Rose & Boyd | Spell ‘’93

Three in one, one in three...

this clip i edited weeks ago is driving me fucking nuts

☣︎ Introduction ☣︎

Hello, my name is ███████ but you can call me drone or 7. I am 19 and I go by it/he pronouns. I am a sometimes force masc content creator but primarily just a transfag that doomscrolls on tumblr. I have been on T since April 2024 and planning on getting top surgery in 2025/2026.

My primary kinks are impact play, rope bondage, latex, leather, dronification, bootlicking, hypnosis, and autoandrophilia. I am also a collector of vintage pornography. I also currently have a mistress ( @makemeyourcanvas ) who I have been in a relationship with since 2021.

Besides kink, I have a major interest in music. My favorite bands are Coil, Throbbing Gristle, The Birthday Party/Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Test Dept, Manic Street Preachers, Nine Inch Nails, and Nitzer Ebb. I have been getting more into Einsturzende Neubauten recently, so I’ll be reblogging a lot of Neubauten content.

Inbox is open, be as perverted as you want.

If you are a bigot, under 18, chaser, or a TERF you are not welcome on my blog.

Currently listening to this banger, I can give this my highest recommendations, being the last album ever produced by Coil, it leaves a bittersweet taste in my mouth, but the way the tracks are composed leave me speechless

Did you know?

Coil (the band) existed before humans did? God and Satan used to fuck on it A LOT.

They never mentioned it in the bible because humans simply weren’t ready. Only when time was right, when our brains evolved enough and knowledge of the world had been accumulated did the music reach us through the two Avatars known as “Peter Christopherson” and “John Balance”.

THE DISCOGRAPHY PRINCIPLE, Episode 4: Coil, or: Better Git It in Your Soul

As I'm writing this piece, everyone who knows their shit is spasmodically waiting for the physical repress of Moon's Milk (In Four Phases) to hit store shelves, assuming they haven't bought it off the site. All the people who have been knowing their shit since before it was cool to do so already had the FLACs on their hard disk drives. Not to brag, but I'm part of that second group. I love gay people, I love Creative Commons licenses, I love what happens when you rub them together (in case you're wondering, you have a phenomenon called teenage lightning).

[As you're going to see throughout the piece, the remaster did come out, and it's glorious]

If you ask anyone they will probably tell you Horse Rotorvator is Coil's best, and it's not like they're wrong, but it may be a bit limiting. It goes about the same as Incunabula; refer back to the Autechre post for more clarification, but in short it's an incredibly good record that takes some extra work done in the present time because some of its sound palette choices end up making it sound a bit uncanny, if not dated. I'd rather not go with "dated" for this specific record simply because Scatology exists, and it doesn't get anymore '80s than that, not necessarily in a positive way. If we take out The Anal Staircase (by the way, great title, guys!) the rest of the tracks on Horse Rotorvator have some actually quite futureproof stuff going on, on average - sometimes bordering on prescient, like on Penetralia, just barely removed from 2010s brostep aggression, and sometimes I wish they had the hardware to process that stuff. But the big-ass reverb on the snare and percussion, the sheer nudity of the production, the way the orchestral bits and samples are integrated into the arrangements kind of make it sound like the record is striving really hard for a sound that simply could not be attained at the time of realization. The great part is that literally nothing I said in this paragraph is a negative at all. Compare Penetralia to, for instance, Restless Day from Scatology; or maybe even compare Ostia to Tenderness of Wolves. Both are great, sure, but while the Rotorvator just don't check out at times, the Scatology ones seem to have an expiration date written on them. Only one exception to this rule: At the Heart of It All. If I had to draw another comparison, this would probably link up to The First Five Minutes After Death, and this time it's the latter paling in comparison to the former. It sounds sickly and isolated in a special unique way, unable to fight back, devoid of any possible bite: it sounds like it saw the actual horse rotorvator, the Four Horsemen slitting the horses' throats and meshing the jawbones into a gigantic, earthshattering plough. Nothing exists beyond At the Heart of It All. Nothing survives.

Coil, after all, always flirted with a sense of profound despair, even at their funniest and most tongue-in-cheek. This is relevant: not many other bands of their era display, or even have, that same sense of humor about not just themselves but the whole world; consequently, not many have reached the same scope of intent, and the same successful realization of said intents, as Coil. Partially unrelated: one of my favourite stories about them is that one time in the early 2000s when the rest of the band couldn't find Jhonn Balance after a gig in Greece — I think at least, I'm going off the top of my head here — so on the following morning they were forced to board their plane to their next gig in mainland Europe without him. So as they're about to play the gig without him, seeing as he simply isn't there, magically he shows up, and nobody could even imagine how he'd managed to get there on time. At the time Jhonn was already having big trouble with alcohol, had already broken up with Peter Christopherson. Many of these things I came to know through some tried-and-true Coil obsessives, and there's apparently a lot of them around: people who exchanged correspondence, cassette tapes, memories with some of the collaborators in the band or even Balance and Christopherson themselves. There's basically an army of unauthorized Coil biographers out there. But staying more strictly on the point, it's impossible to separate Coil and the lives of those who made up Coil; therefore it is impossible to separate Coil and life itself.

