Coil, Horse Rotorvator (1986)

Where bought? La Face Cachee in Metz. The version I have (German copy on Recordvox) now goes for about £40 minimum, making it one of the few records I own that has actually appreciated in value.

Throbbing Gristle and associated projects for me are hit and miss, though I do like the unashamed provocation of most of it. Ultimately provocation and being on the right side only gets you so far: I'm a tunes man to the end of time, and so it shall be. Coil are really only nephews of TG, anyway, a side-project of Psychic TV gone in their own bizarre and pointed tangent.

Case in point is the title, which I only chose to look up now:

The title relates to a dream vision of the slaughter, betrayal, and death of the 4 Horses of the Apocalypse at the hands of the 4 Riders. The amimals' jawbones being made into an earthmoving machine called the Horse Rotorvator - Infernal machinery. 

What I find endlessly interesting is how they manage to communicate this dark entanglement of dream and flesh in their work, and how they manage to suggest in facing earthly fears you can reach some kind of new spiritual or mental plane. Maybe I'm buying the hype a little bit (but not really, as I'm not a huge fan of Coil beyond this point) but I instinctively felt these things before I read anything about them.

So for instance, one of the songs is called 'Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)' - presumably in some kind of reference to the director and possibly his terrifically unwatchable film Salo - does a great job of conjuring these worlds aurally and without being overly literal about anything. It is music first, and you can follow it down different tangents, and enter different worlds. 

Modern bands who actually like Coil and incorporate their style into their work? Xiu Xiu, These New Puritans at a push. None of them manage to convey the weird sexuality and formal rigour of this one, marrying pulverising electronics with gorgeous strings and machines of joy.

It's a fairly inscrutable record, which sometimes can be shorthand for 'I don't know what to make of it, it is beyond my experience'. This is possibly true. For some Horse Rotorvator has the power of a portal, a one record trip to a dome of magick (spelled with a k, always spelled with a k) and velour. Maybe the magick is a literal power, or maybe it is a metaphor for some kind of refuge in individual power against the crushing nature of the system (for instance, I can't imagine they were Tories in any way shape or form). But it lingers, and I feel it.