On A COIL BENDER
While I read Everything Keeps Dissolving in 2023, I went on a bit of a Coil bender, not only revisiting their catalogue chronologically, but looking out the releases that I was unfamiliar with.
I’ve listened to Coil as long as I’ve listened to any industrial music, but I never particularly went in for the obsessional following they garnered. Early on I was a Throbbing Gristle devotee, yes, angry & insular, but as I grew up and my mindset turned outwards, I was looking elsewhere for my cosmic music. It was only in recent years that I realised Coil had discreetly become one of my favourite artists, although even this was based on only a handful of their later albums.
Coil did have a habit, along with their immediate contemporaries, of releasing an awful lot of music, and not all of it of the same quality. It was interesting to see how some of these less essential tracks became the joining threads between their different eras of work, and that those threads were the ones that made the whole thing hang together across twenty-odd years.
So these mixes are what I put together for myself, for when I next want to go On A Coil Bender. Obviously they have therefore been selected and sequenced according to my own tastes, and I may have left out your favourite later-period ritual drone opus, but nevertheless I hope others find them useful and enjoyable, particularly in this era of only renting your music from streaming platforms. Not all of this material is available there.
Mixcloud does not allow mixes with multiple tracks from the same artist, so On A Coil Bender will live here. File size limitations have meant I need to split the first mix in two, but at the time of writing I’m still finalising the second volume so this shouldn’t be a problem. Perhaps in time I’ll add my other mixes here too.
ON A COIL BENDER Volume I : 1983-89 : Black Sunrise
ON A COIL BENDER Volume II : 1990-95 : Out Of Light Cometh Darkness
This was perhaps the most interesting period to investigate - the supposed acid house period that every know-it-all industrial fan likes to harp on about. Their third album Love’s Secret Domain does indeed contain a few tracks where you can see that influence, the singles The Snow and Windowpane being the most obvious, but at least half of the album is closer in sound to what had come before. Once again it was the non-album singles & compilation tracks that helped tell the whole story.
Part one was sequenced in audio software and mainly features the more familiar Coil sound, part two is the more beat-driven and was therefore mixed live. I included one track from the bootlegged demo for the original Backwards album that would have been released through Trent Reznor’s Nothing label, but decided not to include any of Coil’s excellent remix work for Reznor’s group Nine Inch Nails. For similar reasons I eventually decided to remove the erotic new age lounge jam that is the theme from The Gay Man’s Guide To Safer Sex, as it just stuck out too much like a weird thumb. We at least have the theme from Derek Jarman’s Blue as a brief amusing interlude. My favourite discovery here is the single-only track Protection that closes this volume.
