Coil

A colossal machine built to plow the world, made from the bones of the Apocalypse's four horses. The Horse Rotorvator, a gigantic plough that severs every breath of life, foreshadowing the dawn of a new, chilling era. Madness and horror at the gates of hell.

For their second full-length, Coil draw on a dark apocalyptic symbolism, a direct offshoot of that shock debut called “Scatology”, released two years earlier. Fresh from the hypnotic sessions of Psychic Tv, the duo made up of shaman John Balance and synth & sampler wizard Peter Christopherson (already a member of the early Throbbing Gristle) had already mapped out the coordinates of a powerful, glacial sound: a danse macabre propelled by lopsided industrial rhythms and plunged into a vortex of samples. Beneath the pall of murk, though, lurks a talent far more fertile than that of their peers. The insidious seed of Throbbing Gristle, in fact, has grown through incestuous cross-pollination – folk, electronics, psychedelia, gothic, jazz – becoming a shapeshifting, elusive entity. Such stylistic exuberance would reach its peak on “Horse Rotorvator”, in the form of a manifesto-album that would ideally close out Coil's first phase, leaving a crucial legacy for future generations of industrial acts and beyond (just think of so much subsequent dark-ambient). A work out of time that, two decades on, hasn't lost an ounce of its unsettling modernity.

There's no escape for the listener, ground up from the very start beneath the treads of “The Anal Staircase”, a panzer-like progression set to a deranged fanfare, strafed by bursts of samples amid a chaos of shrieks and metallic clatter. At the head of the procession, the dark prophet Balance, with his frenzied, obscene declamations. It will become the album's hit, even making its way onto dancefloors. But behind the din and the hooks lie lyrics of bleak despair (“Take a hollow point revolver/ Right down the rapids of your heart/ Blow the fucking thing apart”) and a morbid mood that permeates the whole album, to the point that the only moments of (apparent) release are the two interludes: the nursery-rhyme cadence of “Babylero” and the village-fair march of “Herald”.

Even the funk charge of “Slur” soon dissolves into a diseased landscape, where Middle Eastern horns and percussion underpin the operatic vocalizing of guest and friend Marc Almond. And it's one of Almond's own collaborators, Billy McGee, who provides the string arrangements on “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)”, a tribute to the murdered Friulian writer and filmmaker: the chirping of crickets suggests a sultry Mediterranean evening, then the guitar arpeggios grow more unsettled and the violins darken around Balance's moving requiem, another display of his funereal melodic gift. It's one of the most spiritual moments of a work that always plays on a double track, deftly alternating mysticism and damnation, love and death.

The other tribute is to the most noir of classic songwriters, Leonard Cohen, whose "Who By Fire" becomes even more chilling, with thick blankets of synth replacing the original's spare acoustic arrangement (and with another great vocal turn from Almond on backing vocals).

Lending a hand to the duo is also the other industrial bard Foetus (here under the pseudonym Clint Ruin), who brings his distorted brass into the putrid catacombs of "Circles Of Mania," the ideal stage for Balance's new pantomime: a delirium of rattles and screams that culminates in a mimed coupling to the cry of "Fucking the ground, fucking the ground, the hole in the ground!". In terms of attitude, we're not far from the pagan primitivism of Virgin Prunes's "…If I Die, I Die" (it's no coincidence that Gavin Friday is another of the duo's friends/collaborators).

The most "canonical" industrial moment is represented by "Penetralia," a march of the damned set to the oppressive time of a drum machine. The full arsenal is deployed: searing guitars, obsessive horns, downpours of noise, electric jolts, and, adding a decisive touch of estrangement, Stephen Thrower's free-jazz clarinet solo, a sort of unofficial third member of the band throughout the record.

Elsewhere, it's a gothic spirit that takes over. In "The Golden Section," actor Paul Vaughan narrates the disguises of the Angel of Death over cadences from a medieval funeral march à la In The Nursery, punctuated by disjointed electronic rhythms. The satanic litany of "Blood From The Air" ("Death, he is my friend/ He promised me a quick end") is intoned by Balance over dark, noisy backdrops, in which Christopherson's samples and devious keyboards once again play a key role. The album closes, amid martial drums, choirs of the dead and horn interjections, with the malignant lied of "The First Five Minutes After Death": the apocalypse is over, and the sterile spoken narration now reaches us from beyond the grave.

Later reissues added the instrumental "Ravenous," a lunar piece embroidered by keyboards within a whirlpool of sounds, noises and animal cries.

The ideal summa of three years of experimentation, "Horse Rotorvator" is the most accomplished work of Coil's early period. Balance and Christopherson split the roles: the former is the showman, the absolute star performer, the latter is the director, who, Fairlight sampler in hand, plans out the sequences and chooses the most fitting sounds. Even the lyrics, beneath their homoerotic morbidity and taste for kitsch, reveal a wide range of references: from the Old Testament to the philosophy of Jean Genet, from the history of ancient Rome to gothic fiction (Poe, Lovecraft), from esotericism to the cyberpunk science fiction of Ballard and Burroughs. And to ward off any suspicion of pretentiousness, there's a pitch-black humor, always ready with a mocking sneer.

Coil would carry on their path with courage, constantly reinventing themselves and unveiling further masterpieces, until November 13, 2004, when John Balance, betrayed by his alcohol abuse, died following a fall down the stairs of his own home, leaving friends and fans devastated.

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23/02/2008