The benefit compilation the World Serpent circle made for John Balance, gathering Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 around a rare Peter Christopherson solo track. A document of a friendship as much as a record.
Foxtrot is a various-artists benefit compilation, released in 1998 on the Chalice imprint through World Serpent Distribution as GRAAL1CD. It was assembled to raise money for the treatment of John Balance of Coil, who at the time was being treated in a private clinic for alcohol problems. The Bureau files it at Tier III: not for the strength of its music, most of which is drawn or altered from elsewhere, but as a document of the circle that made it and the occasion that prompted it.
That circle is the point. By the late 1990s, World Serpent was the distributor holding the catalogues of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 alike, and the three acts shared members, sleeves and a sensibility well beyond a common shipping address. Foxtrot is what happens when that loose family is asked to put a record together quickly for one of its own. Coil, here the trio of Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowall, supply two tracks from the A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room period. Nurse With Wound supply two more, with a third hidden under the Inflatable Sideshow alias. Current 93 close the record. The result is less an album than a gathering.
The single rarest thing on it opens the record. In My Head a Crystal Sphere of Heavy Fluid is credited to Peter Christopherson alone, under his own name, and is exclusive to this compilation · one of only two tracks he ever released that way in a career otherwise spent inside Throbbing Gristle, Coil and other collaborations. For collectors that piece, more than the benefit, is why the disc is sought; the Bureau notes the irony that a record made in difficult circumstances is chased for a rarity rather than its cause.
The rest is mostly the catalogue rearranged. The two Coil tracks, Blue Rats (Blue Cheese Mix) and Heartworms, are a remix and a version that turn up in slightly different shape elsewhere, the latter on the World Serpent collection Terra Serpentes. The Nurse With Wound pieces are similar: Bone Frequency, under the Inflatable Sideshow name, is an altered cut from The Swinging Reflective, and Think Jazz, Think Punk Attitude is the track Cooloorta Moon as broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Mixing It, the presenters' voices left in at either end. Little here is wholly new; the record's value is in the act of assembly, not in unheard material.
Current 93's contribution, the closer A Dream of the Inmost Light, sits slightly outside the archive's core. Current 93 are the neofolk wing of this circle, closer to apocalyptic folk than to noise, and the Bureau files them at the boundary rather than the centre. They are here as Balance's friends, which is exactly the logic of the record, and the track is listed as part of it; the connection is documented rather than argued.
The framing is dark and plain about it. The vinyl edition's four sides were etched with the lines Clarity Confuses Me, Cooloorta Moonshine, Fighting the Ugly Spirit and Hair of the Dog, the last a flat joke about the record's own occasion. The Bureau treats Balance's difficulties as a matter of record and not of spectacle, and notes only that his friends answered a bad period with a record, which is the kind of thing this circle did.
Where it sits: a Tier III circumstantial document; the meeting point of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 on a single disc; held together by World Serpent, the distributor that connected them; and the carrier of a rare Peter Christopherson solo recording. It is not a starting point for any of the artists on it, but it is a clear snapshot of the family they formed.