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Coil, "Love's Secret Domain" (Justin Patrick)
My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love’s Secret Domain.
The album is a seminal one. Steve Stapleton captured this feeling in his brilliant cover art, painted on a wooden door. The door is also emblematic of the songs, and to unlock their full meaning it is necessary to pass through various gateways and gatekeepers: the skeleton of death, the pentagram of the five elements, the chemical pills which open various neural pathways of perception. As the group were huge fans of eccentric British occultist and draughtsman Austin Osman Spare it should be noted that the hand with an eye in its palm is a symbol of Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus. (Zos being the body or hand and Kia the eye or sight, the image conjoins the desires of the body to the internal imagination. Astute readers will also note that Zos Kia was also the name of a musical project John Balance and Peter Christopherson were involved in for a brief time in the early '80s, before devoting themselves fully to Coil.) The winged penis can be seen as an expression of the male virility at play within the group and as a metaphor for the power of astral flight developed by those who practice sexual magick.
It was 1998 when I was at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio when I first saw and heard this album. I saw a lot of other things while listening to these songs in the darkness of my dorm room, lying on a mattress with my eyes closed, concentrating on the sounds. The disc belonged to another kid named Justin who had a record collection I was very envious of. After he played it for me once I wanted my own copy. While there were people with CD burners all around campus, I didn't have one of my own and for some reason didn't copy the disc that way. I probably just wanted to listen to it again while I transferred it to a cassette. But before I could, I had to finagle my friend to let me borrow it from him. He was very protective of the disc, and reluctant to let me take it out of his sight. In the end our shared enthusiasm for music decided in my favor. (I eventually did snatch up a copy of Thighpaulsandra's remastered version.)
The whole two year time period of 1998 and 1999 was one of deep musical discovery for me. My tastes had already shifted to a predilection for "experimental" music, whatever that problematic term means. My brain had already been washed after being exposed to the radio-active broadcasts of Art Damage, a community radio show in Cincinnati which remains a stout supporter of strange and eclectic music, providing an outlet for musicians in the thriving noise and art music scene of my hometown. Antioch further influenced my listening habits. It was there I was turned on to the myriad joys of Meat Beat Manifesto. A girl I was friends with actually said to me one night, "I’ll never take acid again" embarking on a freak out and bum trip after my friends and I played her a track with those words in it from Actual Sounds and Voices. Some other people got me up to speed on the Legendary Pink Dots, and much to the annoyance of my dorm mates, the warbling synths of the Silverman and the delectable voice of Edward Ka-Spel could be heard blaring from my room at all hours, especially in my more melancholy moods. Download, Autechre, Merzbow, and Psychic TV were all new experiences and I ate them all up. Current 93 and Nurse With Wound followed in short order.
Love’s Secret Domain was a watershed among all those listening experiences, and in many ways it summed up a number of my musical interests into one album. The garbled collage of "Disco Hospital," with its cut-up voices disarranged towards the incomprehensible played to my love of the abstract, while still laying down a catchy hook and rhythm. The recurrence of expertly treated digeridoos and bossa-nova like beats give the whole album a feeling of completeness, but it still explored a diverse territory. Tracks like "Dark River" branched off into a nebulous ambiance while "The Snow" found anchor on the dance floor among the techno elite. This latter track also has a jazz tinged piano riff that even after countless listens never fails to send my mind spiraling up into heavenly realms. It is hard to pick a favorite here, when all the tunes are touched by genius. In "Further Back & Faster" I hear premonitions of future directions Coil would take in sidereal sound, promises kept on the Musick to Play in the Dark duology. The track has an ineffable quality to it, but the effect is surely atavistic. The use of Spanish guitars on "Lorca Not Orca" foreshadows the brilliant guitar work heard on later tracks like "Amethyst Deceivers."
In considering the twenty year anniversary of this landmark work, I can say with certainty that Love’s Secret Domain is worth falling into over and over again.
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