Saturday 30 March 2013

COIL, 1979-2004

Coil started their career characterised as one of the best prospects in music experimentation back in the 80's, with the emergence of electronic music, moving the work of other pioneers in the 60s and 70s into a completely new path.

Coil finished their career, giving a completely new definition to what experimental music is - an artistic creation, which in the end, only 50% has to do with music (experimentation and improvisation). The rest 50% is philosophy, theology, poetry, literature, social/human sciences, painting, alchemy, psychedelic drugs and going deeper and deeper down the spiral of introspection.

Along with other people like Genesis P.Orridge, David Tibet and Steven Stapleton, they consisted the very core of the occult experimental music that started in the 70s in the UK.

Coil consisted of Johnn Balance, 1962-2004

 

and Peter 'Sleazy' Cristopherson, 1955-2010

 



The pure essence of Coil manifests in a statement of Johnn Balance in an interview:
 "I'm obsessed with the idea of turning base matter into gold, transmuting base materials, i.e. raw sound, into something else."

Nothing sounded like Coil, nothing will sound like Coil. With this post, I launch a series of album reviews on COIL, the band that contributed most in the change of electronic and especially industrial music in the 80s, into something completely new. A complete discography of COIL can be found in

http://www.brainwashed.com/coil/music/

Around 90 pages. The reason for it is basically that, especially during the later years, each song's performance was different than the previous one, not only in terms of music but of lyrics as well, with John Balance improvising on every gig and creating a fascinating realm of similarly sounding words into a psychedelic dreamscape. Bearing similarities to The Temple of The Psychic Youth, formulated By Genesis P.Orridge, Christopherson's collaborator in Psychic TV and the fathers of the industrial musical movement, Throbbing Gristle; "every message is valid only at the precise time that it occurs, nothing can be the same withing the Flow"

 Album reviews will be random in order. Why should they be otherwise for a band like this? COIL 1979-2004

I close this inaugural post with the COIL manifesto from the Trasparent album, when they were known as ZOS KIA, a rare AMAZING interview of Coil in a Dutch music show where John Balance describes the essence behind the band and the first performance of ZOS KIA in London. Enjoy!

The Price Of Existence Is Eternal Warfare

COIL is a hidden universal. A code. A key for which the WHOLE does not exist. Is NONEXISTENT, in silence and secrecy. A spell. A spiral. A serpents SHt round a female cycle. A whirlwind. A double helix. DNA. Electricity and elementals. Atonal noise, and brutal poetry. COIL is amorphous. Luminous and constant change. Inbuilt obSOLescence. Inbuilt Disobedience. A vehicle for obsessions. Dreamcycles in perpetual motion. We are cutthroats. Infantile. Immaculately Conceived. Dis-eased. The Virus is Khaos. The cure is Delirium.
COIL are Archangels of KHAOS. The price we pay for existence is eternal Warfare. There is a hidden coil of strength, dormant beneath the sediment of convention. Dreams lead us under the surface, over the edge, to the Delerium state. UNCHAINED. Past impositions and false universals. Reassembling into OUR order.
COIL. Who has the nerve to dream, create and kill, while the whole moves every part stands still. Our rationale is the irrationAL. Hallucination is the truth our graves are dug with. COIL is compulsion. URGE and construction. Dead letters fall from our shedding skins. Kabbala and KHAOS. Thanatos and Thelema. Archangels and Antichrists. Open and Close. Truth and Deliberation. Traps and Disorientation.
Coil exist between Here and Here. We are Janus Headed. Plural. Out of time. Out of place. Out of Spite. An antidote for when people become poisons.
COIL know how to destroy Angels. How to paralyse. Imagine the world in a bottle. We take the bottle, smash it, and open your throat with it. I warn you we are Murderous. We massacre the logical revolts. We know everything! We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute Truth. NOW, HERE, US.

Coil, 1983


Jhonn Balance interview, 1988 by AbyssMariner