returns, begins to weep.
Then dwindle, then scream, then mourn.
Noises like a clock (or hooves).
The ghost sound intensifies, becomes a laser (returning to the theme of the sound of light), almost painful.
The night is over and sunrise is a razor.
The night creatures have been replaced by day creatures, and they are far worse because you can see them clearly.
They scream at the sun, hating it, but they need it.
Then, everything begins to contract to a single point, the burning dot that remains on a television screen...before exploding outwards again, bursting like a sore, a sound made of all sounds (just as white is a color made of all colors), the supernova, the end of this horrid place.
The sound/light slowly diminish to nothing.

3.
This comes splintering into existence, a circular saw made of furious, red light.
Then, a moment of silence before a tone appears, solitary and clean.
It begins to wobble and sag, wandering, aimlessly, in and out.
Running circles around the rim of a large crystal bowl.
Infiltrated by some high noises, off in the distance.
After that intro, this is almost soothing, mesmerizing.
The high note cuts slowly back in, jagged; it waxes and wanes, causing discomfort when it gets too close.
A sound comprised of a million tiny, screeching, biting things, too sharp to be organic.
Almost like a rain stick filled infested with sentient, malevolent, metallic shards.
They recede and a lower tone can be heard, bot only for a moment before the splintering terrors return, ready to chew their way through your eardrum.
This is the most unpleasant track thus far...so fucking sharp...
Another awful noise, like a slow pinging, starts up.
(This track is just a huge bag of lightglass.)
This noise is like a searchlight, burning away the darkness surrounding it, scorching it away, cauterizing it.
It rises in pitch until it's, mercifully, no longer audible.
More silence, then what sounds like a pixelated theremin...one sound in a small, crystal chamber, bounced back and forth forever in a matter of seconds, then the tidal ebb and flow of light on the water.
There's a strong sense of loneliness here, of desolation, fear and hollowness, but still sharp, like discarded hypodermic needles.
High, bright flashes come and go, a deep, ragged tone wanders through.
There's more distortion, but it seems unsure of itself.
A feeling of displacement.
There's the sound of various lights on smoke and then the sound retracts, becomes prolonged, everything draws away.
Eventually, some sounds come back, but exhausts and diminished; they tire themselves out then disappear.

4.
Open on a flaming meteor flying through space; something that had been living on it screams and then dies.
(I'm already setting this to the opening credits of Alien in my head)
Weak, fading beacon, a distress call to no one.
A rumbling builds, a craft pursuing the meteor, there is something oozing behind it, tar, ichor.
The pitch changes.
Descending.
Landing.
The surface is frozen; the air filled with shards of ice, the wind, constant.
A sick, flickering, greenish light appears.
Could be dangerous...
More lights approach the landed craft, the low noises we hears are the beings communicating with one another, sizing up these visitors, deciding their fate.
Suddenly, everything seems to be shutting down, melting...something is very wrong with this planet.
Lights flicker and die, organic and inorganic, things smooth out, only to flare up again.
The sound becomes a curtain and begins to flow back, away from the listener, then it lifts, revealing something horrible: the jabbering Thing at the center of it all.
In an instant, things get very Lovecraftian and the whole story comes into focus: since the appearance of those sick, green lights, the visitors to this planet have been drawn down into it, and are now faced with what lies underneath, at the core of this place.
The humans (?) should never have followed that meteor or answered that distress call or done whatever lead them here; it would have been better to die in space.
But, now they're here.
Everything beyond the raising of that curtains is madness.
The wilting of the sound is analogous with the dying of the light of sanity in their eyes.
Screaming into infinity.
Soon after, from the seas of madness, we hear the voices of things: chelidrids, jaculi, phareans, cenchriads and two-headed amphisbands...then Yog fucking Sothoth.
Jesus this is horrifying to witness...
Next, a conversion takes place; the remnants of the fools who came here can be heard, barking, squawking, spitting hate at their new masters.
At the very end, the view widens and elevates and we can take in the whole planet: it's covered with these things, utterly teeming with them.
Then, the realization dawns: this isn't a planet, it's a living, breathing satellite made of these transformed wretches; a sentient nightmare floating through space.

