Wild Light Decade #07: F# Death Coil (Patreon)

F# Death Coil // A cold, bleak December in Sheffield, 2012. Tiny electric heaters stuttering out vague pockets of warmth. Desperate white board scribbling. Endless coffee.

It is safe to assume that Baskinski’s Disintegration Loops was on heavy rotation at the time, although to be fair we had also been doing tape loop stuff for a quite a while prior to this. If you remember Guitar Cascades, off the Heavy Sky e.p, that was heavy on cassette loops. And then, specifically for our Silent Running live shows, for a few songs Joe’s instrument of choice was a pair of old Tascam multitrack recorders. Each one had a crappy little DIY cassette tape loop that one of us made, probably Si. Joe would play back the loops, sometimes mixing between the various channels of noise but mostly just hitting and squeezing the boxes to mess with the motors driving the spindles.

But this is F# Death Coil. A different mode of loop engineering. It can’t have featured the Tascam approach because, for all its noise potential, doing it that way did tend to lack a certain… fidelity. And as we have discussed in various places, we really wanted Wild Light to sound better than any previous 65 record.

Sinking into this recording, it sounds like maybe we sampled some bowed cymbals and created a loop out of it? We were definitely doing a lot of that at the time. If you take a violin bow to a cymbal at just the right angle and you can get some really sweet resonance going… It sounds like there could be some sampled strings in there too. And it sounds like a live performance of some analog Mopho oscillators doing the sporadic crackly noise over the top. Maybe there's more too. Maybe it's a room recording of us doing that all at once, turning into a loop, and then that loop sent through an amplifier and recorded yet again? That was (still is) a classic 65 production technique. Equally, it could have been meticulously layered and looped inside of a laptop. Who knows. Too much music, not enough memory...

But this sound, this track in particular. It somehow really gets to the heart of how it felt most days in the drafty old 65HQ, unknowingly just months away from getting its useless MDF door kicked through and allowing most of the stuff we used to write the record to get stolen. The four of us plugging away trying to make this record. Tired and doubting but tinged with hopefulness that we could somehow pull it off.

We had really intended for this to be a song in its own right, because it felt like we’d stumbled into a really special combination of sounds here. In the end, it just didn’t fit the pace and flow we wanted Wild Light to have, and so there was just nowhere we could make it fit as a whole piece. But you might recognise it as the outro of Blackspots that slowly segues into Sleepwalk City. (Or, if you own the vinyl, it closes out side one and fades back in on side two.)

In hindsight, we should have made this an hour long and released it as the lead single.

Here’s Joe in Chapel Studios. Their tape machines were a bit too expensive for him to be allowed to punch. But we did still make tape loops and mess with motor speeds.

That’s all for this week, friends. See you next Friday!