The last decade has seen a number of significant unearthings from the technocryptic discography of Coil. Most notably among these, the lost 1996 album "Backwards", finally exhumed and released in 2015 by Cold Spring Records. This week sees a sanctioned reissue of it's 1991 predecessor, "Love's Secret Domain", bridging the chronological gap between the previous reissue of it's surrealist sister album, "Stolen & Contaminated Songs". Born of the countercultural hotbed and its response to the constrictions of Margaret Thatcher's England, Jhon 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 Jhon Balance in 1983, Christopherson's fruitful collaborations with Balance would carve out a body of 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 Stephen Thrower, Drew McDowall, Ossian Brown, Danny Hyde, 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".
This wildly energetic and transitional era for Coil is explored by their friend and collaborator, Stephen Thrower, in a recent and revealing interview for The Quietus, "Further Back and Faster: A Return to Coil'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. Containing all 13 tracks as featured on the original compact disc edition, this quality reissue is the essential primer to Coil's later phase, as heard on the ill-fated "Backwards" album for the Nothing label, briefed in the "Trent Reznor On Coil & Nine Inch Nails" interview, and 1996's "Black Light District", where they began their venture into an expressly ambient and nocturnal passage. Insight into this mercurial era of their music and assimilation and perversion of then-developing sounds in electronic music is revealed through the inner workings of their "Obscure Mechanics" in philosophical and musing interviews published in the pages of The Wire. There remains no better guide to the mystic, psychedelic, rapturously unique and deeply beguiling music Jhon and Peter created over the decades of Coil's existence, and the wider British countercultural 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 bridge Coil's deep plumbing of the esoteric and the cultural milieu of the time better than Russell Cuzner's feature for The Quietus, "Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil".
