Zos Kia
Transparent

John Balance and Peter Christopherson are the two master minds of Coil. "Horse Rotovator" is almost impossible not to like; it’s one of those works you immediately become attached to. With a bit of awareness, one can calmly trace the importance of those sounds, and it’s almost always surprising to read the date and hear the avant-garde nature of the project.

Their training, if we want to call it that, is testified by Zos Kia. Various projects, in truth, have occupied the mind and hands, given that one doesn’t yet play with the nose or chin, of this highly skilled duo.

Zos Kia was active from 1982 to 1985. In 1983, their first and only album. A dark, cryptic work, too mature for its time, perfectly refining the avant-garde aspects of the "Second Annual Report" by Throbbing Gristle.

The triviality, impact, and neurosis mixed with a sense of vulnerability are high.

Let’s play a game. I'll put on the first song and turn off the light. Are you in? The effect and risk is like throwing objects in the dark and seeing what happens and what you catch. (Were you expecting a papaboys to review this?!)

Well, with a bit of wisdom, given we are dealing with an industrial/noise work, we immediately imagine a start with a panzer-like impact. Instead, "Sicktone," with the background voices and machine hisses that barely manage to involve us in the introduction, make this first minute feel like an eternity. But when the loop and the harmonious bacchanalia, correctly unbridled by desperate screams, begin, the samodaso dance of the mind and body is born.

An anxiety that would envy a Blixa or Yowe, because here, everything is alive. The electronics do not make the atmosphere sterile and premeditated. Everything is evolving. It’s a life, a process, a dream, a stream of consciousness.

A filmic structure I would dare say, or rather, theatrical. The perfection of the idea that Balance and Christopherson had already at the time is evident.

An unhealthy rhythmic section is paired with both narrating and screaming voices. It’s as if the narrating voice momentarily curtains darkness over the scene, only to raise the curtain again and immerse us into this blackout/daydream of the darkest psychic abyss.

This is what "Baptism Of Fire," "Rape," and especially "Truth" do.

With "Sewn Open," we reach the future conception of "How To Destroy Angels" by the Coil factory. An industrial drone makes the ambient illusorily static and still, as if calming the previous chaos or announcing an evolution for which we don't know how to defend ourselves.

But in the rest of "Transparent," nothing more claustrophobic happens compared to the beginning. With "Here To Here" and "Stealing The Words," we are surprised to find the anticipation of the visionary and architectural science fiction of the more cultured and ingenious Coil. A naturalism mixed with musique concrète and other imaginative escapades.

"On Balance" has an acidic synth, reminiscent of Suicide’s "Cheree," spiced with a kind of unabashedly kraut-like mechanicity.

The loop, ultimately, is the Bible from which everyone draws a bit. But it is how an idea is proposed that elevates and gratifies the proposition.