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.