Bleep

True to experimental post-everything group Coil’s interdisciplinary character, members John Balance, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Danny Hyde contributed a score to a VHS-only sexual education documentary entitled The Gay Man’s Guide To Safer Sex. Released in 1992, the score is of a piece with Coil’s ever-changing work at that moment: the tape’s theme straddles glorious New Age opulence and refreshingly chilled progressive house. Whilst this soundtrack will be appealing to anyone with a fascination in psychedelic, “library music” reappraisals as well as Coil completionists, the work nevertheless remains poignant, politicising and aestheticising in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.