Mute – in conjunction with Threshold House – have announced a partnership that launches with four early, often overlooked, works by Coil – remastered and released with restored artwork, previously unseen imagery and new sleeve notes.

Originally conceived by John Balance, Coil swiftly became a duo with Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle) and after their 1984 debut release, the one-sided 12” single How to Destroy Angels, they were joined by a young Stephen Thrower. On the recordings in the series, Coil are John Balance (1962-2004), Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and Stephen Thrower.

The series launches with 1987’s Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders), the third in a trilogy that began with Scatology and Horse Rotorvator. Where Scatology and Horse Rotorvator are revered, the period immediately after is sometimes skipped over, but these years were enormously potent moments in their history, ones where sex and sexuality, as core engines of their work, were cast under increasing shadow by homophobia and the fear of AIDS, both of which were deliberately fanned and propagated by the mainstream media.

Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) draws on work that had been sidelined during Horse Rotovator’s sequencing. It takes textural and instrumental pieces and shapes them into a fully-formed album. Thrower explains that this is much more than “a round-up of wraiths and strays”, describing it as “the culmination of a ‘magnum opus’ in the artistic sense, the closure of a trilogy – Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Gold is the Metal – rounding up even our most jagged, cryptic, frictional, intemperate materials into a final balanced form”.

It honed what Thrower calls “electro-erotics of sound”, with a collage structure inspired by The Faust Tapes.Notable are its field recordings – a drunken brass band captured in Mexico, a snippet of a TV documentary about young British boxers, and a Thai boxing arena recorded by Christopherson. There is also accident and serendipity at play: ‘Metal in the Head’ contains the sound of their hired Fairlight sampler malfunctioning, when it began to randomly rearrange and distort the music. Words become less important for this record: it is instead about the creation of an enveloping continuity, atmospheres where barbarism lurks, unspoken but detected, alongside the euphoria of intoxication and the Rites of Spring. 

For this reissue its artwork has been painstakingly reconstructed by Thrower and his partner Ossian Brown (a member of Coil from 1999-2004), expanding upon its original concept with additional archive material, including artefacts, photographs, artworks, and personal notes made by John Balance. 

Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) will be followed by Coil’s soundtrack for Derek Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation, the unreleased music for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and the compilation Unnatural History. 

Threshold House was Coil’s own imprint, set to release Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) and nowreactivated by Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown as a vehicle to release the early Coil albums in partnership with Mute, and in association with the estates of John Balance and Peter Christopherson.