Black Light District

Black Light District

Track Listings

1. Black Light District

2. Debris

3. Broken Glass (Piano Version)

4. (Bonus Multimedia Track)

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
2002 EP for the Dutch symphonic metal act features four tracks, 'Black Light District', 'Debris', 'Broken' Glass' (Piano Version), & a 'Bonus/Multi-media track'. Digipak. Psychonaut.

Tracks:

Black Light District
Debris
Broken Glass [Piano Version]

Album Description

2002 EP for the Dutch symphonic metal act features four tracks, 'Black Light District', 'Debris', 'Broken' Glass' (Piano Version), & a 'Bonus/Multi-media track'. Digipak. Psychonaut.

Customer Reviews:

Anneke, you don't have to put on the Black Light..........2006-11-16

An out-of-tune piano can easily concoct dissonant sounds that many might call "haunting." Doing it with a well-tuned one, well, that requires a bit more skill-- and fans of the beautiful timbre of a well-made, well-tuned acoustic piano cannot afford to miss this succinct little record from Holland's skilled metal quintet The Gathering. The instrument's use here is expert and unpredictable; "Black Light District" sounds like nothing else this group has put out to date, which might explain why it commands a love/hate relationship among fans.

The title track starts off like a typical exercise in the "slowcore" genre. A lonely piano arpeggio incubates and develops for more than two minutes before sparse, tasteful percussion drops in (along with a masterfully-camouflaged clean electric guitar). Spoken word courtesy of Sarah Jezebel Deva (Cradle of Filth, Angtoria) further sets the mood: "Blaming global infection for the illness in him // Little knowledge of the non-affection between him and his kin // Old, grey, bitter, anxious and collapsed // Like a wallflower once blooming." Shortly thereafter, Anneke van Giersbergen's angelic croon washes over the track, which has somehow become dizzyingly complex. Underneath it all, the original piano line repeats.

Listening to it, the listener must realize that this minor key vamp had the potential to either end abruptly or continue, dirge-like, for much past its welcome; fortunately, by six minutes in, "Black Light District" takes a completely unexpected turn: a fuzzy bass beat takes over the song, joined by a sinister distorted riff. This section continues loudly for several minutes before resuming the softer tone of the opening. As a mood piece, it succeeds admirably, and is perhaps the most interesting song The Gathering have yet written.

This will to experiment continues with the strangely-satisfying "Debris," an equal parts metal and digital romp which, despite queer lyrics ("I twist the truth, I love your youth"?), is a haunting backdrop for van Giersbergen's lovely singing voice. And the notes she chooses to siren over "Debris" will haunt many a dream. The record finishes off with "Broken Glass," which sounds almost jazzy with just van Giersbergen, a piano, and an unshakeable sense of melancholy. An attentive ear can pick out the piano lid closing at the end.

Rounded out at just under 25 minutes, "Black Light District" is a perfectly dolorous little record by which to watch sunsets. Probably good vampire music, too, if that's your bag.

Buy it!.......2003-06-24

I have been a fan of the gathering for many years. This album did dissapoint me when I first listened to it but over a couple of months I really began to like it. When I went to see the band live again the played the first track of this album, yes all 18 or so minutes of it, and live it was an absolutly amazing experience, those poeple who have reviewed it and said it is rubbish must be short sighted pretentious 'its not good if its not heavy' type people, this is quality go buy it now!

Great.......2003-03-03

My advice is that you have to buy this mini-cd. If you are a fan of the band, dont think twince. Is a new experience to The Gathering fans. The band is becoming more mature, and continue making great music. The "Black Light District" track is a masterpiece... i hope you enjoy this album.

Not bad for a mini-cd.......2003-02-15

First of all , we must remember that this is just a mini for
the 10th anniversary of the group , don't expect a masterpiece
album ; this time the group had released three experimental
tracks of psychedelic prog-rock that deserve great attention :
the title-track (too long , the only error) it's the most
emotional song composed by the group in the last years , instead
"debris" is a mix of the old style of the group with the most recent releases ("hot to measure a planet?" & "If_then_else")
and "broken glass" , in the piano version (the complete version
will be released in the new album "souvenirs") , that's not bad
but nothing unforgettable...a good "hors d'oeuvre" , waiting the
principal dish.

What were they thinking???.......2003-01-31

Its hard to believe that this CD was really produced by the same band that has given us such a consistent string of really excellent "5 star" material - music that could arguably be considered at the masterpece level for the genre.

The last three releases, in particular, ("Birds", "Planet", "If Then...Else) bear repeated listening. They're deep, complex, powerful, emotional, fascinating, just pile on the superlatives baby. Not so this CD - unfortunately, this is one of the most tedious and uninspired pieces of music I've heard in a long time. I'd disparage any band that released something like this -its kind of shocking, really, that this is The Gathering.

