Black Sun, Lunar Dreams: The Music of Coil

This book presents the musical evolution of Coil, not merely as a passage between a range of musical styles from industrial to acid house, drone, glitch, and ambient but also as a spiraling vortex in and through which many of the key cultural events of the late 20th Century were mobilized and transformed. Coil traversed cultural experiences from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the late 1980s’ new summer of love of acid house, to the revitalization of post-punk/industrial bands in the 2000s. These phenomena were transfigured in Coil’s musical practices, generating a decentred perspective on late Twentieth Century cultural history that remained throughout a genuinely alternative and eccentric one. In this way Coil’s highly consistent aesthetics, despite shifting musical styles, technologies and collaborators, can be seen as ‘heretical’ in relation to popular culture since heresy implies such processes of decentring established and conventional cultural forms. To engage with Coil is therefore to engage with an eccentric perception and transformation of contemporary realities, a hidden reverse to use David Keenan’s description of Coil and related groups, that is the dark psychedelic flipside of contemporary realities, once they have been transformed by Coil’s singular aesthetics.