Time Machines is Coil

Coil (band)

Coil were an English cross-genre, experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance—later credited as "Jhonn Balance"—and his partner Peter Christopherson, aka "Sleazy". The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be...

's landmark drone music

Drone music

Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics...

 album

Album

An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...

, released under the alias Time Machines. It consists of four tracks which are composed of a single tone

Pitch (music)

Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

, called a drone

Drone (music)

In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout most or all of a piece. The word drone is also used to refer to any part of a musical instrument that is just used to produce such an effect.-A musical effect:A drone...

. Each tone represents a certain hallucinogenic chemical (see track titles). It is similar to Brian Eno

Brian Eno

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...

's early ambient

Ambient music

Ambient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...

 albums, except instead of creating an atmosphere of calm, it facilitates time travel

Time travel

Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...

, according to band founder John Balance

John Balance

John Balance , born in Mansfield, England, was the founder of the experimental music group Coil, along with his partner Peter Christopherson...

. Each tone was tested and retested in the studio for maximum narcotic

Narcotic

The term narcotic originally referred medically to any psychoactive compound with any sleep-inducing properties. In the United States of America it has since become associated with opioids, commonly morphine and heroin and their derivatives, such as hydrocodone. The term is, today, imprecisely...

 potency. John Balance described the album as an attempt to create "temporal slips"
In a 1998 interview with The Wire magazine, Balance explains:

One of the interesting things with Time Machines is that there's a handful of responses which we've had where what happened to the listeners was exactly what we intended to happen. There would be some kind of temporal disruption caused by just listening to the music, just interacting with the music. The drugs thing is actually a hook we hung it on - it originally came out of me and Drew talking that some of the types of music you listen to - sacred musics like Tibetan music or anything with a sacred intent which often is long ceremonial type music which could last for a day or three days or something. There are periods of time in that where you will come out of time. That's the intention of it to go into a trance and achieve an otherness. We thought can we do this sort of electronic punk-primitive? We did demos with a simple mono synth and we managed it. We sat in the room and listened to it loud and we lost track of time - it could be five minutes in or 20 minutes in but you suddenly get this feeling, the hairs on the back of your neck, and you'd realise that you'd had some sort of temporal slip. We fine-tuned, well, filters and oscillators and stuff, to try and maximise this effect. It was that we were after with simple tones - somehow you could slip through.

Production

When Time Machines was first released, the band was very conscious that it not be labeled as a Coil album, due to how abstract and different it is compared to previous Coil albums. This pressure has lessened in recent years as the band feels that people no longer expect a specific sound from the band. This has led to the 2000 follow-up album Coil Presents Time Machines

Coil Presents Time Machines

Coil Presents Time Machines was a live CD by Coil. This CD was produced in a limited amount of 1,000 copies and was given away with the initial mail orders of Musick To Play In The Dark Vol. 2. The CD is a live performance which took place on April 2, 2000 at the Cornucopia festival in the Royal...

to bear the Coil name on it.

A five-disc Time Machines box set was announced in 1998, but never developed. A two-disc version was announced in January 2006 as a future release, but there has been no further evidence on this being released either.

Reception

Sean Cooper of Allmusic gave the album four out of five stars and described it as "[e]njoyable, if a mite limited in scope."

Track listing

1. "7-Methoxy-ß-Carboline: (Telepathine)" – 23:10
2. "2,5-Dimethoxy-4-Ethyl-Amphetamine: (DOET/Hecate)" – 13:28
3. "5-Methoxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine: (5-MeO-DMT)" – 10:02
4. "4-Indolol, 3-[2-(Dimethylamino)Ethyl], Phosphate Ester: (Psilocybin)" – 26:51

See also

• Harmala alkaloid
  Harmala alkaloid
  Several alkaloids that function as monoamine oxidase inhibitors are found in the seeds of Peganum harmala , including harmine, harmaline, and harmalol, which are members of a group of substances with a similar chemical structure collectively known as harmala alkaloids...
  
  s
• DOET/Hectate
  2,5-Dimethoxy-4-ethylamphetamine
  2,5-Dimethoxy-4-ethylamphetamine is a psychedelic drug of the phenethylamine and amphetamine chemical classes. It was first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin, and was described in his book PiHKAL .- Chemistry :DOET is in a class of compounds commonly known as substituted amphetamines; its full...
  
  
• 5-MeO-DMT
  5-MeO-DMT
  5-MeO-DMT is a powerful psychedelic tryptamine. It is found in a wide variety of plant and psychoactive toad species and, like its close relatives DMT and bufotenin , it has been used as an entheogen by South American shamans for thousands of years.-Chemistry:5-MeO-DMT was first synthesized in...
  
  
• Psilocybin
  Psilocybin
  Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug, with mind-altering effects similar to those of LSD and mescaline, after it is converted to psilocin. The effects can include altered thinking processes, perceptual distortions, an altered sense of time, and spiritual experiences, as well as...
  
  

External links

• Time Machines website
• stickers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• "Persistence Is All" badge