For fans of: Esoteric Atmospheres

Born of the countercultural hotbed of Thatcher's England, John 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 John Balance in 1983, Christopherson's fruitful collaborations with Balance would carve out a body of surrealist, psychedelic and "sidereal" music on the fringe of post-punk and experimental culture for the next three decades. By the mid-1990s the duo had brought on supporting members Drew McDowall, Stephen Thrower, and William Breeze and an assimilation of UK club music and American minimalist composers into their sound. Following on the more club-inspired forays of 1992's "Love's Secret Domain", the ill-fated "Backwards" album for Trent Reznor's Nothing label, and 1996's "Black Light District", they then ventured into an expressly ambient and nocturnal phase. Informed by contact with the then-developing electronic minimalism of Germany's Raster-Noton label, "The Strange and Frightening World of Coil", became concurrently more accessible and further-reaching with the first forays of their ambient and atmospheric "Musick to Play in the Dark". Now back in print for the first time in almost 20 years! -(JP)