the Coil thread

[Guest Greg Reason]

It's a double 10" vinyl; the same records as the normal pressing but in a handmade sleeve

 

This is the only collage cover I've seen, all the others that people have posted photos of were all painted

[awepittance]

oh come on it wasnt cheesy

 

2 3 clicks on photoshop (main menu --> filter --> stylize ---> extrude)

 

 

 

just a matter of opinion i suppose but a lot of this period of Coil's artwork was made with a few clicks on a photoshop or Kai power tools preset (not uncommon in the days of DIY graphic design for electronic music artwork)

It's only because i love the sounds contained herein that i can laugh at how mid 90s techno cheesy dated the cover is.

Edited August 31, 2010 by Awepittance

[Guest Greg Reason]

Better art than Born Again Pagans! **shudders**

[Guest Z_B_Z]

i was thinking of this version of the cover

 

 

but im not swayed by the demo above. im not necessarily concerned with how easy it is to create something.. i dont have a big issue with filters and presets..ultimately its all about context.

 

but yeas, lets all agree that the born again pagans cover is bad

[Guest Greg Reason]

Gots a signed copy of my favourite Coil album woo

 

[Guest Greg Reason]

And the pièce de résistance; Moon's Milk bonus disk with polaroid

 

 

[Guest Apeofnaples]

Listening to The Angelic Conversation on a good set of speakers, fantastic stuff. Coil and Judy Dench? ~ you can't go wrong.

[Guest Greg Reason]

I must admit that's one Coil release I've never given more than two listens... It didn't do much for me then but I should probably go back and play it again sometime in case I was just in the wrong headspace the first few times.

[Guest Apeofnaples]

Give it another spin, you have to be in the mood for it alright, but it's up there for me. Thanks for the Cyclobe recommendation, loving it.

[Guest Greg Reason]

No probs, glad you like it! Such a fucking great record.

 

Art edition, hand-painted by Ossian:

 

[Guest Apeofnaples]

Oh nice! I just picked up his Haunted Air book, pretty interesting though I wish it was larger, the photographs within are really quite small.

[Guest Z_B_Z]

Recently stumbled upon this. It's the coil manifesto from 1983 read in 2001 by balance for a dutch radio special. I love at the end, after he finshes reading, you can hear him declaring it "pretentious" lol.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ATcKtibxOk

Edited January 30, 2011 by Z_B_Z

[awepittance]

I must admit that's one Coil release I've never given more than two listens... It didn't do much for me then but I should probably go back and play it again sometime in case I was just in the wrong headspace the first few times.

 

yeah same here, but i don't think it was because of the mindstate i was in. the great white hype said it best 'Angelic Conversation had an orchestra preset fixation'

[ShammenDelly]

that coil manifesto was brilliant. thanks for posting that.

[Guest Z_B_Z]

i found this pretty interesting. from a recent interview with boyd rice:

 

I think another good question is, you've done a number of collaborations with Coil, is there anything you'd like to share about the recently departed Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, or your time with Coil in general?

 

 

BR: They were both really great guys. I met Sleazy, the first time I went to London, I met Sleazy and the rest of [Throbbing Gristle], that was May of 1978, and he was just a very bright guy. Very smart, great taste in everything. And I was in correspondence with Jhonn Balance, for a long time before I actually met him, I went over there once and I was doing a concert in Brighton, and as the train was leaving the station, this guy walks up and sits down across from me, and he said, “Boyd, I'm Johnn Balance”. So I've known both of them for decades. Jhonn lived in Brighton, and he'd come to a show I did in Brighton, and it was during the New Romantic period, and he had the hair like the guy from The Human League or something, and the shirt with big puffy sleeves and a frilly collar. I remember being on stage and looking at this guy and thinking “What is this guy doing at one of my shows?” and I would later find out that was Jhonn Balance. He came up to me and told me how much he liked the show. I thought “Why is this guy who's into New Romantic stuff like noise music?” But they were both great guys, and I was one of the few people who was ever allowed to stay at their house, and they said, “You can stay at our house, we never let anybody stay here, but you can't tell anybody anything you see while you're in the house, you can't mention any of this to anyone.” And I never did.

 

 

Fair enough, I wouldn't either.

 

 

BR: The room I slept in, they had so much unbelievable art. I slept in this room where there was just stacks of Aleister Crowley, and Austin Osman Spare, there were paintings and drawings and pen and ink things from every conceivable period in his life. Stuff that should go in the British Museum. And it was just like stacked against the wall in their spare bedroom, I mean they didn't even hang the stuff up.

 

 

Wow! I knew that there would be absinthe but I had no idea that there would be that! That's impressive!

