Coil

Coil were one of the most detrimental phenomena in industrial music of the 1980s. It is significant that a large portion of their discography consists of "unreleased" music—that is, "rare," "unpublished," "limited edition," and so on. The collectible aspect often outweighed the artistic one. In practice, Coil turned the inventions of the Throbbing Gristle into a career. This does not mean that some of their albums did not contain forward-looking insights (even if repeated exhaustively) and that, for better or worse, Coil invented the gothic form of industrial music (which had originally begun as an expressionist act).

After the breakup of Throbbing Gristle in 1981, Peter Christopherson became involved in several industrial music projects, from which two groups emerged: Zos Kia, documented by Transparent (Nekropolis, 1983 – Threshold House, 1997), and Psychic TV. John Balance (born Geff Rushton) was also a member of both formations. At the end of 1983, Balance and Christopherson left the two groups and formed Coil. John Balance would continue to appear on albums by Death In June, Nurse With Wound, and especially Current 93 (from the beginning until 1989).

Afflicted, like many "industrial" musicians, with esoteric pretensions, Coil nonetheless launched a far more original program of mostly percussive music with the EP How To Destroy Angels (Laylah, 1984) (Threshold House, 1992), named after the track that would become the most famous of their output, and with the album Scatology (Force & Form, 1984 – World Serpent, 2001), featuring Panic, albeit amid countless redundancies and indulgences.

The album Horse Rotorvator (Force & Form, 1986), destined to remain their masterpiece, shifted the focus toward more complex harmonies and less obsessive, more lyrical and contemplative atmospheres, also assimilating musical genres such as jazz and Middle Eastern folk. The album, notable for its clever use of the sampler (a Fairlight Emulator), is an anarchic meditation inspired by the philosophy of Jean Genet, the psychedelic orgies of the 1960s, the baroque narrative of the 1600s, and English gothic.

The EP Anal Staircase (Force & Form, 1987), in particular, built around the first track of the album, brought order to that chaos of beats and counterbeats, managing to configure the possibility of a dance for industrial polyrhythms and assorted sound effects that at certain points brushes against apocalyptic tones.

From the same sessions, material for the album Gold Is The Metal With The Broadest Shoulders (Loci, 1987) (Threshold House, 1995) and the single The Wheel (Threshold House, 1987) was later derived.

This new inspiration also produced the music recorded for the film Hellraiser (Solar Lodge, 1987).

The traits manifested in the recordings of the late 1980s led to a decisive renewal in the following decade, when Coil, in effect, donned a new skin. Preceded by the EP Wrong Eye (Shock, 1990), the album Love's Secret Domain (Torso, 1991 – Threshold House, 2001), with its nods to "acid house" (particularly the singles Windowpane and Snow), marks the group's conversion to dance music, as was typical for British "experimentalists" of that generation. The album is nonetheless a small masterpiece of playful techno and also includes experiments such as Disco Hospital and Things Happen, as well as Teenage Lightning.

From the same sessions, material was later derived for the album Stolen And Contaminated Songs (Threshold House, 1992) and the singles Nasa-Arab (World Serpent, 1994) and Is Suicide A Solution (Clawfist, 1993).

Two soundtracks for Derek Jarman films also saw the light: Angelic Conversation (World Serpent, 1985) (Threshold House, 1994) and Blue (Threshold House, 1993).

Three volumes of Unnatural History (Threshold House, 1990, 1995, 1997) collect historic compositions and various unreleased tracks, including the 11-part Music For Commercials.

Following the trend, starting in 1994 Coil began releasing material under other names: Eskaton, ELpH, Black Light District, Time Machines, Wormsine, Rosa Mundi, Trial By Music, 2012, and Lifestyle.

Worship The Glitch (World Serpent, 1995), credited to ELpH, was an experiment in chaotic and dissonant "musique concrete".