It goes beyond the mood, which I find morose and uninspired. There is about 20 seconds of acutal valid musical content here, crammed into about 25 minutes. Its beyond self-indulgence - in the first place, that problem implies you have some content to over indulge in. Experimental and artistic? No way - in this case, those kind of adjectives are just a cover for self-absorption, lazy composition, and lackadasial performance.

This really sounds like they had a couple of hours to kill and composed and recorded the whole thing in that time frame - come on Gathering - give it some effort. Let's hope this is some weird aberration and things get back on track for this usually wonderful band.

Black Light District Boys
Average customer rating:
Black Light District Boys

Manufacturer: Klanggalerie
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music
Electronica | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000CA7U3S
Release Date: 2005-04-12

Average customer rating:
Black Light District
Phantom Queen
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Rap & Hip-Hop | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000FSMSVG
Release Date: 2006-04-04

Tracks:

Delta
Black Light District
Twins w/Spectra
Life Transfusion
Slippin w/Renigade
Another Panic Attack w/Spectra
Set the Stage
Can't Hide
Every Girl
Horizon
5D
Bee's w/Spectra

Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room

Average customer rating:

Possibly Coils finest work.
wonderful wonderful wonderful
Coil's transition
Uncomfortable Deja Vu
World without warning

Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room
Coil
Manufacturer: World
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

General | American Alternative | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

Indie Rock | Indie & Lo-Fi | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

Ambient | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

Electronica | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

IDM | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

General | New Age | Styles | Music

General | Rock | Styles | Music

Experimental Music | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music

Alternative Rock | Imports | Stores | Music

Dance & DJ | Imports | Stores | Music
ASIN: B000006ZD5
Release Date: 1996-11-21

Tracks:

Unprepared Piano
Red Skeletons
Die Wolfe Kommen Zuruck
Refusal to Leave to Land
Stoned Circular I
Stoned Circular II
Green Water
Cold Dream of an Earth Star
Blue Rats
Scratches and Dust
Chalice

Album Description

1996 release on Eskaton Records, the first half of theband's then new project & compared to their 'Protection'release. 11 tracks, including 'Unprepared Piano', 'RedSkeletons' and 'Green Water'. The full title is 'Black LightDistrict - A Thousand Lights In

Customer Reviews:

Possibly Coils finest work........2005-09-01

If you like calm, downbeat, downtempo ambience with a more machine than electro sound, this will make you very, very happy. I LOVE this album. The atmosphere and ambience is astonishing, and the sound is truly one of a kind. It's a shame this album is so hard to come by, as it should be widely available in any store that has a music section. Unfortunately, mine is scratched beyond repair, so I need to order a new one. >_ <

wonderful wonderful wonderful.......2005-08-05

The great thing about Coil is that they're all over the place, genre-wise, doing everything from industrial to ambient to glitchcore. BLD is another typically atypical Coil release, unique and hard to classify. I read somewhere that they described it as "a soundtrack to a drowning", and it's easy to see why. It's slow and droning, yet too active to be called ambient, and more menacing than relaxing. Very hypnotic, very unsettling, very good.

Coil's transition.......2002-09-27

This album falls somewhere between Coil's early, drugged decadence, which reached its apex with the acid house inspired "Love's Secret Domain", and the recent works dealing with alchemical sound sculpting and magickal lunar energies. The urban grit, most evident in the '80s albums, is still present to an extent, albeit more as an inseperable quality of a total reality being rapidly molecularized than the patina of Thatcher-era postcolonial decay that was an undercurrent of the work of so many great British artists of that decade. "LSD" signaled a shift to a more electronic Coil, and that process begins its refinement toward a more subtle approach with this project. Crunchy, reverb-laden loops are the backbone of many of the tracks here. For the most part, they are multi-textured, despite their repetitiveness. Clanking, damp stretches of industrial(sorry!) atmosphere are interrupted by the occasional more straightforward song. However, most of this album relies on mood and texture to carry it. It has its dull stretches, but it's creepy and trippy in that unmistakable Coil way. I can see how some people might not get into this album, especially those more into coherent tunes than abstract electronics, but "Black Light District" is an intriguing byway in the continuum that is Coil. It lies on a more obscure part of the map than the major works, somewhere amongst "Horse Rotorvator"'s demented Gothic manor, "LSD"'s warehouse party delirium, and the rural midnight conjurings of "Musick to Play in the Dark".

