Reviews: (Lost In A Sea Of Sound) Scattered rhythms, like a bag of bearings splitting open above an old wooden floor. The downward spray producing one note drops by the feet, skittering sounds falling into cracks and recesses, loud bounces with unimaginable directions and unexplained sounds of complete disintegration as the impact occurs. The Realisation That Someone Has Been Stood Behind You Your Entire Life is like that broken pouch. Everything nestled together in perfect order, like water molecules stacking to make a lake or sea. Then a tear, or the fear of noticing someone behind you, this new spontaneous moment causing a rush of minor chaos. Sounds spilling forth, what once were controlled rhythm and harmony, now separated from the compositions they once were. Coims holds an aural divining rod, continually droning with slight variations as new veins of sounds are discovered. The first track "Londos versus Londos" is a very good example of this, with mesmerizing tones until the final note. "Elon Jobs" is the fresh current of sonic flow. Elephants at play, a barrage of noise that is both whimsical and heavy. The final track on the first side is a slow creeping haunt. Instruments becoming voices in an alternate dimension. Slow and strong breaths toppling trees, staring eyes radiating fierce sonic cries. The second side is one long journey of a track titled "Over The Weather And Under The Hill". With roughly thirty minutes for this single selection, Coims is superbly diversified. Ambience, slicing notes, hypnotic rhythms, and a little Residents styled vocals. Cadence changing on a warped hyperbolic curve, from knobby clamor to semi-polished grooves. Released on the eh? label in an unspecified number of copies. Coims does not have much to find in their biography. They are from Bristol with this description on bandcamp and facebook, "COIMS are an experimental sound duo, often using modern percussion and fretted instruments to create primitive sonic freedom". There is plenty of music to explore, and this eh? release is the perfect place to start. No sound samples at the moment for The Realisation That Someone Has Been Stood Behind You Your Entire Life, but everything on this bandcamp link has tracks to listen to from the last four years. - Robot Rattle
(Vital Weekly) From Coims I reviewed a release before (Vital Weekly 1184), and, frankly, I am none the wiser in the meantime. Is it a group? One person? Instruments? The only thing mentioned on the website from Eh? Records (a subdivision of Public Eyesore) is that Coims is from Bristol. As before I think this is a group and that percussion and guitars are the main instruments, but there might also be some kind of wind instrument in play here. Their approach is a lo-fi approach to the outer limits of rock music, in exactly that corner where it meets improvisation, noise, drone rock and whatever another exotic novelty one can think of in the world of very, and I mean, very alternative rock music. Maybe there is also some sort of manipulation going on, post-recording that is, of wonky and crude manipulation of the tapes used to lay it all down. This happened more on the second side than on the first and throughout that side, I began to doubt if it all just the aforementioned instruments. Maybe there is something else in play here, something more electronic and going back to the first side, here too that might be the case, especially in 'Londos Versus Londos'. The side-long 'Over The Weather And Under The Hill' (B-side) at one point leaps into a steady rhythm and sounds wonderfully psychedelic and hypnotic. This is a lovely little lo-fi thing. - Frans De Waard
(Disaster Amnesiac) What does Coims mean? Is it an acronym? A surname? Quite mysterious, as is just about everything else on The Realisation That Someone Has Been Stood Behind You Your Entire Life. When Disaster Amnesiac first took in the cover art, I was expecting some kind of tribal music or something, but was instead treated to four tracks of somewhat lo-fi Electro-Acoustic sounds. All kinds of instrumental interplay is at work on The Realisation. Primitive synth tones merge with mic'd metals, feedback pulses drone and warble, drum machine beats get all glitchey, stringed instruments are plucked and processed, odd voices intone atop the din, and drum kits interact with squalls of electronics. It's a fantastic ride, notable for the very cool meshing of said elements into coherent pieces that do not fail to surprise the listener with their unexpected turns. Coims seem to be onto some kind of as yet unnamed Fusion music, and Disaster Amnesiac considers himself very much on board with it. They have taken the last 50 or so years of truly underground music and blended their elements into a singularly cool statement. Really fun, fine stuff here. - Mark Pino
