Coil's mid-1990s remixes of Nine Inch Nails, recovered by fans and released by Cold Spring a decade after both Coil members had died. The clearest single document of the bridge between the underground and its commercial inheritor.
Recoiled is a remix record credited to Coil and Nine Inch Nails, released by Cold Spring in February 2014. It collects five Coil reworkings of Nine Inch Nails tracks, made in the mid-1990s and unreleased for almost twenty years. The Bureau files it at Tier III, and files it as a Coil record: the work is Coil's, the release is Cold Spring's, and its interest lies in what it documents rather than in any chart it touched.
What it documents is the bridge. The archive treats Nine Inch Nails as the underground's largest commercial inheritor, filed at F·16 industrial rock and held a little apart from the first wave; the line from the founding tradition into that commercial wing runs, more than through any other connection, through Coil. Trent Reznor was a long-standing Coil admirer, and in the mid-1990s he sent the band the original multitracks and DATs of several songs and asked them to remix them. The work was done not in a large studio but in the home set-ups of Danny Hyde and Peter Christopherson, who mixed independently and then met to sync their separate versions into finished masters. Recoiled is the surviving evidence of that exchange.
The record reached daylight by an unusual route. The mixes were long rumoured to exist as outtakes from Coil's commissioned work for the Nine Inch Nails remix records of the early-to-mid 1990s, but they stayed unheard until members of a Nine Inch Nails forum pooled funds and approached Hyde, who supplied the material. It circulated first as a free fan-assembled set under the title Uncoiled. When Cold Spring gave it a proper release as Recoiled, the label dropped the tracks that read as redundant and added an Eraser remix the fan set had not carried. The Bureau notes one correction to the usual story: the tracks are best understood not as raw outtakes but as new mixes Hyde rebuilt from his own source material, which is the more accurate account of what the record actually is.
The sound is the surprise. A listener coming from the source material finds almost none of its rock surface. The versions are slow and ethereal, closer to industrial ambient than to the originals, stripping the noise back to find the mood underneath; the rearrangement of small details is the method, not wholesale reinvention. They are also plainly pre-laptop, made with baby alarms, outboard effects and a tangle of wires rather than with software, which gives them the texture of their decade. Several reviewers reached for the same word, cult, and it fits: the appeal is narrow and strong.
The record is unavoidably posthumous. John Balance died in 2004 and Peter Christopherson in 2010, so by the time Recoiled appeared in 2014 both Coil members were gone and the work on it was twenty years old. The Bureau files it accordingly: as a recovered document rather than a new statement, a record whose value is partly that it exists at all and was very nearly lost.
Where it sits: a Tier III Coil record; the single clearest artefact of the F·11-into-F·16 personnel bridge, the underground and its commercial inheritor working through the same tape; released by Cold Spring rather than by any Nine Inch Nails label, which is why the Bureau files it here and not at limits. It is not a starting point for either catalogue. It is the point where the two of them touch.