Coil

Threshold Archives began as a project by Peter Christopherson in 2006. At the time, Peter was involved in many projects that consumed much of his time including Soisong, a re-launched Throbbing Gristle, and The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, in addition to assembling the final Coil album, The New Backwards, and the massive Colour Sound Oblivion box. With the passage of time, intercontinental moves, and record label bankruptcies, many master recordings and artworks were lost, damaged, or degrading.

The title Horse Rotorvator is explained in the liner notes as a device large enough to "plough up the waiting world," created from the bones of the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Bay City Rollers this isn't. On the group's second full album, Coil continue the refinement of brute noise and creepily serene arrangements into a truly modern psychedelia, from tribal drumming and death march guitars to disturbing samples and marching band samples and back. Balance shares the same haggard, mystic vocal delivery common to fellow explorers of the edge like David Tibet and Edward Ka-Spel, but he has his own blasted and burnt touch to it all. His lyrical subjects range from emotional extremism of many kinds to blunt, often homoerotic imagery (matched at points in the artwork and packaging) and meditations on death…

This legendary 12" was released and re-released many times, and remains a landmark in the Coil discography. With numerous variations on Coil's most distinctive club track, John Balance and Peter Christopherson cut the recording in 1990 and the work marks a period when the group had all but vanished from the eye of the industrial scene, but was resurfacing in the post-acid house nexus. Vocalist Rose McDowell and programmer Danny Hyde push the track to extraordinary blissful peaks. The original 12" Windowpane release was published in a limited-edition picture disc of 5,000 copies, of which - according to possible Coil myth-making - more than a third were destroyed deliberately as an act of performance art…

Coil's first official full-length album, Scatology, is one of the essential landmarks in the group's discography and, moreover, one of the '80s industrial scene's more vital and influential recordings. This is the first part of the essential Coil trilogy that also includes Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain. The 1984 album exhibits the group at its early industrial stage, in transition to the undefined genre of astral noise psychedelia that Coil would inhabit for the following decades without peer or precedent. The core duo of Peter Christopherson and John Balance are joined by Clint Ruin (aka Jim Thirlwell), whose role in the production cannot be underestimated, as well as Stephen E. Thrower, Alternative TV's Alex Ferguson, vocalist Gavin Friday of Virgin Prunes, and one Raoul Revere (who is in fact British camp pop legend and Soft Cell vocalist Marc Almond)…

A 21 minute EP-length CD from Coil and one of their alter-egos, ELpH. In the CD booklet track one is attributed to Coil and tracks two, three and four are attributed to ELpH. The three ELpH tracks are more distinctively Coil-esque than the Coil track. The first of them is a slow, meditative ambient piece, which gives way to a very dark, intense (and all too brief) ambient piece. The final track is a reprise of the first ELpH track, which is now given time to develop further.

The Angelic Conversation is an extraordinary chapter in the Coil discography, a soundtrack to the 1985 film by Derek Jarman, The Angelic Conversation. Coil took the approach of remixing and reconfiguring orchestral samples; the sound of an orchestra tuning up is used frequently, expanding on the bleak and desolate sound as a perfect accompaniment to Jarman's film. Incidentally, Coil's Peter Christopherson worked as a leading sound designer in the film and created its incidental music - much of which is included here to fill out the CD. Given that the film's sound was made with the Coil touch throughout, the album stands as an entirely cohesive work.

The Unnatural History series puts obscure, collectable, and out of print singles, compilation tracks, and soundtracks on CD, making those ultra-limited works available all in one place.
Unnatural History (1990). The tracks were recorded during the 1983-86 timeline and include not only the classic Balance / Christopherson mind bending electronic surreality as Coil but also include three tracks with Boyd Rice when they were known as Sickness of Snakes which released one EP titled "Nightmare Culture"…

The use of the word gold in the album title is ironic, since a collection of outtakes and leftovers is generally considered to weigh in well under the gold scale. With a group such as the evolving Coil collaboration, however, there's the chance that a well-conceived collection of archive material could have quite a positive impact, whatever the relative status of individual tracks in terms of what projects they were first created for. Rejected material can become a highlight out of a combination of whatever unusual aspects already exist in a piece as well as the dramatic impact of a newly conceived program flow. Gold Is the Metal is a great example of this since the individual tracks continually present challenges to the listener combined with a sonic magnetism…

Originally released around the turn of the millennium, Musick to Play in the Dark featured a restarted Coil at bay, with original members John (later Jhonn) Balance (R.I.P.) and Peter Christopherson joined by synthesist/bassist Thighpaulsandra, and Drew McDowall (replaced by Rose McDowall on the second volume). These are long-form works, collections of mood pieces in several modes, and what’s interesting (and somewhat predictable) is that the patience displayed while shifting in between these modes creates a tension and space that feels… almost removed from music by a step, as if the performance decided to slowly back away from Coil at a respectful, totality-fearing distance (or maybe it was the psychic force of their music that pushed it all back)…

Truly one of the highlights in an excellent catalog of work, Stolen and Contaminated Songs isn't even a proper "album," but a collection of outtakes from the Love's Secret Domain sessions. And what sessions they were to have such a wealth of superb material that was leftover. Showcasing Coil's diversity, the album veers from the orchestrated classicisms of "Original Chaostrophy" and "Corybantic Ennui" to the slow, mutant lounge shuffle of "Omlagus Garfungiloops" and the utter despair of "Who'll Fall?" The last track there is a highlight, a detuned guitar and phone line noises underscore a harrowing answering machine message from someone who's friend has just committed suicide. Haunting in its execution and utterly compelling…