Time Machines is a 1998 album by English experimental groupCoil, originally released under the alias Time Machines. The album was created under the premise of drones named after hallucinogenic chemicals, "tested and retested" in the studio for apparent narcotic potency. Main member John Balance also described the album as an attempt to create "temporal slips".
Background and composition
Time Machines is composed of four electronicdronepieces created with modular synthesizers, which as hinted at in their track names are an attempt to recreate the chemically derived psychedelic and narcotic potency of telepathine, DOET, DMT and psilocybin mushrooms. As well as this, Balance intended the album to cause "temporal slips": he commented that the musical effect was demonstrated when the group "listened to it loudlost track of time". Drew McDowall created the original demo for the record, at first inspired by what he saw as a hypnotic state created in Tibetan music, but his final idea with Balance and Christopherson was to use filters and oscillators on the tones of the demo to induce trance-like effects. When Time Machines was first released, the group was very conscious that it not be labeled as a Coil album, due to how abstract and different it was compared to previous Coil albums. However, Coil later tended towards regarding Time Machines a part of the Coil catalog; this led the 2000 follow-up album Coil Presents Time Machines to bear the Coil name on it.
Legacy
A five-disc Time Machinesbox set was announced in 1998, but never developed. A two-disc version was announced in January 2006 as a future release, but this was never expanded on either, although an album by Peter Christopherson, called Time Machines II, was released posthumously. In retrospect, Drew McDowall has remarked that "eople tell me how much of an impact it had on them – which is always pretty surprising."
Reception
Sean Cooper of AllMusic gave the album four out of five stars and described it as "njoyable, if a mite limited in scope." Record distributorBoomkat praised the album upon its re-release, calling it a "now-classic chemical songbook".
