Tagcoil

Mike Tyson Once Used a Coil Song to Terrorize an Opponent (Maybe)

The Awl reports:

Whatever power of Spinks’ entrance had immediately evaporated when a deafening drone of noise started swirling in the air. As it crescendoed into a maddening roar, the crowd at the Atlantic City Convention Center arched to follow the procession of men, all cops and security guards, emerging out of Tyson’s locker. Tyson, bare-chested and already soaked in sweat, slowly materialized from the back and meandered to the ring, barely blinking. The broadcast announcer Bob Sheridan, struggling to define the scene, played it straight: “It’s interesting Mike Tyson selected as his pre-fight music just noise; every once in a while you hear the clanging of chains. I think that’s what he’s got in mind to do to Mike Spinks’ head, but we’ll wait and see. Everything that Tyson does is intimidating.”

The “noise” was in fact a song by the British band Coil.

Full Story: The Awl: A Man Walks into a Boxing Ring

Via Metafilter, which casts doubt that the song was in fact by Coil. I can’t really hear it very well in the video, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’s the Sergio Cervetti song that one of the Awl commenters suggested either.

Current 93’s David Tibet Shares His Life Story

David Tibet of Psychic TV and Current 93 shared his life story recently with Dazed & Confused magazine:

I was born in Malaysia in 1960. Paradise gained. In 1970, I left for England, where I attended an all-boys boarding school. Paradise not only lost but then packed with the sex of ghosts and kicked into the bonefire. Welcome to NeverLand.

What drove me on then: I loved CS Lewis, Tolkien, Taoist temples, the New Testament, MR James1, Christian apocalyptic, the apocryphal gospels, Aleister Crowley and Qabalah. All this before my balls dropped. I discovered the apocryphal gospels through MR James. I discovered Crowley through buying his Diary of a Drug Fiend at Kuala Lumpur airport when I was 11. The other boys at the school were frightened by my reading matter. Crowley wasn’t big with corduroy boys. My post was opened by the headmaster there; he was later sacked for playing a little too freely with his wards. Hop and skip into the Bad PicNic, made worse by the school being extensively haunted. Welcome to Old England.

After leaving university, I had a brief dalliance with the often dysfunctional family (sic) of Psychic TV2, which was briefly fun and then not. I was impelled to create a music that would channel all my obsessions. So HeyHo, Current 933.

Full Story: Dazed Digital: Your History: David Tibet

(via Ales Kot)

Previously Unreleased Coil Tracks

Frisk film cover

A treat for all you Coil fans:

Oh my…yes, I do believe I have a show stopper for you all. This soundtrack to Todd Verow’s film adaption of Dennis Cooper’s novel “Frisk” (IMDB info here) features original compositions by both Coil (also using their alter ego ELpH here) and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, as well as a handful of pieces they’ve co-composed and/or have had pastiched together, medley-style. All of this loot has languished on this soundtrack up till this point without any formal release. Now, here it is for your collective predilection and as a stand-alone gesture in its own right, it works a charm.

Full Story (and download link): COIL/ELpH/LEE RANALDO-FRISK-ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK RECORDING, UNRELEASED, 1996, UK/USA

(Thanks Zir)

Also, last November a group of fans raised money online to buy the rights to a bunch of previously unreleased Nine Inch Nails remixes that Coil did for the Fixed album. You can learn more and download it here

Uncoiled album cover

New Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson Track In Honor Of The 2nd Anniversary Of His Death

Boing Boing has released a preview of the forthcoming two album release by ex-Throbbing Gristle members Chris Carter, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and Cosey Fanni Tutti (aka XTG) in honor the 2nd anniversary of Christopherson’s death. Desertshore/The Final Report will be released tomorrow on Industrial Records.

You can listen to the track on Boing Boing.

The Soviet Synthesizer that Bridged Occultism and Electronic Music

Coil ANS cover

I have a guest post up today at Boing Boing on a subject I think will interest Technoccult readers:

You don’t play the ANS synthesizer with a keyboard. Instead you etch images onto glass sheets covered in black putty and feed them into a machine that shines light through the etchings, trigging a wide range of tones. Etchings made low on the sheets make low tones. High etchings make high tones. The sound is generated in real-time and the tempo depends on how fast you insert the sheets.

This isn’t a new Dorkbot or Maker Faire oddity. It’s a nearly forgotten Russian synthesizer designed by Evgeny Murzin in 1938. The synth was named after and dedicated to the Russian experimental composer and occultist Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915). The name might not mean much to you, but it illuminates a long running connection between electronic music and the occult.

You can find traces of the occult throughout the history of electronic music. The occult obsessed Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo built his own mechanical instruments around 1917. The famous Moog synthesizer made an early appearance in Mick Jagger’s soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s occult film Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969. And in the late 1970s Throbbing Gristle built their own electronic instruments for their occult sound experiments, setting the stage for many of the occult themed industrial bands who followed. The witch house genre keeps this tradition alive today.