(Sound Projector) Coims is a Bristol duo performing new music in that area since 2016 at least and recently made a split tape with Ocean Floor. Their item is The Realisation That Someone Has Been Stood Behind You Your Entire Life (EH?111), a lengthy title which on a bad day I might read as a perfect summary of an M.R. James ghost story (at least two of his nightmare classics deal with a stalking figure behind you which you can’t shake off). At first hearing of these splendid groinky noises, I thought they might be electronic or synth attack merchants wrangling their twisted circuits, but they claim to do it with “modern percussion and fretted instruments”, which could be a fancy way of describing a drumkit and guitar set-up, so does it mean we’re to regard them as experimental rock of some sort? I doubt it, as this delicious spew has no regularities or pulses familiar to conventional jaded lugs, and it clatters about in a most ramshackle manner free from such nonsense as guitar solos or traditional dynamics. I’m lapping up every minute of this candy drool, so when they speak of creating “primitive sonic freedom”, I for one cast no doubts on that cloth cap. I also enjoy the downbeat, rather grim caste of these lurching groaners, as if these lads care not a jot for audience entertainment nor even for basic rules of coherence. Hard to say why this turgid shambling beast is so compelling a spin, but I can prescribe it to all in need of a good dose of acid salts to the hot brain. Fine screenprinted cover has an ethnic mask image…produced by Bathtub printing in Bristol. Let’s hope the west of England continues to breed such such effective anti-social rock maggots, nibbling their way through mountains of garbage. More please ..... After that I just had to flip the Coims cassette and dip into the single track on the B side of their pink and fleshy output. It’s called ‘Over the weather and under the hill’. Starting out with a haunting sound that resembles bagpipes gone insane, one might be tempted to peg this as their demented attempt at some form of folk-inflected music with a title that celebrates life in the countryside. But these rolling hills soon turn into treacherous forms, and mad bleating sheep are never far away ready to sting us with their powerful tendrils. Just shows that Coims are capable of twisting the Pink Floyd formula into eerie new shapes…may lack the primitive rawness of the A side, but this wayward creepster music is more likely to send me screaming to the Halls of Bedlam before many days. - Ed Pinsent
(Cassette Gods) Improv duos don’t usually flirt this aggressively with psychy/doom-drone/noise aesthetics, nor do they organize themselves along the cusps of almost-but-nope-not-quite-predictable sound structures, tones, or sonorities throughout an album, but all these qualities come together cohesively and stunningly and STILL manage to resemble something aleatory and otherworldly, like something NASA has likely already piped down from their fancy satellites…oh, but here we are. COIMS is not fucking around. Or rather, they Are fucking around So Hard that they’ve discovered (and mastered) a solid niche for themselves that is every bit as adventurous in its being hard to follow as it is its remaining easy to get lost in. While, generally, no more than two events are going on at any given time on this transmission, both (actions) heavily bolster the others’ sonic potency ten-fold, filling out the space and saturating it with foreboding intent, as if they were but two frantically gesturing arms separated only by the throbbing, caving torso of your own mind, each of their fingers flicking & flickering on and off again a series-switcheroo of contact mic-captured acoustic crackles, cackles, and echos, heavily processed string-wrought textures, loose-riffage, drone, and/or myriad herz-levels of feedback. It’s all just a hair shy of a bit much, as far as minimalism historically concerns itself, and it's all fucking great. A didgeridoo, space-monk, and/or cosmic death ray may make multiple appearances. At times, a mysterious spaghetti-western vibe threatens to take hold, were that “West" to be an amalgam of Joshua Tree and Roswell, but each joined, somehow, improbably fused and infused with the unconquerable terrain and tribal spirit of inner Australia. This release is powerful, and a great addition to the ever stalwart Eh? roster! - Jacob An Kittenplan
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