COIL COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I: LIVE IN LONDON 24.08.83

Camera: Cerith Wyn-Evans

Year: 1983

Time: 24 mins

Music: Peter Christopherson

Eye of Sound: To celebrate the news of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's demise yesterday, a recording of Coil's performance at the Air Gallery in London in 1983. Entitled A Slow Fade to Total Transparency (How To Destroy Angels), it features John Gosling, John Balance and Marc Almond, while Christopherson provides the sound input on tapes. Samples from Pasolini's Salò set the tone for Almond's reading of a bitter-violent text apparently addressed to an ex-lover and for Balance's and Gosling's disturbing ritual of self-mutilation. As an esoteric ritual performance, the procedures elude the understanding of the non-initiate, and, much like in TPY's First Transmissions act, we are only allowed to know that it is located at the intersection of pain, sacrifice, control, art and magic. If the abundance of blood, smear and dejects is reminiscent of Muehl and the Aktionist posse, the slow, pseudo-ritualized gestures of the performers lend it a different, possibly more deranging effect, and certainly carry a different signification for the artists and their followers.

COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I

PETER CHRISTOPHERSON COIL - ANS (2004)

Director: Peter Christopherson 

Year: 2004

Time: 61 mins

Music: Coil

Eye of Sound: Released as a companion to Coil's ANS box-set, Christopherson's ANS (also known as Coilans) is divided in four different movements, each corresponding to a different, but globally coherent, visual approach to the band's music. The whole project is intended as a tribute to the ANS synth, sometimes described as the first synth in the history of music. Simple and soft sine-waves float in the acoustic sea, resulting from Coil's very brief experiences with the synthesizer in Moscow, which operates by transcoding visual information into sound patterns. Thus, the animation successfully completes the cycle, now translating the synth's music back into visual form. Christopherson's work explores the subtleties of synesthesia by restricting itself to simple, elegant and subliminal chromatic exercises, while the music translates, in its pristine simplicity, the glorious reaches of analog sound. The slow modulations in the sound/image relation eventually defeat perception and synaesthesic thought processes start expanding, tuning our cognition machinery into the mysterious waves of analog and analogy.

COIL ANS