Everything Keeps Dissolving

Book excerpt: Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.