 

 

BR: Yeah, well I'll tell you a story they told me, it's like, the other person they let stay in that room was Kenneth Anger. He was in London, he needed a place to stay, and they thought “Oh boy! We're into Crowley, we're into all of the same stuff, this will be amazing to get to have Kenneth Anger staying in our house”, and he went in that room, and he never came out. They would go and listen at the door and see if he was even alive, if he was even moving around. They said the only time he would come out is late at night, they would hear the door open, and hear him walking into the kitchen and getting some food, and walking back into the room, he stayed there a week or something. They really never saw him! He showed up in London for a book signing of some sort, and they were there, and he was talking about [how] he was looking for a place and they thought “Oh Wow” so they went up to him and said listen, we live in a really nice house, a very safe section of London, we have a spare room, you're welcome to stay as long as you wish, so he did. He just didn't interact with them.

 

...

 

BR: (Excuses himself to sniff snuff for a moment) Well early on I had this box I invented which I called the noise manipulation unit, and in effect it was a way for me to sample noise and form it into rudimentary rhythms live on stage. When you mention Sleazy, this just came up, it's like, I used this thing for a number of years and I never told anybody how it was made, and to look at it, you know, it's just a box with buttons on it and cords coming out, and I never told anybody what it was. When I played at the London Filmmakers Co-op, Sleazy came up afterwards and he said “What's in that box that creates those unbelievable noises?” And I told him how it was designed because, I figured anybody else, I tell them how it's done, and they're going to have the same sound that I have. Sleazy is such a creative guy, I didn't think Sleazy was gonna rip me off, but the next time I saw Throbbing Gristle, when I played with them at SO36 in Berlin, Sleazy had told Chris Carter about this device, and Chris Carter had designed a version of it for Sleazy to use, so when Sleazy died, it said Sleazy was the first person to invent a device that could sample, and that's not true. He didn't invent it, and Chris Carter didn't invent it, I invented it. There are pictures of me on my website where I'm holding a little metal box with buttons and cords, that's what that was.

 

[awepittance]

that's pretty cool, and very funny about Kenneth Anger. Although i'm not inclined to believe him about Sleazy and Chris Carter ripping off his gear designs, maybe it's true who knows.

[Guest Greg Reason]

I don't recall Sleaz ever saying he was indisputably the first. I'm sure there are quotes out there if you do some digging around but I think it was always assumed he was one of the first rather than the absolute first guy ever to do it.

[awepittance]

and yeah and just for context, Boyd Rice is a white supremacist racist in case anybody doesnt already know that reading...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsKbbIybtVM

 

ive heard fans of his who aren't racist try to claim that this has been some kind of ongoing 'performance art' hes doing, i call bullshit

Edited May 30, 2011 by Awepittance

[Guest Greg Reason]

On one of the interview bonus features on Colour Sound Oblivion the host asks Sleaz about DiJ, it was a bit awkward and Sleaz more or less politely says he thinks it's a bunch of fucking bullshit

 

I'll see if I can find it, it was a pretty effective put-down

[Guest Greg Reason]

 

For the art edition vinyl of Remember Well which we were due to release ages ago but had to delay while the vinyl was made... Should be finalized in two weeks or so. The single ended up being a tribute to Peter as he passed while Danny and I were finishing off our remixes, so we're continuing that with the vinyl version

[Guest Z_B_Z]

and yeah and just for context, Boyd Rice is a white supremacist racist in case anybody doesnt already know that reading...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsKbbIybtVM

 

ive heard fans of his who aren't racist try to claim that this has been some kind of ongoing 'performance art' hes doing, i call bullshit

 

he addresses this in the same interview. after watching that four hour documentary on him, i dont think hes a white supremacist, but he does enjoy pushing the buttons of those with liberal humanist sensibilities. that being said, i think some of the moves hes made are of questionable taste, but i find him interesting none the less.

 

How did you come to be interviewed by Tom Metzger on his television show? (Metzger is a notorious racist, who had a nationally televised talk show in the 80s called “Race and Reason”).

 

 

BR: Well, a year or two before I met Anton La Vey, I was working on a book called "The Outsiders"; and I wanted to do a series of interviews with people who had become iconic figures in popular culture not despite the fact they were outsiders, but because of the fact they were outsiders. I wanted to come up with twenty largely generalized questions to ask all of them and see how their answers varied or how they overlapped. So I sent off ten or twelve letters to a sort of Who's Who of figures considered to have extreme views at the time. I sent a letter to Anton La Vey, another to the Mormon polygamist Alex Joseph who had 13 wives and I was also keen to interview the hardline Zionist Meir Kahane, whose views were considered so extreme he was nicknamed "the Jewish Hitler". So I sent off all these letters and the only person who contacted me was Tom Metzger.

 

 

So Metzger called me up and said I could interview him, so long as I went on his public access show so he could interview me. There weren't a ton of people asking me to go on T.V. in 1986 so I jumped at the chance. I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who watched the program in its entirety that Metzger had no idea whatsoever of who I was or what I did.

 

 

Were there areas where you saw eye to eye or areas where you disagreed?

 

 

BR: I was more into a generalized Spanglarian "Decline of the West" mindset, and he was into a very specific anti-U.S. government thing. He hated the Feds, as he called them. We were both fans of Jack London, but he was fondest of London's socialist works like "The Iron Heel", which I never quite cared for.

