The London project that, for a brief run in the early 1980s, was the same fluid thing as Coil under another name; ritual, lo-fi and occult-leaning, sharing personnel and stages, and leaving behind one shared release that is the first recordings of both groups.
Zos Kia (also written Zoskia) is the early-1980s London project formed by John Gosling, who performed under the name Joan D'Arc, together with John Balance and Min, with Peter Christopherson handling sound and a shifting cast of guests around them. The name is taken from the Zos Kia Cultus, the magical system of the English occult artist Austin Osman Spare, a touchstone for the people involved more than a doctrine the music set out to illustrate. The group ran from about 1982 to 1985 and never settled into a fixed shape; that instability is the point of it.
For its first two years Zos Kia and Coil were, in practice, one thing under two names. John Balance had conceived Coil in 1982 as a project running alongside Psychic TV, in which he and Peter Christopherson were then playing. Through 1982 and 1983 the same people recorded and performed under whichever name suited the occasion, so that the early Zos Kia material and the early Coil material are hard to separate and were never meant to be. The recordings are darker and more raw than most of what Coil went on to make, closer to the cut-and-paste industrial underground the work grew out of.
The live work was confrontational. The group's best-documented action is the performance at the Air Gallery in London in August 1983, which involved blood and flesh-cutting in the body-art manner of the period, and a set at the Berlin Atonal festival in December 1983 on a bill that also held Psychic TV. The Berlin recording became one side of the group's one widely circulated release.
That release is Transparent, issued as a Zos Kia / Coil split on the Austrian label Nekrophile Rekords (NRC 05) early in 1984. It was the first released recording of both Coil and Zos Kia. The Zos Kia side carries the Berlin Atonal performance; the Coil side gathers live and studio fragments. The package also held the Coil text The Price of Existence Is Eternal Warfare, written by John Balance in 1983, in which much of what Coil went on to do is already sketched. Transparent was later reissued on CD by Threshold House in 1997, on 12" by Eskaton through World Serpent in 1998, and remastered by Cold Spring in 2016 with bonus material from the pre-Zos Kia group AKE.
The split came as the group dissolved. From January 1984 Balance and Christopherson left Psychic TV and the Temple of Psychic Youth to make Coil their full-time concern, and Coil is where the line carries on. Gosling kept the Zos Kia name a little longer, with all material under that name alone being mainly his own work, then joined Psychic TV for about a year before going on to Sugardog, to solo work as Sugar J, and to the long-running Mekon. Min, the third of the founding trio, left London and followed the Peace Convoy. By 1985 the name was retired.
The Bureau files Zos Kia as a precursor entry rather than a body of work in its own right: a short-lived project whose main importance is as the chrysalis Coil came out of, and as a document of how fluid the early-1980s London industrial underground was, with Psychic TV, the Temple of Psychic Youth, Current 93 and Coil all sharing people and stages. The file holds the founding line-up, the Spare-derived name, the confrontational live actions, the one shared release and the dispersal into Coil and Psychic TV. It is filed for what it led to as much as for what it was.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Renaissance · last revised c. the Victorian period