Zos Kia’s music is an essential insight and archival piece into the early work of the industrial scene and particularly of Coil in their formative stages. Their recordings are even darker and more  industrial-rooted than much of the Coil material that followed. The music is primal, brutal and reveals the interests that surrounded Coil/Zos Kia and the early years of Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth (TOPY) / Psychic TV...

 

John Gosling was an original member of Zos Kia (as Joan D'Arc), alongside John Balance (Coil) and Min. This trio, together with Peter Christopherson (TG, Coil) and other guests, recorded and performed in the early 1980s under the names Zos Kia / Coil, including the “Performance Action” (involving blood and flesh cutting) at the Air Gallery in London in August 1983 and a performance at the Berlin Atonal festival in December 1983. The latter comprised one side of the Transparent cassette issued by the now defunct Austrian label Nekrophile in 1984, which became the first released recordings of both Coil and Zos Kia.

It was reissued years later by Coil (Threshold House/Eskaton) and included the Coil manifesto ‘The Price of Existence Is Eternal Warfare’, originally written by John Balance in 1983, in which numerous references that inspired their future work can already be found.

The name’ Zos Kia’ had been taken from the magickal system of occult artist Austin Osman Spare although John Gosling never really seemed too occult-fixated, AOS was a great source of inspiration for Coil’s members.

 

In 1984, Balance and Christopherson left to concentrate on Coil full-time. All material released under the Zos Kia name alone was primarily the work of John Gosling. After retiring the Zos Kia name, Gosling went on to record with Sugardog, Psychic TV and work solo as Sugar J and Mekon. Debuting in 1994 with "Phatty's Lunchbox", Gosling pioneered the blueprint for the dance music popularized years later by the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers: breakbeat trip-hop invested with a lot of energy and old-school attitude.

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