Coil — The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex

In 2013, pioneering producer Patrick Cowley's pornographic cues were assembled and released under the name School Daze, and met with warm praise. But his work is not a curio or an outlier. Cowley, like a good deal of other pioneers in disco and house music, was in a symbiotic relationship with the broader LGBT community. These genres are arguably inseparable from the queerness that lifted them into the mainstream.

Legendary group Coil, comprised of ex-Throbbing Gristle member Sleazy and late TG mega-fan Jhon Balance, have similarly explored sexuality and sex throughout their career. The Gay Man's Guide to Safer Sex is no exception, soundtracking an informational VHS of the same name.

The music on this release was recorded early in Coil's career. As such, it may prove more conventional than some fans expect. It's stuffed with progressive house hallmarks: short female vocal samples, swathed in reverb; bright synthetic strings, arranged in jubilant chord sequences; funky, repetitive basslines — in short, a style which was since adopted by and (poorly) imitated in modern mainstream pornography. Thus, the music naturally carries an intense sexual charge. But it's truly tender and sentimental.

'Exploding Frogs' has the groovy, almost gratingly repetitious approach to jazz as Badalamenti's work on Twin Peaks — full of brushes, snares, clicking fingers; reversed instruments and speech, and dissonant saxophones — but also shares its esoteric mystery and oddball charm.

'Nasa-Arab II' is an aquatic-sounding track, disorientating and polyrhythmic. It's reimagined (or pre-imagined) by sister track 'Nasa-Arab'. Treated, indistinct vocals, hooting owls and a greatly extended runtime all serve to deepen the track's sense of mystery and soften its edges. Easier to pin down, less jittery, but still generous and propulsive. It's a little like Massive Attack's 'Risingson', with an absolutely relentless bass riff that brings the best of trip-hop to mind.

These two tracks are the album's locus. It goes on to reprise both 'Exploding Frogs' and its title track, the former resurrected as 'Omagus Garfungiloops' with added sprinkles of eccentricity. Weird, car-horn honks keep intruding on the song, leaning in and shouting over it. But it's not an unpleasant experience, and certainly refreshes and adds some surprises to the track.

'The Gay Man's Guide to Safer Sex Theme' closes this release out. Any changes from its iteration at the album's opening are minimal. But it bookends the other work here so well, and is so catchy in its own right, that it's hard to mind.

If you were in doubt, cast your doubts aside. What could be overlooked as a scoff-worthy oddity contains some of Coil's career-best work.

The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

SØS Gunver Ryberg — Entangled

SØS Gunver Ryberg’s Entangled straddles the frontier between techno and noise; a collection of tracks which entertain as effortlessly as they challenge. The album hosts as many moments of extremity as it does fragile beauty. For long-time fans of Ryberg, the power and aggression of this work will come as no surprise. But some will be taken aback by its melodic tendencies.

'The Presence_Eurydike' is possibly the most gentle track Ryberg has ever produced, soaked through with divine, almost orchestral sounds. Most tracks on Entangled are dry, sharp, and brittle; petrified frogs. This one is still leaping around in the morning dew.

That's not to criticise anything else on here. Ryberg keeps everything at the limit, at the breaking point. But while uncomfortable, Entangled never becomes an endurance test. You keep wanting to turn everything up — not down.

The album ends on a high with 'Silver Thread'. It's a throwback to early electroacoustic music, with a soft drone that adds wonderful tension. It isn't that too-easy-to-evoke feeling of dread that so many electronic musicians are in love with. It's something more complex; anticipation, uncertainty. 'Silver Thread' punctuates Entangled with a question mark. And as it fades out, surrounded by its mystery, you will be desperate for more.

Entangled is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Hissing Tiles — Boychoir

Hissing Tiles' Boychoir sounds like the horror punk cousin of Scott Walker's Bish Bosch. It's chock-full of experimentation and vocal eccentricity. Barer than any of Walker's work, it replaces lush string arrangements with angular guitar melodies and fizzes of noise.

