**white vinyl, de luxe triple-gatefold set. In process of stocking** 150 minutes of previously unreleased material from Coil, strewn with parts that would eventually metastasise into Backwards, and ultimately Black Light District and Musick To Play In the Dark.
We hardly need to stress that Swanyard is a bounty for Coil nuts out there, but equally a fascinating listen for anyone attempting to get to grips with their unfathomable catalogue - especially DJs and listeners currently digging into the underbelly of the ‘90s.
The material was all written and recorded between 1993 to 1996 and was selected and assembled by Danny Hyde (Electric Sewer Age, ex-Coil, ex-Psychic TV, ex-Black Light District) from the studio archives. As he outlines in the liner notes, these 23 tracks offer unforetold snapshots of Coil’s constant work-in-progress during an important phase of exploration.
Tracks were usually seeded in Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson’s dreams, and rendered thru the prism of his myriad sample bank, with Jhon Balance pulling from his notebooks for lyrics, and Danny Hyde would aid in engineering, editing and mixing, animating their studio gremlins and mental apparitions to an almost complete form.
The Swanyard is effectively as close as you’ll get to being in their notorious studios during the pharmaceutically-fuelled peak of the ‘90s, at the point where dark ambient, electronica and dance music were mutual bedfellows, and mutated the framework for where we are today.