 

 

There is a point in your interview in which you seem to make the point that industrial music is racialist music, or white music.

 

 

BR: Industrial music is not racialist. I think that what I said was that someone in Europe wrote an article in which he stated that industrial music was the only form of 20th century music that didn't have roots in black music or negro spirituals or something like that. Even that's not strictly true. You've got surf music, heavy metal, lounge music, exotica, and so on ad infinitum. Even Motown doesn't have roots in negro spirituals. I think the point the author was making was that industrial music was largely unrelated to any pre-existing tradition, and certainly not to rock and roll. I've made the same point myself repeatedly. Rock music today uses the same three or four chords that were used in "Louie Louie", by Chuck Berry. And most of it is lame. But then, 95% of everything is lame.

 

 

What was your impression of Tom Metzger?

 

 

BR: I won't lie to you, he was very intelligent, very well read, and very charming. In other words, he was a textbook example of a high dominance male. I've met many such people in the course of my life, Charlie Manson for example. You don't have to agree with or condone all of their thoughts or actions to find them fascinating. And for better of worse, I've been fascinated by the extremist fringe for literally most of my adult life, if not going back to my childhood. I find Stalin more compelling than Mother Teresa and Eva Peron more compelling than Hillary Clinton. So do most people. If you were in prison and had the choice of reading a biography of Lady Di or The Marquis de Sade, which would you choose? The question answers itself.

 

 

Well, people might have a passing interest in these things, but few will own a bust of Hitler or a swastika flag. I can't help but ask if there was more than just dabbling going on.

 

 

BR: A book came out in the 70's, I think, called Morning of the Magicians and it was the first book to posit the notion that Hitler was essentially an occultist who wanted to end the Christian era and inaugurate the resurgence of paganism. That's quite interesting. In the following decade, maybe ten or twelve other books came out expanding on this theme. I'd been immersed in the occult since the age of 13, and naturally was curious. So were Anton La Vey and Michael Aquino. My milieu in the 80's consisted of people like David Tibet, Genesis P-Orridge, & Coil; all people who were occultists first and musicians second - and they all shared the same fascination. It had nothing to do with conservative politics because we were far from conservative, and it certainly had nothing to do with race. We were drawn to the occult aspects of the phenomenon. In fact, Douglas Pearce [of Neofolk band, Death In June] was quite vocal in his opposition to Hitler, saying that the phenomenon was interesting, but Hitler was not.

 

 

The rest of us, I think, were anxious to know how an unknown, homeless artist became, in a few short years, the leader of a powerful nation that was (for a time) the strongest force in Europe. I alluded to this about 30 years ago in in the RE/Search Industrial Culture Handbook.

 

 

What I took away from all of this is that people who know how to manipulate archetypes can essentially end up becoming the imagined manifestation of those archetypes. I must have done my job effectively because to this very day there are people who imagine that I'm synonymous with Hitler. This has become quite tedious for me because I've never had any interest in being anyone's leader. I was offered the leadership of the Church of Satan and turned it down.

 

 

At present, my life amounts to this: everyday, my girlfriend wakes me up at 2:00 in the afternoon so that I can see two episodes of the Partridge Family on T.V. I stay up all night watching obscure, old films or episodes of The Highway Patrol or Mister Ed, then go to sleep when the sun rises. Those among you who find that threatening or evil should consult a good psychiatrist. Or maybe not. If Hitler were alive he'd be up at night watching Mr. Ed. And Charlie Manson told me that Mr. Ed was one of his favorite shows as well. In his own words, Charlie said "I love that fuckin' horse! He's a motherfucking beatnik, man!"

[awepittance]

i wish Boyd Rice's music was interesting enough for me to get over his stupid and child like 'controversial' persona

 

the whole crypto fascist association in death-folk and industrial music is beyond stupid to me. I can handle modifications of the nazi imagery in things like Throbbing Gristle, but when it actually becomes some kind of pagan norse arian pride thing it's not defendable. If he's doing it just ot push liberal sensibilities, i think at this point he's pushing anyone's sensibilities who has a brain.

Edited June 1, 2011 by Awepittance

[kaini]

receive the flame under his NON alias is a pretty good album. and i believe the wire mentioned that he did some very interesting things with locked-groove records.

 

i'm a firm believer in separating the music from the person as much as possible. i mean the 'glitter beat' on a lot of gary glitter records is a damn fucking catchy beat.

Edited June 1, 2011 by kaini

[Guest Z_B_Z]

Some of the positions he's taken in the past are indeed juvenile and indefensible, but he's done some interesting work. apparently eno was quite impressed with some of his early stuff. I'd like to get a hold of that album of locked grooves.

[awepittance]

i like one NON album, i like the Boyd Rice work with Coil, i also like his semi hardcore pornography starring him. However i really don't think most of his stuff is all that historically important nor that good. People like Monte Cazzaza, who in my mind deserves a lot more 'industrial music cred' get overshadowed by attention whores like Rice.

 

that will be the end of my spiel.