Uncomfortable Deja Vu.......2002-08-22

Coil is just one of those bands that is next to impossible to describe. Every album they've done sounds very different from the last. Here is my best to describe Black Light District. After you've just finished a very long and strenuous exercise, while your heart is still pounding, lay down flat on your back in a very quit place. Then just listen. You can hear your heart, but you can also hear a very soft rushing sound. The blood surging through your veins. That's the sound of this album. This picks up from where Transparent left off. But its far less minimalistic, and much better thought out. If you're into long, dark, rhythmic atmospheres, then BLD is for you. Like a lot of Coil's previous work, most of the tension that you feel isn't from what you hear, but what you think you're about to hear. BLD brings that to the ultimate extreme. Some of this album is closely reminiscent to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. It also works on many different levels. Besides being damn creepy, the sounds that are used in this album are nothing short of mind-boggling. It will inflict fear, hope and uncomfortable Déjà vu from a childhood memory you forgot years ago.

Here is a list of similar releases.
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume 2
Einsturzende Neubauten: Silence is Sexy
Nine Inch Nails: Further Down the Spiral (mostly Coil remixes)
Coil: Transparent
Kevin Key: Music for Cats
Skinny Puppy: To Dark Park

World without warning.......2002-06-05

After Coil's long lay-off during the first half of the '90s - where the band merely cleaned out their archives and reissued some older albums on compact disc - the musical climate had certainly changed in the avant-garde/ambient/dark wave genre, so some fans may have wondered how Coil would continue their musical journey into previously unknown territories. 1995's "Worship the glitch" (under the ELpH banner) tapped fully into the then-modern approach of cut-and-paste soundbits, mechanical ambience, and heavy digital distortion, but the real surprise came with their next offering - 1996's "Black light district", ominously subtitled "A thousand lights in a darkened room" and originally released by Coil's side-project of the same name. Although the band's line-up had changed since the late-'80s and since "Worship the glitch" (and perhaps the reason to ditch the ELpH name), the music is sometimes along the same lines as the ambient tracks on Coil's earlier albums, albeit with a much more refined, coherent quality. Considering that "BLD" is an astonishingly diverse and innovative album that includes everything from creepy atmospherics to quiet ambient waveforms to somewhat hyperactive glitch textures, it becomes clear that Coil have created a piece of music which often seems to be the opposite of those smooth-as-silk ambient ventures we came to expect from so many '90s electronica artists. No album by Coil is easy to start with, but in my eyes "BLD" is very accessible and listenable due to its diversity and Coil's ability to hold the listener's attention, if only to see what will happen from track to track. You know...things happen a lot! A short piece called "Unprepared piano" (and exactly sounding like that) gets the album underway, followed by "Red skeletons", which consists of shuffling, muffled layers of rhythm and lots of non-musical effects. The first real highlight, however, comes in the shape of the 10 ½-minute "Die Wolfe kommen zuruck", which is German for "The wolves are coming back". Although the title strongly suggests a sort of environmental feel, the soundscapes rather work in an industrial direction: A heavy, repetitive metallic pound (an alternative, more vivid description could be 'clanking graveyard rhythm') plays over dark, droning noise loops and siren-like tones - this will make your little puppy dog hide under your bed. The first few minutes of "Refusal..." will sound familiar to owners of "The Angelic Conversation" in that it uses various processed water noises before a shimmering melody works its way through the gloom, backed by John's fantastic, dreamy vocals. Unfortunately, a couple of slightly uneventful pieces lurk in the middle of the album, most notably "Green water" with its rather childish keyboard noodlings and the two-part "Stoned circular" with its deranged effects, but thankfully things quickly perk up again with the 9-minute, appropriately titled "Cold dream..." and the utterly stunning "Blue rats". The latter sneaks along on a bass-heavy, punchy sequencer arrangement and features another excellent vocal performance by John, this time much more paranoid and aggressive. The album-closing "Chalice" seems a bit similar to Autechre's and Black Dog's early material, especially due to the way the descending synth chords and melancholic undercurrents are presented, although the sound effects and choir-like voices are pure Coil. Despite the unquestionable quality of this release, there's one thing which really annoys me: The vinyl edition of "BLD" features the 8-minute bonus track "London's lost rivers", perhaps one of Coil's most disturbing songs because it displays the feelings and impressions of a suicidal before he drowns himself in the rivers of London. Quite why this excellent track was left off the CD edition remains unclear, but it can also be picked up on the Russian compilation "A guide for beginners: Silver voice". In sum, if you're looking for a more dance-oriented Coil album, like "Scatology", "LSD", or "Stolen and contaminated songs", then this isn't for you. If you like to explore the outer realms of ambient music, then "BLD" should impress.

Music Track:

Music Track

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