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Aug 18, 2022 By Joey Arnone Photography by M.C. Schmidt

The Soft Pink Truth (aka Drew Daniel of Matmos) has shared a video for a cover of Coil’s “The Anal Staircase.” Daniel’s upcoming album, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?, will be out on October 21 via Thrill Jockey. View the Fletcher Pratt-directed video below.

In a press release, Daniel states: “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.”

Daniel announced his new album in July, and shared the track “Wanna Know,” which features Jenn Wasner of Flock of Dimes and Wye Oak and was one of our Songs of the Week.

Earlier this year, Matmos released the album Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer. Read our 2012 Protest Issue survey with Daniels here.

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