Time Machines is a 1998 studio album by English experimental group Coil, originally released under the one-off project alias Time Machines. The album was created under the premise of psychedelic drone pieces named after corresponding hallucinogenic drugs, "tested and retested" during the album's studio sessions for apparent narcotic potency. Main member John Balance also described the album as an attempt to create "temporal slips". Background and composition Time Machines is composed of four electronic drone pieces created with modular synthesizers, which as hinted at in their track names are an attempt to recreate the chemically derived psychedelic and narcotic potency of telepathine, DOET, DMT and psilocybin mushrooms (telepathine and DMT being primary components of ayahuasca). As well as this, Balance intended the album to cause "temporal slips": he commented that the musical effect was demonstrated when the group "listened to it loud [and] lost track of time". Drew McDowall created the original demo for the record, at first inspired by what he saw as a hypnotic state created in Tibetan music, but his final idea with Balance and Christopherson was to use filters and oscillators on the tones of the demo to induce trancelike effects. In a 1998 interview, given to David Keenan for The Wire magazine, Balance explained the album's concept and intent, inspired by trancelike states: One of the interesting things with Time Machines is that there's a handful of responses which we've had where what happened to the listeners was exactly what we intended to happen. There would be some kind of temporal disruption caused by just listening to the music, just interacting with the music. The drugs thing is actually a hook we hung it on – it originally came out of me and Drew talking that some of the types of music you listen to – sacred musics like Tibetan music or anything with a sacred intent which often is long ceremonial type music which could last for a day or three days or something. There are periods of time in that where you will come out of time. That's the intention of it to go into a trance and achieve an otherness. We thought can we do this sort of electronic punk-primitive? We did demos with a simple mono synth and we managed it. We sat in the room and listened to it loud and we lost track of time – it could be