John Balance, founding member of Coil and formerly of Psychic TV, died over the weekend.
From the official thresholdhouse label announcement...
"We are greatly saddened to have to you that at about 5.30 pm
Saturday Nov 13th, Jhonn Balance, was killed in an accident at home.
Under the influence of alcohol he fell from the first floor landing,
hitting his head on the floor some 15ft below.
Peter/Sleazy who was in the front room heard the noise, came out
investigate and found him unconscious, though still breathing.
Balance was rushed to hospital, where his condition deteriorated,
and he died soon after, without ever regaining consciousness.
There is no suggestion that this event was in any way deliberate, in
fact, anything other than a tragic accident.
Unusually, Balance had been cheerful during the day, and was
looking forward to seeing Ian at the weekend, and working on new
recordings this week."
[]
A brief history of the band, quoted from Rough Guide to Rock --
"Formed London, 1983 by John Balance as a solo side project to Psychic TV but developed into a full-scale musical project in 1984, when he cemented a partnership with Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson.
The seventeen-minute, one-sided 12" titled How To Destroy Angels was released in 1984 and was described on the cover notes as 'ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy'. It was dedicated to the god Mars and used predominantly iron and steel instruments, such as swords and gongs. It was a theme echoed on the group's debut album, Scatology (1984), on which Balance and Christopherson collaborated with Stephen Thrower (of Possession), J. G. Thirwell (aka Foetus) and Gavin Friday. Concerned with the alchemical or spiritual process of transforming base material into gold, the album compounded a multitude of apparently banal non-musical sound sources, which were processed to create a momentum within changing rhythms. The result was an album of considerable intensity that varies from slow dramatic tracks like "At the Heart of it All" to the ferocious celebratory bacchanalia of "Panic".
Coil's next release was a 12" single covering Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" (1984) with "Aqua Regis" and a restructured version of "Panic" on the B-side. Coil produced a video to accompany the single: featuring car crashes, hallucinogenic putrefaction and Marc Almond as the Angel of Death, it was widely banned, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought a copy.
Between 1984 and 1986 Coil collaborated with Derek Jarman on the film The Angelic Conversation, the soundtrack to which was reworked and remixed before release under the same title. After Nightmare Culture (1986), a collaboration with Boyd Rice, Coil recruited Stephen Thrower as a full member of the band and released the album Horse Rotorvator (1986) and an EP called Anal Staircase (1986). Horse Rotorvator combined Fairlight brass and clunky percussion with lyrics about sex, death and cannibalism. However, the album's most striking feature was Christopherson's sampling - notably on "Ostia", where a recording of grasshoppers on the Aztec pyramid at Chichen Itza is used as the vehicle for a song about the film maker Pasolini, who was murdered by a rent-boy in Ostia.
Article comments
1 - yemeth
Nice one on the topic! Just to thank you for the information, this is one of the nicest research places (from which I used information for an article in spanish). For those spaniards out there, check out this article for information: Un año desde la muerte de John Balance ( Coil ).
I think I like from him the "magickal" part, the attempts to affect with "musick"; the CD "musick to play in the dark" is amazing in that sort of sense, though I guess it depends in your mood :]