Coil
Love's Secret Domain

It is truly impressive to see how quickly Coil managed to shed the sounds of the eighties. It's just 1991 and "Love's Secret Domain" is released (the first official release since "Horse Rotorvator," concluding the ideal trilogy that began with "Scatology"): the album is heavily influenced by acid house sounds, and while the reasons for the shift lie largely in the contribution of dance producer Danny Hide, Balance and Christopherson (aided by loyal Stephen Thrower) must be credited with once again capturing and metabolizing the most interesting novelties of the moment, pulling something extremely personal out of the hat. And it must be said that the new attire fits perfectly with Coil's music, perfectly matching the unhealthy environments, full of excess and perversion, that have always distinguished the English industrial act.

The nightclub, a place of bewilderment and perdition, is the temple where Balance and Christopherson's new sacrifice is consumed, ready to immolate our ears and brain on an altar of plexiglass and ecstasy tablets. They don't reach the creative peaks of a work as unattainable as "Horse Rotorvator," but the two are once again capable of crafting a truly intriguing, varied piece of work, dripping with madness from the first to the last note.

Vaguely abandoning the gothic atmospheres that characterized previous works, "Love's Secret Domain" is the blurred and shaky viewpoint of a drug addict on a night of excess: artificial fun, we might say, crazy bingeing, zero foresight, and absolute disregard for the aftermath of the next day. Smoky settings, confusion, irrational acts. Shuffled among the crowd in a dark corridor or sprawled over the counter of a sleazy joint. With a dry throat from too many cigarettes, a swollen head from alcohol, limbs jittery from amphetamines: the world around threatens us yet also fascinates us, and into the abyss of unconsciousness we sink, groping butts, breasts, packages, downing improbable drinks, bloated with synthetic happiness, vulnerable yet fortunately insensitive. These are the impressions that rain down on us during this lavish performance, which ends up resembling a violent act of sodomy in the filthy bathroom of a nightclub, where every now and then, amidst the short breaths of the person behind you and the crude noises of the person vomiting in the adjacent toilet, you can hear the distant pulsing of the most hallucinogenic techno-trance.

Balance and Christopherson prove themselves once again to be skilled architects in building a hallucinated world, tangled edifices, phallic monuments glimpsed beyond a thick fog, swallowed in a vortex of dense paranoia and psychological turmoil: a colorful nightmare of marzipan, colored pills, and vodka-orange. And the honesty of the two artists lies especially in not resorting to the "easily psychedelic," but in setting up, with their usual professionalism, well-structured compositions, rich with solutions and a thousand nuances that compose a journey evolving with the uncertainty and unpredictability worthy of a Burroughs novel. And it's precisely the Burroughsian cut-up that seems to animate this journey where we find ourselves feeling our way through the intricate and synthetic corridors of a claustrophobic and labyrinthine night world. As if we were, indeed, in "Naked Lunch."

So let yourself be captured by this sort of "Dark Side of the Love," a murky excursion into the dark and secret domains of love. Among fragmented phrases, recurring themes, and sudden changes of direction, the journey proceeds under the banner of disorientation: perfect sounds, sick sounds, amidst bouts of vomiting and stomach cramps, the path of perdition unfolds through 13 doors, 13 foul places where one might easily encounter unsavory characters, like in a murky remake of Alice in Wonderland. However, we are not guided by the White Rabbit, but by a somewhat disinterested Charon, always ready to disappear to avidly pursue his own amusements. And so Balance's voice, less present than usual, comes and goes, unrecognizable at times, manipulated by machines or assaulted by the vocoder, yet always incisive and capable of instilling fear. Rather, it is the pulsating rhythms of the most hallucinogenic techno ("The Snow"), the fluorescent ejaculations of the most lysergic and absurd noise music ("Teenage Lightning" 1 and 2), the hypnotic basslines of the darkest dub ("Where even the Darkness"). Forget Orb!, forget Massive Attack! The sounds become fluid, like neurons disintegrating under the lethal influence of drugs, and like an evanescent sperm entering your ears and flooding the cavities of your brain.

But "Love's Secret Domain" isn't an electronic album, "Love's Secret Domain" is yet another manifestation of the artistic freedom of a band that acknowledges no limits, that isn't afraid to pull the avant-garde from its golden throne and throw it into the mud to serve the basest instincts. And so, amidst measured industrial incursions, dark frescoes of harrowing desolation, and explorations of absurd noise music, there's also room for the whimsical organ of "Disco Hospital", the Spanish-style guitar riffs of "Lorca not Orca" (yet another tribute to a homosexual artist killed for his ideas), and the classical opening with oboes and violins at the end of the noisy nightmare "Chaostrophy."

"Things Happen" is a drunken monologue where Anna Anxiety-Barnez's voice is so slurred and drawn-out it makes us think the woman really is in the grip of alcohol fumes. And if "Titan Arch" boasts the crystalline vocals of Marc Almond, a fundamental influence for Coil as well as a longtime friend and collaborator of the band, Balance gives us a terrifying performance in the concluding title track, an essay of unpredictable yet at the same time measured madness, which all the "novice crazies" of today’s fake musical world should study deeply. Because, as usual, what instills fear in Coil's art is the clarity and rationality with which the craziest acts are carried out, just like a serial killer, with method and rigor, prepares to slice you up and neatly stores you in the freezer.

What are you waiting for? Let yourself be sliced up too, come taste the secret domain of love!