There’s a lot to unpack. Visually, The Universe Is A Haunted House is a beautifully presented book, too big for comfort, like an ancient Bible, waiting for its lectern. Images tumble out and over each other – like Peter Greenaway’s books, Pillow and Prospero.
It overwhelms at every turn, each giant page ceding new sight and deepening the spirals. Further down. Furthur. You won’t find out much about Coil in this book; you can’t read it. As with their music, it works best as a sensory experience.
You could look deeper, try to find some context that glues these images and fragments together as clues to some great elliptical, psychedelic mystery entitled Why Did They Have to Die?, but the absence of contextual information (the absence of words, which you feel have often been Coil’s friends) doesn’t make this easy and as you turn every page the mystery simply deepens.There are some glorious shots here and plenty of stuff I’ve either not seen or glimpsed very rarely. Someone is a hoarder, someone’s been shifting through the garbage, finding jewels. Sometimes, one image obscures another as if these have been culled from a deep drawer which was pretending to be an archive and thrown to the floor in frustration and then photographed. There’s an order of kind, a chronology, so that you see the boys (and girls, but you know the score) getting older and shuffling with their coils, but, as a Coil obsessive even this is a paradox since I can more or less remember when I first saw many of these images and that timeline isn’t at all chronological. A picture of the Scatology sessions, first glimpsed a few years ago, on a trawl through some blog or other, a mailing list mention of albums that never came to be: The Sound of Music, Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window…
Things that never were (perhaps things that never could have been) are deep within these pages. That Autechre collaboration, that track with the Butthole Surfers, those pinky clam shells that only spawned a couple when they promised many. Coil were always disappointing, even if the albums they released never disappointed (I remember The Ape of Naples leaving me with the sensation that there just wasn’t enough material after all, but that is very much the exception) because Coil may have been occasionally profligate with their promises (I suspect that was mostly Jhonn Balance, who wished he could wish these ideas into existence), but they were rigorous with the quality control, hardly ever letting a dud take slip out into the world.
And it’s here that this book unsettles. It feels a bit invasive to own this, like flicking through someone’s diaries. It feels like a lot of this was never intended to be seen (of course it wasn’t) and it can be a little uncomfortable at times, as if you’ve just found out some vital and terrible information about a close friend by hiding in the toilet stalls and listening to gossip.
The magick of Coil is at least as much about the necessarily obscure and arcane nature of their craft. I remember thinking a similar thing about vastly inferior bands like Whitehouse – when their records were almost impossible to obtain and information about the band at best shadowy and incomplete there was something mysterious and unimaginable about the people behind these awful sounds, but when we found out who these people were, what they looked like, what their intentions were… well, it seemed a bit pathetic. I sold all those records because they were suddenly just power-hungry guys, trying their luck; the prosaic reality of the musicians couldn’t keep pace.
Now, Coil is an entirely different beast and far less reliant on shock and subterfuge, but still… this book is full of images that seem private, not suitable for public consumption (in that way, they match the music, perhaps). Some of them feel like they wouldn’t want me to see, even if I’ve corresponded a little with Balance and he’d always seemed completely open, and lacking in guile and not at all full of silence or secrecy. I’m not sure they’d approve, but perhaps others know them better; maybe they’re looking up at all of their fans and grinning like cats at us swarming and swaying at this beautiful paean to lives well lived.I can’t make up my mind and so I’ll treasure this, and dip in often, and then leave it for months untouched, hedging my bets. If the Coil spirits are there, I hope they’re happy. This book is a thing of great beauty, no question and maybe that’s enough. I guess Coil have always had me overthinking.
-Loki-
