L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords is filed at Tier I because of what it pressed in a single year. The Belgian imprint ran only from 1984 to 1989 and issued around thirty records, but the first dozen of them are foundational documents of the British apocalyptic-folk and industrial-occult cluster: Coil's début, the early Current 93 albums, and several of the first Nurse With Wound records. A label that releases the canonical early entries of a form earns its file on the first of the label tests, and LAYLAH does so several times over in its opening months.
The label was founded by Marc Monin and took its name, styled with full stops as L.A.Y.L.A.H., from a term in the work of Aleister Crowley, fitting for a roster steeped in occult and ritual material. It operated as a sub-label of Les Disques du Crépuscule, the Brussels label, which handled the manufacturing and distribution. The arrangement is worth stating precisely: Crépuscule pressed and shipped the records, but the A&R, the choice of what to release, was Monin's own and ran independent of the parent. LAYLAH was therefore a curatorial imprint riding on Crépuscule's machinery rather than a Crépuscule house line.
The 1984 run is the heart of it. The first record was Current 93's LAShTAL (LAY 01); the fourth and eighth were Nature Unveiled and Dogs Blood Rising, the two records that fix the early Current 93 manner. The fifth, LAY 05, was Coil's How to Destroy Angels, the first record the band issued under the Coil name before leaving for Some Bizzare. Around these came early Nurse With Wound (Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's, Brained by Falling Masonry), Laibach's Boji / Sila / Brat Moj, and a Current 93 / Nurse With Wound split single. To press that group of records in twelve months is to hold the centre of the scene at the moment it cohered.
The roster reads as a map of the early cluster. Across the five-year run LAYLAH released The Hafler Trio, Organum, Robert Haigh, 23 Skidoo (The Culling Is Coming) and Sol Invictus (Against the Modern World), alongside the Current 93, Coil and Nurse With Wound records. These are the figures the archive files or cross-references throughout the apocalyptic-folk and ritual material, and the label is the point a great many of them pass through at the start. That is the third label test, the connector node, and LAYLAH passes it as clearly as it passes the first.
The Bureau's reading. LAYLAH is filed at Tier I as a label that issued the canonical early entries of a form and connected most of the principals of a scene. Marc Monin's imprint ran for five years on Crépuscule's distribution, kept its own counsel on what to release, and in doing so pressed Coil's first record, the foundational Current 93 albums and early Nurse With Wound, with Laibach, The Hafler Trio, Organum, 23 Skidoo and Sol Invictus around them. Much of the catalogue has since been reissued on Durtro, United Dairies and elsewhere, but the original Belgian pressings remain the documents, and the label remains one of the fixed points the early-1980s occult-industrial scene formed around.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene