Soisong is the project in which the surviving half of Coil worked as a genuine partner rather than a solo author, and the Bureau files it at Tier III on that footing: an adjacent project of the Coil aftermath, but a real collaboration with an identity of its own. It joined Peter Christopherson, after Coil, to Ivan Pavlov, the Russian electronic artist who records as CoH, with whom Christopherson had worked from about 2005. That the work was shared, and not simply Christopherson under another name, is what gives the file a standing his purely solo guises do not have.
The sound is the meeting of two manners. Christopherson brought the exotic, ritual late style of his Thai period; Pavlov brought a colder, cleaner, more analytical digital approach, the discipline of the Raster-Noton world. The result sits between them, warmer than CoH alone and more exact than Christopherson alone. The project had a taste for elaborate objects and conceits, in keeping with both men: the debut EP qXn94... (2008) came in a disposable wrap that could not be reused once opened, the early CDs shared an octagonal shape, and the release of the album xAj3z (2009) was followed by a worldwide campaign in search of the record's missing virtual vocalists, the invented singers it featured.
Soisong premiered live in Tokyo in March 2008 and toured Europe, and the live work drew the project into Derek Jarman's orbit: a score to Blue performed in Rovereto, and, with David Tibet and others, a live soundtrack to The Angelic Conversation in Turin. A declared "Split Phase" in 2010 sent the two back to their own work, and Christopherson's death that November ended the project before he had finalised his part of a planned release; Soisong Split appeared in 2012, pairing a CoH EP with four of his unpublished sketches.
The Bureau's reading. Soisong is filed at Tier III as the Christopherson and Pavlov duo of 2007 to 2010, the most genuinely collaborative of Christopherson's post-Coil projects and the one whose identity is least reducible to him alone. It is filed beside the CoH and Peter Christopherson files, which carry the two halves of it, and it is the project through which their work briefly became a single thing.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene