Band announced the official reissue of their compilation albums A Guide For Beginners - The Voice Of Silver and A Guide For Finishers - A Hair Of Gold.
Out of print on CD for almost two decades, Coil announced the official reissue of the much sought after 'Best Of’ compilation albums ‘A Guide For Beginners - The Voice Of Silver’ and ‘A Guide For Finishers - A Hair Of Gold’ now together in one deluxe set.
Officially licensed from their original label, FEELEE, this edition spans Coil's entire career, featuring tracks from all their major albums. They were hand-picked by Coil to represent their best work and originally released to mark their first performance in Moscow in 2001. A vinyl-only edition by FEELEE was released as two separate luxurious 2xLP editions in 2018.
The artwork (text in English and Russian Cyrillic) sympathetically features the rarest of the images previously used in the original Russian and English editions and is packaged in a deluxe, glossy 8-panel digipak with spot matt-laminate varnish.
The band:
Coil was originally founded in 1982 as a solo vehicle for Geoff Rushton aka John Balance (he also joined Psychic TV at this time), before evolving into its permanent core duo with the addition of his partner and fellow PTV member Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. Christopherson had previously been an original member of industrial music legends Throbbing Gristle and a partner in leading design agency Hipgnosis, later becoming a go-to music video director.
Having left Psychic TV ahead of their 1984 debut EP, ‘How To Destroy Angels’, Coil signed to Some Bizarre Records for the release of the albums ‘Scatology’ (1984) and ‘Horse Rotorvator’ (1986). They then established their own label, Threshold House, to issue the landmark 1991 album ‘Love’s Secret Domain’ plus a record of additional material from the LSD sessions entitled ‘Stolen & Contaminated Songs’ the following year. The remainder of that decade saw releases from pseudonymous projects such as ELpH vs. Coil, Black Light District and Time Machines, plus the soundtrack for Derek Jarman’s ‘The Angelic Conversation’, before a return to ‘regular’ studio output such as ‘Astral Disaster’, two volumes of ‘Musick To Play In The Dark’ (1999 and 2000) and ‘Black Antlers’ (2004). They also began performing live shows in 1999 and played a series of mini-tours over the next five years.
The final Coil album, ‘The Ape Of Naples’, was compiled by Christopherson following the accidental death of Balance in 2004 at the age of 42 and released at the end of the following year. Christopherson himself died in 2010 at just 55.
Via their music and exploration of lyrical themes related to alchemy, the occult and sexuality running throughout their work, Coil became one of the most pre-eminent and subsequently mythologised groups to have emerged from the early 80’s post-industrial music scene, influencing sub-genres such as dark ambient, neofolk and various mutations of industrial, experimental and gothic rock. One notable fan was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, for whom Christopherson directed the notorious ‘Broken’ and ‘Wish’ videos, while Coil reworked songs from three NIN remix LP’s that were later compiled for the ‘Recoiled’ EP released by Cold Spring in 2014. Reznor’s side-project How To Destroy Angels is also named in homage to Coil’s debut EP.
Former Coil members during various stages of their career included musician (and now horror author) Stephen Thrower, producer/musician Danny Hyde, author William Breeze, plus musicians Drew McDowall, Thighpaulsandra (who has also worked extensively with Julian Cope and Spiritualized) and Ossian Brown.
Liked? Share!
Related news: