Master and Slave in the Music of Coil
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Sound Scripts Volume 3 Article 7 1-1-2011 Master and Slave in the Music of Coil Drren Jorgensen University of Western Australia Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts Part of the Other Music Commons Recommended Citation Jorgensen, D. (2011). Master and Slave in the Music of Coil. Sound Scripts, 3(1). Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts/vol3/iss1/7 This Refereed Article is posted at Research Online. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts/vol3/iss1/7 Jorgensen: Master and Slave in the Music of Coil Master and Slave in the Music of Coil Darren Jorgensen Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art University of Western Australia For Theodor Adorno, pop music perpetuates the place of pop music in the lives of the British working drudgery and alienation of working class existence class. A founder of the industrial genre, Throbbing by providing a distraction fromit. This paper turns to Gristle, parodies the status of three minute songs a similar critique of pop music, in the work of Coil. with their grinding, shrieking number, "What a Day" Born out of the UK industrial scene, Coil distort the (20 Funky Jazz Greats, 1979), in an ode to the use of pop song format, reproducing and appropriating its popular music in relieving the drudgery of working sounds with cynical manipulations. This cynicism life. Or in another early example, Cabaret Voltaire's shines through a mastery over the forms of pop "Nag Nag Nag" (Extended Play, 1978) pokes fun at music and its sounds, that Coil configure without the everyday irritations of English life with layers of veering into pop's more explicit commercialism. By feedback squealing before a simple drum machine estranging the familiarity of pop music, Coil point to playing out the forms of popular musical culture. how listeners are enslaved by the industrial mode of Boyd Rice, working under the name NON, makes musical alienation, by reproducing this alienation in a noise compositions from layers of pop rhythms. ii For new way. the industrial musician, the critical answer to the Theodor Adorno damns popular music for totalitarian sound culture of pop does not lie in a high infantilizing the masses and keeping the proletariat in art avant-garde that was instead a part of the class its powerless place. i The pop song produces its own problem in England, but in the distortion and authority through repetition on radio, in a structure of remediation of popular sounds. aural power that keeps the listener in a state of Industrial musicians solve the pop problem by submission. For Adorno the pop song has no pushing pop music so as to distort and parody the qualities of its own, and only its standardisation and sounds of the machines that reproduce it, to repetition, its immersion in industrial reproduction, incorporate the feedbackof the production process so lends the form its cultural power. The solution to this that it reveals its place in the structure of industry. problem is, for Adorno at least, complex classical Throbbing Gristle's 20 Funky Jazz Greats (1979), avant-garde music, whose difficulty helps rather than Cabaret Voltaire's The Voice of America (1980) and hinders the critical self-consciousness of the listening NON's Physcial Evidence (1982) each parody or subject. This essay turns to sound artists who share distort the five minute pop song formula to create a Adomo's views, but who do not conclude that consciousness of industrial production within pop complexity is the solution to the problem of a music. In this essay I want to tum to Coil, a post degraded, popular aural intelligence. These are artists industrial outfit that emerged from this generation of working within the genre of industrial music. musicians and released a first 12" in 1984. Largely Arguably, industrial music developed in the UK in made up of duo John Balance and Peter 'Sleazy' the 1970s and 1980s as a means of parodying the Christopherson, Coil also included members drifting 26 Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the 2009 Totally Huge New Music Conference, vol. 3 (2011) Published by Research Online, 2011 1 Sound Scripts, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2011], Art. 7 in and out of their studios over the years. Balance Coil's recordings, this is not an education they share, and Sleazy were both members of the post-industrial and this allusion to an inside meaning of the record is project Psychic TV, and before that, Christopherson mysterious. The record has a doubled function, as it was a founding member of Throbbing Gristle. Coil targets insiders who are involved in rituals to do something very different with the pop song to accumulate male sexual energy, and outsiders who these other industrial and post-industrial groups, are not involved in such ceremonies. It is tempting to however, and it is to their particular operation upon it dismiss the insider meanings altogether, to proclaim that I want to tum here, in order to theorise their that every listener is an outsider, and that the only work. listeners who could be inside the circle would be Coil While Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire parody themselves. The industrial structure of distribution, in the pop song, and NON turns it into noise, Coil which manufacturing is at a distance from simulate the powerful place of the pop song without consumption, ensures that consumers could never actually producing pop music. They denaturalise the know if they were performing the right ritual, if they pop song by constructing music from their own were in fact on Coil's precise wavelength. Thus it is original recordings, their own noises, to construct a that, even in this first release, Coil reproduce popular distinctive relationship with popular music. As music's structure of power by naming their listeners Balance tells an interviewer in 1987: as outsiders, and establishing the listener's desire as the desire of the other, or the desire for another's Sonic research is very hard to do properly on a desire. Rough Trade advance or whatever. It maintains a Adorno bases his critique of popular culture on pseudo-science, it has a wishy-washy quality that Hegel, whose reasoning methods find that there is I don 't particularly want to be associated with. little that takes place beyond historical causality. I'd rather be seen as a perverse noise unit with Adomo's Hegelian Marxism does not admit of the decidedly dubious musical leanings. iii kind of alternative symbolic universes that Coil Here Balance rejects the avant-garde in favour of the mythologises in How to Destroy Angels, as its form popular. Yet Coil were not always interested in being remains, for Adorno at least, caught up in the musical. The first Coil release, How to Destroy historically dominant mode of industrial Angels (1984), is derivative of the avant-garde reproduction. For Adorno only a completely different tendencies within industrialism. For in addition to the musical structure can bring into being a sufficient kinds of pop-noise crossovers I have been writing of questioning of capitalist modes of thought. The here, Throbbing Gristle and other industrial groups theories of another Hegelian, Alexandre Kojeve, attempted to venture into the nether regions of sound, make a better framework for thinking through the creating atmospheres with early synthesisers, loops specificity of Coil's art.v Kojeve reduces Hegel's and field recordings. Coil's How to Destroy Angels historicism to a struggle between master and slave. also creates a distinctive atmosphere by using the The master depends for his power on the recognition recorded sounds of clashing swords, gongs and of the slave. The problem for the master, however, bullroarers. The result is at times cacophonous, at lies in the fact that he remains unrecognised, since he others ambient, but always reminiscent of other, does not recognise the slave in tum. The master experimental industrial releases of the time, such wants to be recognised by other masters, but no Throbbing Gristle's In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), master could recognise another without turning Nurse With Wound's Homotomy to Marie (1982) and himself into a slave. It is to the master's double-bind, Lustmord's Paradise Disowned (1984). that describes the stratification of history within It is possible to tum to the inlay notes of How to modernity, that we can tum to unpack the way that Destroy Angels so as to unpack the way in which Coil also produces popular music that reproduces its Coil set out to differentiate themselves from their own historical situation of power. industrial fellows. The subtitle of this first record, In Coil's liner notes to How to Destroy Angels, the printed in the liner notes, is Ritual Music for the appeal to insiders is an appeal for an impossible Accumulation of Male Sexual Energy. This counter-recognition. These notes work against combination of occultism and drug use recalls the creating an empathetic listenership for the record, influence of Alastair Crowley on the group. Indeed, and instead places Coil in Kojeve's double-bind, as as David Keenan demonstrates in England's Hidden their appeal to other masters is made only on the Reverse (2003), Balance and Sleazy cultivated an condition that they go unrecognised. The exclusion education on esoteric and occult matters, and took of listeners places the listener in a condition of this knowledge seriously.iv Yet for most listeners to slavery, of what Adorno described as a transfer of recognition-authority to the object.vi To unpack this Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the 2009 Totally Huge New Music Conference, vol. 3 (2011) 27 https://ro.ecu.edu.au/soundscripts/vol3/iss1/7 2 Jorgensen: Master and Slave in the Music of Coil troubled structure in more musical terms, we can turn itself, in a dialectical sublation that in Hegelian terms to Coil's subsequent records, that followed after the is a demonstration of mastery.