The Soft Pink Truth Covers Coil's 'The Anal Staircase'

Ahead of the release of the Was It Ever Real? mini-album this Friday, and forthcoming full album Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? out October 21st, Drew Daniel of Matmos aka The Soft Pink Truth has shared the hypnotic, undulating new video for his interpretation of Coil's immortal queer classic "The Anal Staircase".

Fletcher Pratt's suitably suggestive video worms ever deeper into a seemingly infinite tunnel, suggesting psychedelic transcendence as much as it does dark-room hedonism.

Daniel elaborates on the choice of track and the making of the video: "I discovered Coil at age 16, buying their albums "Scatology" and "Horse Rotorvator" as a follow-up to loving Throbbing Gristle, but they were their own elegant proposition, and the idea of two gay men who are a couple and made music together looked to me like an ideal for living.

Eventually, life took a turn and I wound up meeting them both in person and becoming, if not friends (I was too much of a fanboy to be relaxed enough around them for it to be a true friendship), then at least acquaintances. John would phone me up and we would talk, and we hung out in London and Barcelona when in the same orbit with each other. After John Balance's death, I began to play a cover of "The Anal Staircase", and had the chance to play it live in front of Sleazy before his own passing.

We hugged and talked about John backstage, and Sleazy was moved by the cover and thanked me. In the wake of their deaths, the cover was something that I wanted to record properly and finally decided that the time was right only this year, after talking to Stephen Thrower about it (Thrower was the third member of Coil at the time the song was recorded, and is now a member of Cyclobe and Unica Zürn, and a friend of mine).

For the video, I wanted to visually depict the feeling of an endless spiral that picks up the anal / intestinal / rectal but also architectural conceit of the original Coil artwork for the single, and asked Fletcher Pratt to animate something that would represent that formally, and to foreground the lyrics in a direct way.

The bright white font is supposed to recall the kind of fonts used in pornographic "hypnosis" videos, in which large texts bombard the viewer with mind-altering commandments. The cover and the video are dedicated to John Balance, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and Stephen Thrower."

Asked to explain his new album's gauntlet-throwing title, Drew Daniel says: "years ago a friend was DJing in a club and a woman came into the DJ booth and asked 'is it going to get any deeper than this?' and the phrase became a kind of mantra for us. What did she really want? This album was created as an attempt to imagine possible musical responses to her question."

Throughout the ten songs of the album, the provocation to go "deeper" prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor, sweeping higher and lower on the scale of frequencies, engaging both philosophical texts re-set as pop lyrics and wordless glossolalia.

Rather than a dryly pursued thesis, the music flows across emotional terrain from upfront peaks to melancholic valleys, often within the same song. The accompanying mini-album Was It Ever Real? explores equally eclectic zones in deep dance music and minimalism, from the aching vocals and throbbing beats of the Dark Room Mix of "Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?" to the closing title track's slow-burning post-soul instrumental.

The Was It Ever Real? mini-album is released as part of Thrill Jockey Records' 30th anniversary series of limited-edition collaborations and new albums, which also includes new music from Sam Prekop & John McEntire, Douglas Andrew McCombs (Tortoise, Brokeback), Dan Friel (Upper Wilds), The Body & OAA and Colpitts (Kid Millions / Man Forever).

Watch the new music video here: