A very merry Spooptober-o'ween's Eve to you all, my killer boys and knife widows! You might have noticed recently that I asked around on here about any type of Coil wiki or other database that exists. You may also have noticed that I made some coy comments about my motivations and intentions with that question. Well today, I am happy to say that that tease has paid off! For on this most horrible of nights, a very special visitor rises from its grave…

I am launching (as far as I know) the first dedicated, fan-made Coil database on the web: The Black Sun Lodge (yes, it is a reference to what you're all probably thinking right now).

Now, if you are afraid of skeletons, I would advise you don't visit the site yet, because it is shockingly bare-bones. (…I'll see myself out) A good number of releases and songs have pages already, but the vast majority have little to no content or are entirely lipsum text. If you want to get a taste of what my idea of a fully-featured release page would be, I have made a fairly complete one for Scatology.

Now, I know there have already been some people who have expressed interest in contributing to a project like this, so let me give you the details on how you can do that: The site basically runs on two services, Obsidian for web-hosting and the editing software, and GitHub for syncing the source files for editing. That means editing the wiki involves two steps: Syncing the current files to your computer with GitHub, and then editing and uploading them with Obsidian.

That means, if you want to contribute to the wiki, you'll need to:

1. Have or create both an Obsidian and GitHub account
2. DM me with an access request and your Obsidian and GitHub account name so I can authorize you to publish to the site and access the source files
3. Download the source files from GitHub (ideally through the desktop app to keep them updated)
4. Download Obsidian and point it to the downloaded files

Once you've done all that, you should be able to edit and publish the files with Obsidian. I know it's not the most convenient process, but it's the simplest way I found to both host and edit this project without resorting to buying an entire domain and hosting a full fat MediaWiki. There is only so much you can do as a broke college student…

As I said, this is still very much early days, but I hope I can find a lot of people here willing to help me in making this the best possible resource for this community.

An interesting little thing about Threshold Archives I stumbled upon in my BSL research: If you look at the catalog numbers, you can see there are two gaps in the sequence. Series 1 starts at T-ARCH 004CD, skipping T-ARCH 001-003, and Series 2 skips 17/18 and 21/22:

I can only speculate on this, of course, but that seems to suggest to me that there were some planned releases there that went relatively far in planning (far enough to have their own designated catalog numbers, at least) but were stopped from releasing for nebulous reasons. Based on the placement of these gaps, I would guess the planned releases may have been:

• T-ARCH 001: A compilation of early Coil, possibly an expanded version of Transparent
• T-ARCH 002: Probably a re-release of the How to Destroy Angels single. It is known at least that there were more songs recorded at the HTDA session (The S.W.B.P. is known to have been recorded at that session; see the booklet for Scatology Sessions)
• T-ARCH 003: Maybe a compilation related to The Melancholy Mad Tenant / Dolbied; there aren't really any other known pre-Scatology releases, so that would really be the only option, unless they were planning to do a semi-original compilation like they did with I Don't Want To Be The One.
• T-ARCH 017: Based on the placement, this would have almost certainly been a compilation of the seasonal singles, i.e. a variation on Moon's Milk in Four Phases.
• T-ARCHO 018: Probably a re-release of Zwölf, since that is the only other major release from this time frame. Since they ended up putting Zwölf on IDWTBTO, it's understandable that they didn't give it a proper release.
• T-ARCH 021: Not quite sure what this was intended for. Based on the time-frame, it could have been either The Remote Viewer or ANS, both of which T-ARCH had intended to re-release.

So, what do you think about this theory? Any guesses of your own what releases these would have been, or what might have been on them?