Balance and Sleazy were one of music’s great romances. In the early 1980s, Geoff Burton, aka Geoff Rushton and then John Balance, utilized fan letters and zines to will himself from a troubled childhood of precocious homosexuality and occult aspirations into the arms of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. As a photographer whose portraits shocked the Sex Pistols, graphic designer for Peter Gabriel’s early albums, and member of the notorious “Wreckers of Civilization” Throbbing Gristle, Sleazy had already earned a reputation. But in true alchemical fashion, when the two came together they created something much stronger, and stranger, than most life-work partners, amassing dozens of albums and EPs and homages to back-of-the-lab psychedelics and antiquarian gems. Coil devised an uncanny, stained, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of musique concrete, kosmische, techno, drone, cabaret, jazz, and glitch, with guest stars including aliens, the ghosts of ancient kings, and “the accumulation of male sexual energy.” (Hence the stains.)
Coil planted seeds. They introduced into their devoted fanbase the effluvia of early queer mystics like Austin Osman Spare and presented them the evidence of modern queer existences fundamentally opposed to assimilation. Their cross-pollination of futuristic tech and ancient texts would sprout various tangles: Björk’s pagan poetry and Sunn O)))’s postverbal omm, the antibody music of Autechre and Dreamcrusher, the probiotic post-goth of FKA twigs and the Knife and even Perfume Genius, all seeking out healing in the abject.
Like most romantics, though, they were at their best in the shadows. Musick to Play in the Dark, their magnum opus, released just as the last millennium turned, is part Muzak and part Magick. It’s effective, setting a mood like marital aids Music to Keep Your Husband Happy and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, or Haruomi Hosono’s ’80s music for department-store shopping, or Spotify’s yawning chasms of vibey playlists—yet far more potent, almost domineering. If you give yourself over to it, odd things transpire. (Many moons ago, I spent a year or so falling asleep to it. One night I did not. My house burned down the next morning.)
“Are You Shivering” sets the stage with a ferocious roar, like a groaning opening of black rubber curtains; it recedes to reveal a glistening expanse of slippery little noises sliced into dripping tinsel. Balance’s voice hovers among them, first cut and honed into amorphous moans, then clear as an echoing bell: “I lay down and shiver in your silver river/Out drips the last drop of this vital fluid… This is moon music.” Others have twinned male potency and lunacy, perhaps, but no song has made semen so spellbinding.
Post-coital from the start, Musick then spaces out with “Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night,” an epic of arpeggios and buzzing analog threads spun largely by synth whiz Thighspaulsandra, who, along with Drew McDowall, are the album’s crucial collaborators. “Red Birds” spirals ever larger before self-immolating in toxic fizz. The little noises return, licks of flames soundtracking a fireside chat—and out stumbles the “Red Queen,” in which Balance recriminates via sped-up chitter chatter and coruscates with crisp, shady intonation. “Is it so awful to be seen to feel and fail?” he asks of those too proud to admit they’ve been fooled by the foolish. The band plays on behind him, the beat an entirely blotto slur of heaving bass and vicious minces of piano. “An unsafe male trait,” Balance calls out, snide in the face of macho vanity. “What are you going to do if they don’t believe you?”
Safety’s for the birds. “Strange Birds,” that is, in which clicks and cuts flutter and take flight and presage recordings of their real, feathered brethren. It’s a grounding pause for an album with its head in the stars. But it’s not a relief. In 1999, bird songs often augured the end of an ambient set, and loons sang across jungle tracks; here, they don’t offer a consolation of dawn so much as a warning from the sky. “One day your eggs/Are going to hatch,” Balance whispers. “And some very strange birds/Are going to emerge.”
Like so many of music’s great romances—Ike and Tina, Kurt and Courtney—horror attended the astonishing beauty of their creation. Balance, a long-suffering alcoholic, fell from their mansion stairs to his death in 2004; Sleazy died in Bangkok just six years later. The horror was inextricable from the beauty of albums like the AIDS-haunted Horse Rotovator, or the limited-edition records cloaked in white covers streaked with Balance’s own blood, loosed during a lunatic episode. Myths are made from such mayhem.
Yet the most profound moments of Musick are somehow the simplest and sweetest. Closer “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” summons the uncanny power of, say, Portishead remixing Arthur Russell. A rhythm shuffles like a lover’s gentle snore; Balance’s voice, never more gentle than here, and cloaked in reverb thick as warm blankets, duets with a warm organ. Lonely chords swell as Balance ponders the legacy and latency of trauma. “Is that hurt you?” Balance wonders. “We forget, and don’t notice the loss/Crossing into venerable degeneration.”
We all return to the soil. At the center of the album, Coil’s finest moment blossoms. “Broccoli” is perhaps the only Balance and Sleazy duet, an astonishing meditation on familial duty, death, etiquette, gardening, and the titular vegetable. “By working the soil we cultivate the sky,” Sleazy sing-songs, and Balance chants over bass as deep as the grave. “We embrace the vegetable kingdom.” Death as vegetative state, death as generation. Coil are dead, but we’re still feasting on their harvest.
Buy: Rough Trade
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