Coil

Coil emerged primarily through the work of vocalist and musician John Balance alongside programmer and visual artist Peter Christopherson, augmented by assorted additional members and participants, establishing themselves as one of the most revered and mythologized acts to arise within Britain’s post-industrial landscape. Launched in 1982 initially as a splinter from Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, the ensemble devoted more than twenty years to producing uncompromising and frequently transcendent music that examined subjects including alchemy, dreams, the occult, drugs, and sexuality. Their enduring reach extends across goth rock, dark ambient, neofolk, techno, and experimental music broadly. The apocalyptic Horse Rotorvator from 1986 continues to be considered the group’s defining achievement and among the decade’s standout albums. After engaging with acid house on Love’s Secret Domain in 1991, the band pursued auxiliary projects such as ELpH and Black Light District that probed drone possibilities. Later releases shifted between song-focused works including 1999’s Musick to Play in the Dark and noisier experimental efforts like Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil in 2000. Coil formally disbanded after Balance’s sudden death in 2004, though The Ape of Naples appeared the following year as the final album. Numerous further posthumous releases and reissues have appeared since Christopherson’s passing in 2010, encompassing the 1990s studio album Backwards along with soundtracks such as Sara Dale’s Sensual Massage.

John Balance first applied the Coil name to solo material in 1982. Christopherson entered the following year, after which the pair staged their initial performance at London’s Magenta Club. They also joined John Gosling, another former Psychic TV associate alongside Balance and Christopherson, within the Zos Kia undertaking. Transparent, issued early in 1984 and credited jointly to Zos Kia and Coil, marked an early document. Coil next delivered the one-sided seventeen-minute single How to Destroy Angels. Balance and Christopherson subsequently enlisted Possession’s Stephen Thrower, J.G. “Foetus” Thirlwell, and Gavin Friday for the 1984 debut album Scatology, a visceral and primal exercise in sculpted industrial noise centered on themes of alchemy and transmutation.

Coil next turned toward visual media. In late 1984 they recorded a version of “Tainted Love,” yielding a widely prohibited hallucinogenic video that cast Soft Cell’s Marc Almond as the Angel of Death. Although domestically controversial, the clip ultimately entered the Museum of Modern Art archives. Coil supplied the score for Derek Jarman’s 1985 film The Angelic Conversation, releasing the soundtrack itself in 1994. After the 1986 split release Nightmare Culture with Boyd Rice and Current 93, Christopherson and Balance invited Stephen Thrower into the lineup on a permanent basis. The resulting trio produced Horse Rotorvator that same year, incorporating classical, jazz, and Middle Eastern elements, together with the EP The Anal Staircase.

Coil released The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser in 1987, a set of atmospheric gothic instrumentals originally intended for but omitted from Clive Barker’s horror film, followed by Gold Is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders), comprising demos and outtakes from the Horse Rotorvator sessions. Unnatural History, gathering rare and unreleased material, concluded the band’s first phase in 1990. Coil resurfaced the next year with Love’s Secret Domain, whose sound bore clear traces of acid house. Stolen and Contaminated Songs, another collection of outtakes from that period, followed in 1992.

Drew McDowall began collaborating with Coil in the early 1990s and became an official member in 1995. During this interval the group signed to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records imprint for the projected album Backwards. Although that project remained unreleased at the time, Coil gained notable mainstream visibility through contributions to NIN remix collections including Fixed, Further Down the Spiral, and Closer to God. They also issued Worship the Glitch under the ELpH name and recorded A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room as Black Light District in 1996.

Between 1998 and 1999 Coil issued four seasonal EPs—Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, and Winter Solstice—later gathered as Moon’s Milk (In Four Phases). After adding Thighpaulsandra, they released Astral Disaster in 1999, Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1 that same year and Vol. 2 in 2000, Queens of the Circulating Library in 2000, and further limited editions. Concert activity resumed for the first time since the early 1980s, resulting in four Live albums issued in 2003.

On November 13, 2004, Balance fell from the second-floor landing of his residence and died. Recordings completed with his participation, among them …And the Ambulance Died in His Arms and The Ape of Naples, appeared the following year. After Balance’s death Christopherson moved to Thailand, continued working as the Threshold HouseBoys Choir, reunited briefly with Throbbing Gristle for performances, and initiated multiple Coil archival efforts including a planned full-catalog reissue series. The New Backwards, an updated treatment of the Backwards sessions, received a limited 2008 release within a vinyl edition of The Ape of Naples on Important Records before appearing as a standalone CD. The expansive live DVD box set Colour Sound Oblivion surfaced in 2010.

Christopherson died in his sleep on November 24, 2010. Coil associate Danny Hyde oversaw the 2014 Cold Spring release Recoiled, comprising previously unheard Coil remixes of Nine Inch Nails tracks from The Downward Spiral. Backwards itself appeared on the label the next year, while additional reissues emerged briefly under the Threshold Archives banner. In 2017 Optimo Music issued A Cold Cell in Bangkok, Christopherson’s 2008 remix of the Ape of Naples track “Cold Cell.” Further archival material and reissues followed on labels including Dais and Prescription. Swanyard, a compilation of previously unreleased mixes and versions drawn from Hyde’s archive, was released by Infinite Fog Productions in 2019. The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex + 2, containing music from a 1992 VHS-only sexual-education documentary, appeared on Musique pour la Danse. Another previously unreleased soundtrack, Sara Dale’s Sensual Massage, followed on Infinite Fog in 2020.