Coil – Moon's Milk (In Four Phases)

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.

Autumn Equinox exudes more of a pensive and twilit mood, from the Rose McDowall-sung folk ballad Rosa Decidua to hall-of-lords hallucination The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant to the liminal string-plucked classic Amethyst Deceivers, featuring excellent alien guitar by Breeze.

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, while Magnetic North is its inverse, a guided meditation of gently flickering software and surreal chakra poetics.

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.

Tracklist:
First Phase: Spring Equinox
Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull (Part One) 8:29
Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull (Part Two) 8:09
Second Phase: Summer Solstice
Bee Stings 4:55
Glowworms/Waveforms 5:54
Summer Substructures 8:07
A Warning From The Sun (For Fritz) 10:00
Amethyst Deceivers (Live In Europe 2001) 6:33
Third Phase: Autumn Equinox
Regel 1:15
Rosa Decidua 4:53
Switches 4:43
The Auto-Asphyxiating Hierophant 5:55
Amethyst Deceivers 6:42
Fourth Phase: Winter Solstice
A White Rainbow 8:52
North 3:46
Magnetic North 8:50
Christmas Is Now Drawing Near 3:26