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

DEREK JARMAN PSYCHIC RALLY IN HEAVEN (1980)

Director: Derek Jarman

Year: 1981

Time: 8 mins

Music: Throbbing Gristle

Eye of Sound: A legendary film, mostly because it was directed by a semi-legendary filmmaker for a semi-legendary band. Using music from The Second Annual Report, TG's first album, it features footage from a live performance and unintelligible visual noise, rhythmically interspersed to produce a throbbing effect.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TY3B03WV

THROBBING GRISTLE RECORDING HEATHEN EARTH (1980)

Director: Monte Cazazza

Year: 1980

Time: 62 mins

Music: Throbbing Gristle

Eye of Sound: An analog video for biological people. Part of the limited edition TGV box-set, this live studio performance was originally released on VHS and was the basis for their famous Heathen Earth LP. It documents the band's later characteristic blend of synth expansion, guitar noise and cold-hearted beats, resulting in an uncanny balance of electronic/electric ambiances and distortion with a penchant for improvisation (which Chris & Cosey would later refine and tame, ironing out "excessive" distortion and improv elements). The film was shot by Monte Cazzaza and features overlapped images of the concert and assorted modern tragedies: war, murder, public disorder, urban desolation, etc - characteristic of both the band's visual output and the forthcoming decade's aesthetics. The world is a war film, so they say, in this case one with the glorious blotted colors of VHS mind-warping distortion, magically preserved in the aseptic surfaces of dvd frailty.

film kindly offered by sudasy via e-mail. many thanks.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FDUGW8YB

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