Although John Balance and Peter Christopherson certainly haven't been passive over the last years there wasn't much new to hear from their band, Coil. Now it finally happens with the double-compact disc "The Sound of Music". This new release will not only contain older soundtrack works, but also a lot of new material.

In the meantime Coil remixed some Nine Inch Nails tracks, Sleazy has made videos for Nine Inch Nails, Jah Wobble, Senser, Sepultera, and Rage Against the Machine, while John has contributed to the Current 93 mini-album "Lucifer over London". Meanwhile, they've been in the studio to record the actual new album "International Dark Skies", with which Coil want to keep following the path they've taken on "Love's Secret Domain".

"It will be electronic and abstract, not really ambient , but still more flowing and hypnotic than noisy", Coil announce the new album that's now planned for the summer. In this respect, a foretaste of its hypnotic flowing ambient sounds might have been the the compact disc "How to Destroy Angels", with which Coil revitalized their first 12" from 1984. Instead of the original two pieces which were meant to be sexually stimulating Coil filled the CD with completely new tracks that don't have much in common with the original anymore.

In 1994 Coil realesed the soundtrack to the film "The Angelic Conversation" by Derek Jarman, who died on February 20th last year and called this movie "a poetic reverie, pursued farther by the minimalistically produced electronic-ambient sound. It often seems as a background noise to the Shakespeare sonnets recited by Judi Drench. "The Angelic Conversation" was a film and music collaboration especially brought into being for Coil.

"We couldn't get him (Derek Jarman) to make a video clip sutable for television, so he made a film about love between men out of it, based upon Shakespeare's sonnets. The piece we recorded for Derek Jarman's "Blue" was intended to be representation of the ghost-like memory of the gay clubs at the end of the 70s/beginning of the 80s, where people had sex with strangers in backdoors and caught the HIV virus. The piece is a derision of the 70s disco sound that then becomes a hell-like landscape of fear of future evens and goes back to disco again" - Coil

To keep open any musical direction for themselves, Coil started the Eskaton label, which specializes more upon experimental electronic dance music. The latest Coil 12" - "Nasa Arab" - and the mini-album "Coil vs. ELpH" have already been released through Eskaton and new projects from John and Peter such as Black Light District, Worsine, The Eskaton and others will be released in the future. Meanwhile, Coil have seperated from Stephen Thrower and replaced him with Drew McDowall. After the release of "The Sound of Music" there will be more new Coil releases. Unnatural History II, a collection of older compilation tracks will also contain unreleased material for Trent Reznor's Nothing label. A new album, "Backwards", will come out. It has been described as "a more aggresive album with chanting, songs, and text". But coil also want to continue to do soundtracks. At the end of last year Coil traveled to Los Angeles to talk with Gus Van Sant and Clive Barker, and even though Barker didn't use Coil's contributions to his debut film "Hellraiser", he is still interested in them.