Some of you may remember me mentioning the aborted Autechre/Coil collab back in episode one of this series. In that very same conversation, we had a really deep dive into how Coil's attraction to — mostly Western — esotericism, even the most downright evil and uncomfortable parts of it (how could we ever forget the iconic "the industrial use of semen will revolutionise the human race" shirt?), stemmed from a more general interest in the fullness of life; and the more I think about that, the more understandable Coil's visual fascination with nature is. Four EPs, one for each of the major sun-related astronomical events introducing the four seasons; the luscious woods on the covers of the two Musick to Play in the Dark records; the rocky cliffs and the goats being a perfect aesthetic fold to The Remote Viewer's abrasive/ascetic hurdy-gurdy drones. All of this accompanied to music that seems to strive for the most eldritch effect possible — in one way or another, Coil's sound design is like looking very, very, very deep into the bottom of an abyss of your choice simply for the fun of it, or rather for the curiosity, the doubt that something of incalculable value might lie down there. We as humans really enjoy getting to know stuff much more than we enjoy actually knowing stuff, the progress of process is much more enticing to us than the staticity of completion. Coil still sound, twenty years after Balance's death and almost fifteen years after after Christopherson's death, like they are disciples. They listen just as much as we do.

And this predisposition to listen is specifically what makes them particularly apt at speaking, too. Coil express depth because they feel deeply, ultimately, and they don't fear emotion — any emotion. Which means they are just at ease analysing the diffusion of gossip and its subsequent deformation and bloating as they are discussing alcoholism and the search for oblivion, and what's better: these topics are discussed in two sister tracks (namely Red Queen and Ether). Both tracks, alienated from the context of their respective records, sound like relatively soothing jazzy piano ballads with some lunatic saying the most out-of-pocket shit possible on top of them, and some pretty fucked up background noises going on, Red Queen being the easiest possible application of this concept. But the effect gets somehow creepier when Jhonn Balance actually introduces a recognizable melody into the mix. This is probably the best moment to talk about Jhonn Balance's voice.

If I'd talked to Dog about this piece, they probably would once again link me to Drew Schorno's piece about "vestigial shamans" (you can find it here). Balance's singing is not about technique, but at the same time it's not as simple as the boomer-like concept of mojo, either. Balance could barely carry a melody through most of the time, to a point where some Coil tracks sound like they'd benefit heavily from a guest vocalist; early on, I believe, Coil — perhaps Balance himself — must have been convinced that was the case too, and for proof just look at the plethora of external one-off collaborators brought in the fold (among many notable names, one stands tall: the legendary JG Thirlwell). Then you try to actually substitute Balance, or maybe even sing your own version of the track, and it doesn't work anymore*. It simply stops being compelling in a way that is very hard to quantify. Yet another name popping up from the Autechre piece, i.e. that of Tom Waits: it's that lived-life element mixed with the more strictly performance-related aspects of vocal interpretation that makes the difference, sure, but it's about how you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Tom Waits achieves this by virtue of his life-long effort to turn into his own character, i.e. by way of sheer commitment to the bit if you're so inclined; Jhonn Balance — ironic that, of these two, he should be the one using an actual pseudonym — does that by simply being a vestigial shaman, a person so profoundly wired for jumping in and out of some other world that he seemed, for better or for worse, to be unable to stop doing that.

*There is, of course, only one exception to this rule, and that is Rose McDowall, i.e. most likely a vestigial shaman herself, at least judging by her Facebook. I am lucky enough to be her virtual friend on there, and she seems like an incredibly endearing person — speaking frankly, I'd love to buy her a drink and have a conversation at one point…

The shamanicity (is that even a word?) of Coil is stunningly matched by the sound design and production: so materic it's tangible, so abstract it forces you to wonder what's on the other side of the door. You don't always want to know. In the summer of 2016 I was listening to Batwings in a dark room, for some reason, and there was a crucifix in this room; I shone a flashlight on it and the crucifix projected its shadow on the wall and at that point I very distinctly felt something powerfully trying to make its way through my ribs, into my chest. I immediately left the room. To this day this remains the sole thing in my entire life that made me firmly and unequivocally grasp possibilities beyond what we see normally. And as much as I love waxing poetic over Balance's lyrics and vocals, in this case I believe it was mostly the repetitive, simple keyboard figure — it's almost as if they'd managed to shrink down a church organ and you could now play it, volume obviously adjusted for size, within your breast pocket. But the whole array of clicks and pops, or the insanely advanced vocal processing, displayed throughout the Musick to Play in the Dark/Moon's Milk era really elevates the composition and arrangements to new heights, making them a true spectacle to listen to even on the most low-specs sound systems.

The beautiful thing is that Coil doesn't necessarily need the extra bells and whistles and, more importantly, that they know when and where to use them. This is on display throughout most of their discography, but nowhere is it clearer than on The Ape of Naples, a posthumous record that is entirely built to represent Balance's aural eulogy. One of the most overlooked tracks on the record, I'd argue, is Tattooed Man, basically a simple pop song revolving around laid-back percussion and a simple accordion melody — until, of course, Balance himself intervenes almost shouting a tale of dead lookalikes, of love and hate, of self-image and acceptance (or lack thereof) of finality. It's hard to explain why this track would be more touching to me than the more openly emotional Fire of the Mind (link) (which has one of the best opening verses in the history of recorded music, if you ask me) or Going Up (my main issue with this one is that it comes after Teenage Lightning and Amber Rain, both incredible tracks that scarred me for life — in a positive way, but I do realize its necessity in the economy of the full record of course. It just is). I guess it's touching to find that at the end of the line, even resolute spiritworld straddlers get a bit scared of their own powers. But after all, the main requisite for being a shaman is feeling more than the others — being, maybe, more human than the others.

Coil - Southpark

Current 93 | Earth Covers Earth “93

Coil: Musick To Play In The Dark² (2000)

1991

I feel so mentally and physically ehxausted but we still have to go visit a few sites today outside of the city and prepare many things for tomorrow... im laying down with my eyes closed, listening to Coil, trying to regenerate myself even a tiny bit. It's too hot for me...