Coil's first LP and the start of the Scatology / Horse Rotorvator / Love's Secret Domain run. Balance and Christopherson at the industrial stage, with JG Thirlwell in the production.
Scatology is the first full-length record by Coil, released in 1984 on Force & Form and the K.422 Some Bizzare sublabel. It follows the debut EP How to Destroy Angels, so it is the first LP rather than the first release, and the Bureau files it at Tier I as the opening record of the run · Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain · that forms the spine of the Coil catalogue.
The duo at its centre is John Balance and Peter Christopherson. Both had come through Psychic TV, and Christopherson through Throbbing Gristle before that, and Coil began when the two left to work on their own. Scatology is the first sustained statement of what that work would be: Christopherson's sampled and treated sound as the foundation, Balance's voice and words on top, the whole built into pieces that move between skewed song-form and instrumental passage. The method is recognisably post-Throbbing-Gristle, but the register is already Coil's own.
The production is shared with JG Thirlwell, working as Clint Ruin, and his hand in the record's sound is substantial rather than incidental. Around the core, the album draws in collaborators · Stephen Thrower on clarinet, Gavin Friday singing on The Tenderness of Wolves, Alex Fergusson on guitar · a way of working, the central pair plus a shifting cast of contributors, that Coil would keep for the rest of the catalogue. The Bureau notes the pattern here at its start.
The subject matter is in the title. Scatology takes the body and its waste as material, part of the transgressive vocabulary of the early-1980s industrial milieu, worn openly rather than implied. The record runs from the opening Ubu Noir through Panic, At the Heart of It All and the rest to Cathedral in Flames, and closes, on the single and later CD pressings, with a cover of Tainted Love · Coil's response to the AIDS epidemic of the period, years before such a gesture was common.
It is an early record, and the Bureau says plainly that the run gets stronger: Horse Rotorvator (1986) is the greater album, the method at full maturity. But Scatology is where the method arrives, where the duo's way of working is first set down at album scale, and where the catalogue the archive files Coil for actually begins. The record had a troubled life on the label · Coil disowned the unauthorised K.422 repressings · and the 2001 Threshold House remaster is the version the band stood behind.
Where it sits: Coil's debut LP and the first of the three-record run; primary in the industrial stage, the sampled-and-treated method carried from Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV into Coil's own form; tied to JG Thirlwell through the production; and the ground that Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain build on. It is not Coil's best record, and the Bureau does not pretend otherwise; it is their first, and the run starts here.