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  • Published: 10 January 2023
  • ISBN: 9781913689438
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 600
  • RRP: $70.00

Everything Keeps Dissolving

Conversations with Coil



Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
 
Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.

Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.

Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
 
Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.

  • Published: 10 January 2023
  • ISBN: 9781913689438
  • Imprint: MIT Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 600
  • RRP: $70.00

Praise for Everything Keeps Dissolving

"[Coil's] 'Tainted Love' video remains one of the greatest music videos of all time. I was always more attracted to Coil than Throbbing Gristle; the darkness and the scatology really chimed with me. [...] What they did to your senses. What they could do with sound. What Jhonn was doing lyrically. The exotic darkness of them permeated their work."--Trent Reznor
 
"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."--The Quietus