5.
Something is wrong from the start.
Cybernetic dissonance.
Metal becoming flesh or vice versa; whichever is more painful.
Or, this might be machinery giving birth to other machinery, robotic cellular mitosis, the evolution of sentient machines.
A chorus of voices welcomes this new creation into the world and then a stream of data begins transmitting  into it.
We follow the information back to its source and behold the forging of raw data, it's a lot to handle.
Then, a respite, as we are bathed in the cool, blue light, soothed.
It's in this light that liquid crystal is grown.
Again, something goes wrong, and the crystals are shattered by the sheer volume and pitch that it turned against them.
There's some electro-human mewling and then a slide back into the cool, dark server room, where we wait.
Lights suddenly come on as everything powers up, activated but not acting, searching, waiting, all the drives spinning in unison.
An anomaly is found and whatever strange intelligence is directing things is unable to process it; it's incompatible and potentially hazardous.
We hear the computer virus.
At this point, I found myself losing the "story". Whereas, with the last few tracks, it's been rather evident (to me and my mind), things get to...nondescript.
I'll blame myself.
Eventually, after some indeterminate sound that comes and go, the "music" changes and I find a new...not story, but a new theme: this part, the last third or so, is what a satelite experiences; slow, rotating planetary masses. Lights appearing and disappearing. Some errant radiation is detected. An echo of a lost radio signal. centuries old.
My literary mind suggests this is a precursor to the previous track or, perhaps, some back story.
In the end, the satellite (or whatever) just drifts off into the ether, untethered and unimpressed by what it's witnessed.

6.
A cold and lonely plain, stalked by horrifying mutants.
This is a fitting soundtrack from the wastelands at the end of King's third Dark Tower book.
The ground has been melted into glass, and the creatures are all making noise, sounds like metal scraped across that glass.
There are flying things and things that could once fly, but can't any longer.
The land is dead. And these things are dead.
I'm not picking up on any story here; just a landscape and the things that inhabit it.
Like these insects that sound like a chorus of dead angels with air trapped in their lungs.
This is almost like a track from Ghosts, but, rather than a swamp at sunset or a forest in a snowstorm as the inspiration, there's this...Christ....
This might be the same dying planet featured in track two, just another part of it, perhaps the opposite side.
The glassy ground reflects strange starlight.
This used to be arctic tundra, but now it's just cold glass.
This side of the planet doesn't face the sun, so, rather than begin immolated, it's been frozen.
More insects arise, like broken cicadas.
In the sky, rocks tumble slowly.
There are still predators and prey here, they are unaware of what is about to happen.
The wind blows ceaselessly, cutting.
There are some interesting sounds here, but nothing that can't be described as strange, evolved or mutated animals.
At one point, the low rumbling of a huge land mass in the sky can be perceived, but not by these creatures, they take no notice.
There is something almost like tension strings towards the end.
Rather than a huge supernova, as in the earlier track, here all the creatures wait in silence as the end comes.
Track two was the bang, now comes the whimper...until the very end, when all these living dead things panic and begin to tear each other apart: chaos, confusion, autocannibalism; as if that will save them.
Then, while they destroys themselves, the silent, killing light comes to swallow them all.

7.
Radio interference, signal patterns.
The calm before something horrible, I'm sure.
Things growing in the dark, hatching.
Slivers of light, breathing, sentient light.
There is a vast ocean sound, then the piercing begins.
Then stops.
A warming, a taste of what it can do; a harbinger.
More waiting, more calm, toying with us. After everything I've heard, what could possibly be next?
The anticipation is killing me; this is like walking around a minefield blindfolded...FUCKING DO IT. PULL THE TRIGGER.
One thing I'll freely admit: I've never been this nervous listening to music.
The sound right now is so languid, like a huge creature rolling over in its sleep...a huge creature that could destroy a city without even noticing it.
Another fade to almost complete silence, and then that high vibrating like tinnitus...gone.
Never committing...teasing...it knows what we're expecting.
Hm, there's a sound like a light bulb burning out and then everything switches; deeps and soothing tones, red and purple...womblike.
Ready for some trippy shit: we're inside the Universe waiting to be born! Chickens and eggs and all that bulllshit...or maybe Coil just ran out of horrible things to expose us to.
There is a lot more texture to this section that the earlier one; squawks and squeaks, then, again, almost total stillness, barely textured...flat, black water, the surface of which is occasionally broken by a ripple or small wave...
Everything can be heard, but as if from a massive distance...like a veil.
Maybe we're dead.
Maybe, by listening to this whole thing, we've completed some ritual and we've killed ourselves without even knowing it...
A new sound, something almost human, is introduced, then just waves and wooshing.
A ghost through time.
At this point, more than three quarters of the way through the track, everything seems to be losing energy...maybe it's THIS that's dying, the track, the album, the ANS, and not us.
I wondered if there's even any energy left for some final assault...is this a gathering or focusing of power?
It feels like the opposite.
Then, the question is answered:  finally, choking on weak, fitful noises, the monster dies in its sleep, dreaming of its awful existence and what it has done during it.
The ANS is dead.
We're free.

I thought this album was going to be flat, a three and a half hour Time Machines. I was wrong,.
Not...pleasantly surprised...because very little of this has been pleasant...but...surprised, yeah.
Don't get me wrong, most of the time I felt like listening to this could be equated to passing a kidney stone.

Things happen here, on this album, events occur...but not for any reason a human could discern.
This could be what "people" ten thousand years from now listen to as pop music.
Listening to anything after this just seems...pointless, an empty gesture.

I dare you to find music that's more experimental than this.
I fucking dare you.