It’s little the surprise otherworldly sounds and limitless possibilities of synthesizers and samplers would evoke the luminous. But there’s more to the connection. The aim of the alchemist is not just the literal synthesis of chemicals, but also synthesis in the Hegelian sense: the combination of ideas. Solve et Coagula. From the Hermetic magi of antiquity, to Aleister Crowley’s OTO to modern chaos magicians, western occultists have sought to combine traditions and customs into a single universal system of thought and practice.

Electronic music grew from similar intellectual ground, and it all started with Scriabin.

Full Story: Boing Boing: The Soviet Synthesizer that Bridged Occultism and Electronic Music

Coil Retrospective

Coil

The Quietus ran a retrospective on Coil‘s career for the one year anniversary of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s death:

Through a potent trinity of chemically-altered states, occult arcana and technological transmutation, Coil was, perhaps, the strangest and occasionally the most frightening of bands. While their twenty year history saw much in the way of personal turmoil and tragedies as they moved through the extreme hedonism and post-AIDS fallout of London’s gay clubland to a more hermetic but no less intoxicated existence on England’s South West coast, John Balance (née Geff Rushton) and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson remained true to their original intentions to explore, as the cover of their debut release puts it: “How sound can affect the physical and mental state of the serious listener”. Such explorations produced a unique and incomparable body of work that not only charts a most unconventional route through emergent musical technologies, but also signposts a hellishly complex set of references to occult theories and deviant figures throughout history (from Aleister Crowley to William S Burroughs) along the way. But the high physical and mental cost of their creative processes often lead to long gaps in their output. Indeed, the most elusive album in their back catalogue eluded the band themselves: Backwards, originally intended as a follow-up to 1991’s Love’s Secret Domain, was mentioned in the band’s semi-regular updates describing sessions with mainstream players such as Tim Simenon and Trent Reznor, yet the album was never released (although some of the recordings were later re-arranged posthumously for The Ape of Naples and its companion piece, The New Backwards).

The Quietus: Serious Listeners: The Strange And Frightening World Of Coil

RIP Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson

Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson

Peter “Sleazey” Christopherson – of Throbbing Gristle, Coil and Soi Song, -died on November 24th:

The sad news has reached us that Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson has died in his sleep last night at the age of 55. Chris Carter twittered “Our dearest beautiful Sleazy left this mortal coil as he slept in peace last night. Words cannot express our grief.” and the TG site simply displays the message “Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson 1955 – 2010”.

Brainwashed: Coil

This live video of Throbbing Gristle from earlier this year is likely one of the last videos of him performing:

(Follow through to YouTube to view the rest)

Peter “Sleazey” Christopherson interview

peter sleazey christopherson

Turns out Sleazey’s new project, Threshold HouseBoys Choir, just played in Boston.

Just walking along the street, I am constantly struck dumb by the beauty of a piece of rust on an old gate, or the purity of the sound of a blind beggar singing for his supper, or the chord made by three competing air-conditioners. I think that most people filter out those kind of things from their perception of life, by necessity — to avoid going mad from the overload. In doing so, they miss a whole mind-blowing, extraordinary world of joy.

All I have always tried to do is share my joy, that joy, with other people. Unfortunately, to see these things and not go mad myself, I have had to filter out different things, such as where I put my glasses, or what day it is, or whether I have spilled noodle-sauce on my trousers. ,-)

Obviously the Mellotron used tapes to reproduce the sound of real instruments, and backings, and the Fairlight was invented (it seems to me) to do the same thing, only digitally and with more tools for composition and manipulation. But I was using one of the first Apple IIs ever made on stage with TG, before the first Fairlight even left Australia, to reproduce all kinds of sounds and “music concret” – I never understood why these wonderful toys should only be used to put a string-player out of a job.

“Look what I can do with the sound of a Polaroid camera, or some teenagers first gasping ejaculation, or the sobbing confessions of a young murderer or mercenary, or the regular thump and hiss of a life-support machine!” I thought. How much more power and meaning do those sounds have, than a not very clear reproduction of a French horn playing a B flat? For me, it’s a no-brainer.

Full Story: Tiny Mixtapes

(Thanks Trevor)

Previously: Video for Peter “Sleazey” Christopherson’s first post-Coil project: The Threshold HouseBoys Choir “A Time of Happening”

Rare and unreleased Coil tracks

Mystical Beast posts some rare and unreleased Coil tracks.

Full Story: The Mystical Beat: Rare and unreleased Coil tracks

(via Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming)

RIP Jhonn Balance

From the Coil web site:

We are greatly saddened to have to you that at about 5.30 pm Saturday Nov 13th, Jhonn Balance, was killed in an accident at home.

Under the influence of alcohol he fell from the first floor landing, hitting his head on the floor some 15ft below.

Key23 has an open thread for posting magickal audio files. Anyone doing a tribute to Balance is welcome to post a link there.

J-Lou has a Coil track in his November 15th entry.

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