A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room (World Serpent, 1996) is credited to The Black Light District. After a seven-year hiatus, during which the duo only released compilations, EPs and side projects, Balance and Christopherson found an improbable second life with the trio of late 1990s albums: Time Machines (Eskaton, 1998), a set of four lengthy droning tracks (for a total of 72 minutes); Musick to Play In The Dark Volume One (World Serpent, 1999), that augments the line-up with Drew McDowall and Thighpaulsandra (Tim Lewis) and serves the surreal electronic music of Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East and The Dreamer Is Still Asleep; Astral Disaster (World Serpent, 1999), that contains the even longer (but a bit tedious) The Mothership And The Fatherland, MU-UR and 2nd Sun Syndrome; Queens Of The Circulating Library (Eskaton, 2000), basically a Balance-Thighpaulsandra duet; Musick to Play In The Dark Volume Two (World Serpent, 2000), with one of their most sensational tracks (Batwings), Thighpaulsandra's Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night, and an ever more cosmic and ambient sound; Constant Shallwness Leads To Evil (Eskaton, 2000), a puzzle of 23 brief sketches that span all the styles of their career. These huge, hypnotic, subliminal suites mark a return to the origins of How To Destroy Angels, via kosmische musik and tape manipulation techniques.

The two volumes of Musick to Play In The Dark may constitute the most austere and important recording of Coil's career. They wed Coil's trademark exoteric and subliminal sound to a bacchanal of digital noises.

Moon's Milk (Eskaton, 2001) collects the Solstice And Equinox Singles released in 1998 (solemn ambient music that resembles Constance Demby's sacred new-age music given a "pagan" twist).

Thighpaulsandra (Tim Lewis), a former Julian Cope collaborator turned electronic musician, debuted solo with the EP Some Head (Eskaton, 2000), that contains two lengthy tracks: the 16-minute Black Nurse (a three-movement suite that runs the gamut from Brian Eno-esque organ-driven ambient music to tribal/ceremonial music to a piano-driven ambient/cosmic motif) and the 14-minute Tudor Fruits (mainly horn dissonance, percussion and noise).
Thighpaulsandra's double-CD album I, Thighpaulsandra (Eskaton, 2001), with guests Julian Cope and members of Spiritualized (the band he joined in 2000), is the electronic equivalent of George Harrison's All Things Must Pass: a cauldron of naive experimental ideas, a pastiche of different styles and different influences, that are held together only by the ideology of the artist.

The Plastic Spider Thing (Eskaton, 2002) is a remix album.

The Golden Hare With A Voice Of Silver (Eskaton, 2002) is a career retrospective.

In 2003, Coil also released four live albums (some of the worst live albums ever released, thanks to the low cost of manufacturing CDs). The 10" The Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence (Beta-lactam Ring, 2003) offers two suites that replay old ideas.

The triple-disc Ans (Threshold House, 2003) collects compositions by Johnn Balance, Ossian Brown, Peter Christopherson, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov for a pioneering device, the ANS, that converted graphic designs into music.

John Balance died in december 2004, but, far from dismissing Coil, Christopherson increased its output.

Coil's three-LP set The Ape Of Naples (Threshold House, 2006) was Peter Christopherson's personal tribute to John Balance, obtained by remixing unreleased sessions that were originally meant for an album titled Backwards. It contains the third version of Teenage Lightning. The deluxe reissue of The Ape of Naples (2009) includes an album titled The New Backwards, which is material from Backwards remixed by Christopherson with help from Danny Hyde, notably the nine-minute lightweight industrial dance of Careful What You Wish For.

The double-CD Black Antlers (Threshold House, 2006) is a collection of funereal songs including Sex With Sun Ra and the fourth version of Teenage Lightning, among much disposable music.

The double-CD Remote Viewer (Threshold House, 2006) marked instead a return to the dance music of Love's Secret Domain.

When it finally surfaced, the lost album Backwards (2015) didn't offer anything better than what had already appeared here and there. The eight-minute Heaven's Blade is a more disco-oriented version of the demonic dances of the Sisters Of Mercy and the seven-minute Fire of the Mind is an expressionist piece wrapped in shrapnel noise. But much of the album sounds amateurish and sometimes even clownish.