Coil - "...And the Ambulance Died In His Arms"

And the Ambulance Died in His Arms is a live recording of Coil performing at the 2003 All Tomorrow's Parties festival at Camber Sands. On this date, Coil were Jhonn Balance on vocals, Peter Christopherson on sequencers, Thighpaulsandra on keyboards and Tom Edwards on marimba. This combination of musicians appeared on Live Two, recorded two years earlier. Where that set was abrasive and loud, this one is largely subdued, very different from the other recordings of Coil that appeared over the course of the Live series. Balance takes the mic to explain the subdued nature of the material, "We're doing a quiet set today. We've had too much shouting over the past year." Of the five lengthy tracks, four are completely new and one is a radical reworking of "The Dreamer Is Still Asleep" from Musick to Play In The Dark Volume One. Most of the set appears to be improvised, especially the glossolalic "Snow Falls On Military Temples' and "Triple Sons and the Ones You Bury", where Balance appears to be channeling his lyrics from another plane, suggesting phrases and then settling in on one which gets repeated and morphed into something totally new. Most of the song titles on this album are generated from those very phrases. Of all the live Coil albums that have been released, and there are a lot of them, And the Ambulance is one of the more satisfying. It is an excellent document of Coil's improvisatory nature, a side that was not displayed on their studio albums much, if at all.