The melodies themselves are catchy in an unhinged, Mr Bungle-esque way. They transport you to the coconut shie of some nightmarish carnival. 'Nightflood' contains a phrase that sounds like chattering dolphins, or shoes slipping on wet lino. But the release isn't whacked-out or impenetrable. Any experimentation is in service of the text, and incorporated elegantly.

Boychoir makes some valiant stabs at discussing gender politics and gender policing. Masculinity is positioned as an intrusive presence in an otherwise balanced world. It's an obligation to be fulfilled, a role to play. And when masculinity arrives, it carries all its associated language and horrors. It must be with some self-consciousnesses the artists chose a rock group — one of the most stereotypically masculine forms — to try and undermine such roles. Though their explorations are all too welcome, unconventional and well-considered for this to work against them.

This is a release which probes into uncomfortable areas and asks difficult questions. It's supported by bizarre noise elements and spirited performances from every member of the band. More than worth its weight in time, this should earn a few spins from any listener.

Boychoir is available for pre-order here. You can also stream the album’s first single.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Burial — Claustro / State Forest

Since the release of Rival Dealer in 2013, Burial's style has become hard to pin down. The producer's first few releases consisted of straightforward but catchy garage tracks, underpinned by a sorrowful and ghostly ambience. Since then, Burial seemed to lighten the general mood of his bangers, dialling up the cheese and relegating ambience to its own corner.

But these ambient tracks, once treated by the producer as interludes, lengthened and multiplied. Beats either sparsened or disappeared completely. Melodies dissolved into a wash of sound collage and field recording. Burial's distinctive sound had become fragmented, split down the middle.

Claustro / State Forest feels like an acknowledgement of this change — divided, as it is, between two markedly different sides. ‘Claustro’ is perhaps the most uptempo track Burial has produced; ‘State Forest’ the most languorous. But these two tracks feel like very estranged siblings. One is chirpy, the other dour and dry.

The vocal sample in ‘Claustro’ is lazy and irritating — not as deft in deployment as anything on Untrue. And maybe I’m missing something, but ‘State Forest’ just sounds like Burial paulstretched one of his own tracks.

Sadly, in continuing the disassembly of an iconic sound, this release proves that Burial's early work was greater than the sum of its parts.

Claustro / State Forest is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Trupa Trupa — Remainder

Grzegorz Kwiatkowski of Trupa Trupa made a startling discovery in 2015. In a pine forest, nuzzled next to the former Stutthof concentration camp in Poland, was a cache of buried shoes.

In modern Poland it is an offence to accuse national authorities or Polish citizens of having a role in the extermination of the Jews. But the thousands of shoes Kwiatkowski found buried there tell a different story altogether. A perfect representation, he argues, of Poland's reticence to exhume the past, or to examine their own place in it.

There is, of course, a fine line to be drawn here. Nazism was not a fun, opt-in summer camp of a regime. But it was built on a house of cards; a precarious structure of individuals denying responsibility. Without this desire to look away, to cover the ugly with earth, it could not have succeeded. And this desire has followed Poland like a spectre into the modern day.

On 'Remainder', Trupa Trupa's new single, Kwiatkowski and co. rail against Holocaust deniers with typical style. The track recalls The Cure's Pornography; it fills you with nervous kinetic energy, while at the same time crushing and nailing you in place. The coldness and warmth of a harsh truth.

Trupa Trupa are not interested in psychoanalysing Holocaust deniers. It is a position much too confusing and complicated to do any justice to in three minutes. Instead, they parody the seductive, simplistic rhetoric of conspiracy theorists, chanting 'It did not take place' over and over like a mantra. To say the effect is disturbing is an understatement.

The strength of this track is that, while it adopts a minimal approach to its topic, it feels clear, cogent and forthright. The past may be a dark and frightening place. But the future is looking brighter courtesy of Trupa Trupa's LP Of the Sun, due this September.

‘Remainder’ is available for purchase from Boomkat here. Alternatively, it’s up on youtube here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe