condition (record/cover): NM / NM (seal is cut)

Folded poster-cover in plastic bag with sealing sticker.

Cranioclast in mischievous mode. After the architectural seriousness of A Con Cristal (1987) and the travelogue expanses of Lost In Karak (1988), the duo released Rats Can Coil Cats Can Roil in 1990 as a 12" 45 RPM EP on their own CoC imprint. The title is itself an anagrammatic palindromic game, and the insert note explains it without quite explaining it: "Rita N. Koslak and Klara K. Tonsi were playing with rats, cats and other pets."

Two pieces, "Rats Can Coil" and "Cats Can Roil," that operate in the dialect Cranioclast had made their own by this point. Electroacoustic treatments, tape loops, elusive narrative fragments that suggest a story they have no intention of telling. The music is looser than on the earlier records, more rhythmically inflected in places. You can almost hear the project beginning to open toward the more openly humorous direction that would characterise its Nineties output, without losing the Central European formal rigour that had made it unmistakable.

A compact artifact, shorter than the other CoC titles but equally essential for anyone building a complete Cranioclast shelf. Later reissued alongside other early material on the 2024 Silentes CD A Con Cristal / Rats Can Coil-Cats Can Roil / Accidental Encounter Of Rats And Cats On A Turntable, but the 1990 12" remains the original, and the object the later reissue exists to celebrate.