Dream Machines // Interviews

The albums made by Coil in the second half of the eighties and the turn of the nineties remain a remarkably powerful body of work; their reputation as intoxicating, occasionally disturbing pieces of post-industrial electro-acoustic art has only increased over the years. Apart from Geff Rushton/John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, there was another mind involved in these recordings: Stephen Thrower, who was with Coil from ‘Scatology’ to ‘Love’s Secret Doman’, and later went on to form the brilliant experimental-ambient duo Cyclobe. Rushton (1962-2004) and Christopherson (1955-2010) are no longer with us, but in this interview, Thrower paints a fascinating picture of Coil’s musical processes: the pioneering use of technology, the wild sonic experiments, the creative use of drugs. He also speaks movingly about Coil’s role as one of the very few bands who were openly gay in the darkest years of the 1980s HIV-AIDS crisis, and how they expressed this through their music. The s...

Sonic surrealist, magus of the absurd, self-proclaimed ‘purveyor of sinister whimsy’: with his musical alter-ego Nurse With Wound, Steven Stapleton has been delivering esoteric electro-acoustic soundscapes to enthralled admirers since 1978. I spoke to him about the origins of Nurse With Wound in his passions for krautrock and free improvisation;  his love of unexpected creative incidents,  his disdain for computer technology, and his ambivalent relationship with the industrial genre. Before Nurse With Wound, you were a record collector. What made you think, “I can do this myself”? I was a sign writer, and I was asked to write a sign on the window at a studio in Wardour Street [in Soho, central London]. And I started painting the window, and the [studio] engineers were sitting behind me at a tea break. And they were just making jokes about putting the paint on backwards because I had to write the sign backwards so it could be read from the front forwards. And then on th...

As a member of The Wild Bunch, Milo Johnson has a special place in UK pop cultural history. T he Bristol-based DJ crew that he co-founded in the 1980s helped set the template for the creative collectives that would make some of the most important UK dance music of the late 20th century . The  Wild Bunch  also included Daddy G and 3D, who went on to form Massive Attack; Nellee Hooper, who went on to producer Soul II Soul’s debut, and later offered a platform for a young rapper called Tricky. Musically, they dealt in hip-hop, electro, soul, funk and reggae; their recorded output was small, but ‘The Look of Love’ in 1987 pioneered the very British style known as lovers’ hip-hop. Milo Johnson went on to establish himself as a house producer under the name DJ Nature, but in this interview, he talks about the origins of the Wild Bunch, the early Bristol scene and the influential Dug Out club, as well as how the crew made the record that opened up new horizons for UK underground musi...

British electronic pop music would not be quite so wonderful if it wasn’t for Daniel Otto Joachim Miller, the founder of Mute Records, early producer of Depeche Mode and music-maker as The Normal, Silicon Teens, Duet Emmo and Sunroof. In this interview, he goes back to the DIY roots of Mute and  recalls  the liberating influence of punk, the joys of cheap synths and seeing an early minimalist  Depeche Mode play live for the first time. He also talks about  pushing the sonic limits while doing  sampling experiments with the Basildon band , as well as the musical influence of Berlin and the rise of the remix. When you were starting out, what was the first synthesizer you ever bought and what did you use it for? My first synthesizer was a Korg 700S. Which I used exclusively on my first single [‘T.V.O.D.’/’Warm Leatherette’ by The Normal, 1978] and I also used it a lot on the Silicon Teens album [‘Music for Parties’, 1979]. I think on those two projects, that ...