Sideways Into Coil

Written by Maxime Canelli; translated by Lamuya.

Back to main page ✿ Texte original (en français)

When Tessa sent me an SMS asking what the 3 (or 5) most beautiful Coil albums are to my ears, I knew this wouldn't be an easy one. I wrote this as an e-mail, which I intended to send to the couple of friends with whom I had recently discussed this band — this obsession of mine — then I thought I could share it with everybody:

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Who could one day manage to order and arrange, on a cold linear timeline, everything there is to say about COIL? Effervescent matter doesn't gladly remain kept in a book or a box.

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Walking through the labyrinth, we can read stories about:

　trying astral projection at eleven years old

　blurring the frontiers between dream and reality

　vanishing on the rocky English shores

　receiving a revelation from an angel on the dance floor

　falling from two storeys and dying

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I apologize for every simplification and schematizion of the events that happened.

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On a fan page, people trying to describe Coil in three words, sometimes using the texts from the records:

　gay pagan explorers

　something. something. something.

　black lodge cabaret

　true modern gnostics

　love's secret domain

　light shining darkly

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Coil are John and Peter — capture the image of the couple.

Coil as a couple, two disparate and complementary components, magnetic lovers. SOMETHING is born from these two personalities, such two different existences.

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Polarities:

　subconscious / conscious

　intuition / control

　immediacy / responsibility

　transparency / restraint

　fragility / roots

　vision / realisation

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Go in heart first, not head first

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The idea appears that Coil's music does not come from them but through them:

"The music just flows through us, it is actually not our music at all."

For instance, records released under the name "ELpH" (Worship the Glitch, 1995):

"Elph, yeah, it's channeling. That's why we're finding it difficult to do another album because we're not sure if they're still broadcasting. Someone else said this is entities being channelled by you and I had to say yes because it really did feel like that for like a week something opened up above us and poured into us. We were constantly inspired and then it finished transmission. . . we felt it finish. Hopefully we can open the channels again. This was in 96 the Elph thing. I think we consciously set up these channels - we didn't say let's. . . "

Or learning that Moon's Milk is a set of four recordings, moments captured precisely at the solstices and equinoxes of a single year — the recorder was on for a few hours during these four instants in 1998. Music determined by these astral positions, and a little more.

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At the end of the 2000s, several simultaneous changes:

The band no longer lives/records in London, but in a quiet house on the coast near Bristol

Formally, the music goes from complex and intricate to simple and clear.

From 2000: "[the recent albums are made as] instantaneous mood poems, with that raw and clear thing that we liked. Everything we're doing now is faster, clearer, cleaner, where before we would think and think, and wrestle with ourselves and the technology, and fold it all in and in, collapse and conceal and tangle everything"

Convoluted — as felt in Horse Rotorvator (1986), Love's Secret Domain (1991)

Simple — as felt in Musick to Play in the Dark (1999-2000), Moon's Milk (recorded in 1998), Time Machines (1999)

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A chasm in their discography: 1993 recording sessions that never found an exact, finished form. They moved on before that happened. The music reappears, diluted, in other recordings: The Ape of Naples (2005, as a homage from Peter to John who had just passed away in 2004, in which these old tracks take on a new meaning) and The New Backwards (2008, a sort of alternative rendition of the same sessions). Peter disappears in 2010. Bootlegs from these 1993 sessions, finished by others, keep coming out: think what you will of them, but they were released without the band. In any case: a myriad of possibilities, nothing is fixed…

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Towards the end, the band started making concerts, culminating in a 2002 tour where the band on stage consisted of six gay men: I think that's a very important dimension in Coil's music — the "Tainted Love" cover in 1985 when AIDS was starting its devastation — the OST for A Gay Man's Guide to Safer Sex — a very strong kinship with many gay artists, Marc Almond, William Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Kenneth Anger, friends and influences often cited in interviews.

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There's a paragraph to be written about British land, the rivers of London, the English tradition of the occult, but I should go there myself first so I don't just end up just writing about my fantasies

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While making a compilation for my friend Jeanne who's unfamiliar with the band, I found myself looking for pictures to illustrate the four sides of my two cassettes containing two hours' worth of music. I had little paper material, and the pictures that fit — four and not one more — were:

　an eye, propped open with fingers, before a contact lens is inserted

　a man watching us through a glass of wine, as an invitation, but also as a face, someone disappearing behind the glass

　a parchment containing the typescript of Kerouac's On the Road

　an ambiguous perspective view of stairs, we can't tell whether they're going up or down

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"I smashed my head through a window at our house, but luckily it was Victorian glass, so it broke in chunks and not shards, which was a God-given miracle. A Goddess-given miracle. It didn't cut me, really. Well, only a little bit, but not much. So then I went downstairs and started attacking my arms with the glass. But by then, I'd already worked it into a magickal thing. I thought, "I'm in a real rage here. I need something to shift, and I'm not sure what." So we - he - Peter - fortuitously, foresightedly grabbed these blank album covers and smeared them on my face and arms. And then we made a recording with the broken glass. I had reached more than a red rage. You know that state? It just carried on. It took about a week to calm down from it."

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Go in through the back door — a collection of hidden tracks to begin with:

　Sideways Into Coil

　1. “First Dark Ride”
　2. “Tainted Love”
　3. “The Wheel”
　4. “Comfortable”
　5. “Lost Rivers of London”
　6. “Spastiche”
　7. “Pre-Original Chaostrophy”
　8. “Light Shining Darkly”
　9. “Heartworms”
　10. “How to Destroy Angels II”
　11. “The Sea Priestess”
　12. “The Coppice Meat”
　13. “The Halliwell Hammers (2)”

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