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Love’s Secret Domain

In college, my roommate Steve and I used to interview bands for the on-campus radio station, and by our senior year, we’d gotten pretty jaded. We’d had milkshakes with Mr. Bungle and sushi with Shonen Knife, and when the Revolting Cocks needed a keg in their dressing room, or Nivek Ogre was freaking out on a layover at LAX, they knew whom to call. But when I finally got a chance to talk to someone from the last band on my list, I was physically afraid of picking up the phone.

Only a handful of people I’ve met have ever heard of Coil, and of those unhappy few, the ones who can stand them at all are, generally speaking, a bunch of perverts and gluttons for the most inscrutable brands of weirdness. With songs like “Anal Staircase” and “The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party,” they left no uncertainty about where their heads were at, but their albums included copious liner notes detailing the arcane inspirations for each song, from the base pleasures of ergot poisoning and chili torture to L’Autreaumont’s proto-surreal Maldoror poems and Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu plays. Clive Barker’s first choice to score Hellraiser, the band were axed by producers who thought their music was too sinister for a movie about torture-fetishists from Hell. His blurb on the vinyl release of the soundtrack said it all: “The only band whose music I’ve ever had to take off, because it was making my bowels churn.”

The video Coil’s Peter Christopherson made for Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP was a mock-snuff home movie so unflinchingly realistic that Interscope shitcanned it and snuffed its release. Surely, they couldn’t actually harm me through the phone, and if they tried any mind control techniques, Steve would restrain me from doing anything crazy while under hypnosis. But I still had that delicious thrill you get as a kid, just before ringing the doorbell of the scariest house in the neighborhood on Halloween night.

This lasted about a minute into the interview.

John Balance was a soft-spoken, shy interview subject, but soon warmed up and commenced blowing my mind with astounding anecdotes and tidbits about the band’s various fetishes. Late in the interview, I paid him what I thought was a compliment in praising their genius for capturing evil in their music, and asked about how they approach making music that made people so uncomfortable.

Balance was silent long enough that I worried that he might have hung up. Finally, he said, in a slightly hurt tone, “We always tried to just make music that was beautiful.”
It took me a few moments to ride out the satori he’d planted in my undercaffeinated brain and recover the thread of the conversation, because he’d got me to thinking about the funhouse mirror quality of the artist’s intent, and about how much more profoundly disturbing evil can be, when it seeks to be beautiful.

This simple statement explained for me why I was drawn to qualities in art and literature and music that sat mostly, but not easily, within the fantastic or experimental domains, and nailed a common thread. Suddenly, it made sense why so much of horrific entertainment, in setting out to be scary or grotesque, merely turned out ridiculous, or ugly. That profound chill, that sense of haunting that separates Val Lewton’s Cat People from other drek in the same vein, for instance, is the same wild hair that made lifelong schizophrenic Adolf Wolfli’s collages of soup cans in 1910 so much more meaningful than Andy Warhol’s contrived pop art renditions of same forty years later. It’s in the mystery that drove Wolfli to try to communicate something of almost mystical significance with, among other things, Campbell’s soup cans. It’s what makes Henry Darger’s tortured Vivian Girls epics so much more edifying––and terrifying––than Lolita or any other art that dares to try to explain why some adult males are complete freaks.

The most resonant entertainment for me out of that time and since, not only revered the awe and beauty of the unspeakable, but which gave the antagonist something more to play with than just coming back from the dead and fucking with people. Clive Barker’s “In The Hills, The Cities” blew my mind around the same time, because the monstrous titans of the story were not out to crush and destroy; this was a traditional Communist picnic outing gone awry, and the crazy beauty of what they were trying to do shone through the story and made the monsters something to weep for.

John Balance died a few years ago, having pretty much ruined his health chasing after a penumbral beauty that looked, to everyone else, like the polyp-pocked haunches of Hell. I think that, ever since, I have had quite a lot of quality horror ruined for me, because so many seem to try too hard to be scary or gross, when the stuff that continues to send me is informed by a borderline psychotic compulsion to revel in how beautiful darkness is.

Related posts:

1. I Love Cheese
2. That Love/Hate Thing
3. That Old Devil Called Love
4. Gorilla, My Love
5. I Shall Tell You A Great Secret

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