For fans of: Love’s Secret Domain
Born of the countercultural hotbed of Thatcher's England, John Balance and Peter Christohperson's music as Coil may be the most explicitly occult (and outwardly queer) of all of the British post-punk and industrial sounds of the 1980s. The origins of Coil can be found in Christopherson's contribution to the very outfit that coined the term industrial music, and the transgressive sound, art, and theater they deployed as Throbbing Gristle. Splitting from TG with the meeting of Zos Kia's John Balance in 1983, Christopherson's fruitful collaborations with Balance would carve out a body of surrealist, psychedelic and "sidereal" music on the fringe of post-punk and experimental culture for the next three decades. By the early-1990s the duo had brought on supporting members Drew McDowall, Stephen Thrower and William Breeze and an assimilation of UK club music and American minimalist composers into their sound. This all began with the unlikely meeting of British rave, ecstasy, and club culture colliding head-on with their morose, cinematic, and surrealist themes heard on 1991's "Love's Secret Domain".
Now, 30 years since it's release on Chicago's legendary industrial and electronic label, WaxTrax!, the album enjoys a gentle remaster polishing by Josh Bonati from original source materials, and new liner notes from Drew Daniel of Matmos. This wildly energetic and transitional era for Coil is explored by their friends and collaborators in a series of interviews for The Quietus, "Further Back And Faster: A Return to Coil's Love's Secret Domain". Containing all 13 tracks as featured on the original CD edition, this quality reissue is the essential primer to Coil's later phase, as heard on the ill-fated "Backwards" album for Trent Reznor's Nothing label and 1996's "Black Light District", where they began their venture into an expressly ambient and nocturnal passage. For those looking to explore the 22 years of mystic, psychedelic, rapturously unique and deeply beguiling music John and Peter created over the decades of Coil's existence, there is no better guide to their cultural continuum than David Keenan's "England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground". More concise compendiums tend to be on the exiguous side, but few resources online balance Coil's deep plumbing of the esoteric with their occasional alignment with the cultural milieu better than Russell Cuzner's Strange World Of... feature for The Quietus, "Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil". --(JP)