Time Machines

Time Machines is the most extreme record in this index and it is also the one that asks the least of you, which is a strange thing for a record to be.

Coil — John Balance and Peter Christopherson — made it as a deliberate instrument rather than as music. Four tracks, each around fifteen to twenty minutes, each a single sustained drone with almost no event in it. The titles are chemical names: a β-carboline, a substituted amphetamine, 5-MeO-DMT, and the phosphate ester that is psilocybin. The stated intention, printed on the release, is that these are "four tones to facilitate travel through time", and the record was issued with no conventional artwork — a plain embossed sleeve, no track information presented as music, no indication that it is an album at all.

What is actually on it is microtonal beating. Each drone is built from close-together frequencies that interfere with each other, so the sound appears to pulse, breathe and move without anything changing, and the effect of sitting with that for a quarter of an hour at a time is genuinely disorienting. It does not produce fear. It produces the specific sensation of having lost track of how long you have been doing something, which is a different and rarer thing for a record to do.

It is the most literal piece of functional music in the index

Everything else we hold is representing something. Time Machines is attempting an effect on the listener's nervous system, and whether you believe it works is largely a question of whether you sit still for it. The honest assessment is that at volume, in the dark, with no other input, all four tracks produce measurable time distortion in most listeners — not because of anything mystical, but because a featureless seventeen-minute drone removes every cue a person uses to estimate duration.

Coil's position in the genre

Coil were never a horror act and they are among the most important groups in this index's hinterland: Christopherson came from Throbbing Gristle, Balance from Psychic TV, and across twenty-odd years they made records about ritual, death, illness and sexuality that most horror music is a watered-down version of. Time Machines is their most reductive record and their most influential one — the modern drone and dark-ambient scene is more indebted to this than to anything else from the period.

Where it is impossible to recommend

It is seventy minutes of four sustained tones. There is no melody, no rhythm, no development, no variation and no event. Played as background it is a hum; played properly it demands your entire attention for an hour and gives you nothing back that can be described. It is the least listenable thing we have scored and that is not a criticism of it.

For the same architectural emptiness made from recordings, Heresy; for the same stillness used against memory, Everywhere at the End of Time; for the same abandonment of pitch for mass, Black One.

The short answer: the fourth drone stops. There is no structural ending to Time Machines because there is no structure to resolve — four tones, in sequence, each one beginning, sustaining and ceasing, with no relationship between them and no return of earlier material. The final track is the psilocybin tone, and it ends the way the other three do, by being switched off. What the record does instead of an ending is leave you without a clock: the most frequently reported experience of finishing it is not knowing how long it has been, which is the designed effect and is the only sense in which it has a conclusion at all. Later reissues, including the Time Machines vinyl and the expanded editions, do not change this.

What are the four tracks on Time Machines?

Four drones, each named for a psychoactive compound: a β-carboline associated with ayahuasca, a substituted amphetamine, 5-MeO-DMT, and the phosphate ester of psilocybin. Each runs roughly fifteen to twenty minutes. The naming is not decoration — the record presents each tone as corresponding to the compound, and the sleeve's claim is that they are tools rather than pieces.

Does Time Machines actually distort time?

In a mundane sense, yes, and you do not need to accept the sleeve's framing to get the effect. A featureless sustained tone with no rhythmic or melodic events removes every cue a listener uses to estimate elapsed duration, so time estimation degrades badly — most people finishing a seventeen-minute track will guess anywhere from five minutes to forty. Coil's framing is esoteric; the mechanism is ordinary and it works.

Who were Coil?

John Balance and Peter Christopherson, working from the mid-1980s until Balance's death in 2004. Christopherson had been in Throbbing Gristle; both had passed through Psychic TV. Across Scatology, Horse Rotorvator, Love's Secret Domain, the Musick to Play in the Dark records and this one, they made the most serious body of work in British industrial and esoteric music, and almost no horror music exists downstream of them that admits it.

How should I listen to Time Machines?

In one sitting, loud, in the dark, with nothing else happening and no clock in the room. Any other approach turns it into a hum. It is seventy minutes and there is no way to sample it meaningfully — a two-minute excerpt of a seventeen-minute drone contains none of the effect, because the effect is entirely a function of duration.

Is Time Machines frightening?

No, and it is the only record in this index for which that is the right answer. We score it 098 on reality anchor, the ceiling, because nothing in it is orientable — but its effect is disorientation rather than dread. It belongs here because it is the furthest point in the direction the rest of this medium's records travel.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 098 is the ceiling of our scale — 103 of 105 works score lower. There is no pitch centre, no metre, no event and no duration cue anywhere on the record.

Pace 002 is the floor — 103 works are faster. Four sustained tones across seventy minutes, with no rhythmic content of any kind.

Tone 008 is bleak — 11 works score lower, although "bleak" sits awkwardly here: the record is not sad, it is absent.

Viscera 010 is near the floor — only 6 works score lower. There is nothing bodily in it at all.

Era bias 044 is just under the midpoint. 1998, analogue and early digital synthesis, released with no artwork on a small press.

The threat at 025 is on the supernatural side — 24 works score lower. There is no agency, no presence and nothing approaching.

On shocks: none. There is not one transient on the entire record.