We send you our best wishes for the New Year!

So far, portents (Astrologickal, Magickal, Spiritual, Physical, Pataphysickal, Astro-archeologickal, Psychologickal!) look very promising. Numerous Oracles predict good things in the coming Cycle. John is up and running, and wants to thank all the people who expressed concern and sent best wishes during the time he was staying in the clinic. It really helped to know that people care about what was going on.

We spent most of the Winter festival, coccooned at Slut's Hole Studio recording "Coil presents Black Light District - A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room" with various new and hosts of old collaborators. It should be out by the end of January via World Serpent. Sonically, it combines the atmospheres and rhythms of early Coil, some hard-core ambient ELpH-like sound textures, minimal but subtle vocals, and a Subterranean earth-tree-dreamers perspective. It's Eskaton 008 and is out first on CD, swiftly (?) followed by a vinyl edition. We're even thinking in terms of picture discs and stuff like that, so contact/bother World Serpent, or your friendly local Indy dealers, to keep up to date.

As US based/rec.music.industrial-reading correspondents may already know, the excellent title sequence from the current David Fincher film "Seven" is based on and features our extremely Coil-like mix of NIN's Closer (The Precursor Mix) - Whatever people think of the film itself (we liked it!) the titles are quite a piece of work in themselves.

Unfortunately and as usual, the fact that it was the work of both COIL and NIN somehow managed not to be properly credited at the end of the film - or the track itself included on the soundtrack album! We wouldn't have gotten any more money from it, but this far down the line we'd have thought that some respect should be shown when it's due (It was particularly galling to see the credit "Music by Howard Shore" at the point where our music was running!).

Trent and the NIN camp say they DID try to get us credited, but as we all know, from our Hellraiser experiences etc "Life's a bitch, and bigger fleas have little fleas...etc. etc". Hence this minor bit of personal flag waving...

One of the things we will be making a priority early on this year is to increase our InterNet presence and substantially update and expand our Web-sites,as well as starting to do similar things in the real world with Black Sun magazine becoming a reality not just a rumour of a dream,(or a dream of a rumour!).

So best wishes and the blessings of Zos, and All The Gods be upon you!

Jhon Balance & Peter Christopherson,

Threshold House & Eskaton 14th January 1996 ev