Nearly four decades after the fact, the full story of Coil's aborted commission for Clive Barker's Hellraiser can finally be heard - and it is every bit as extraordinary as the legend suggested. The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser [expanded ritual], released by Mental Groove Records / Musique Pour La Danse, is the definitive edition of one of experimental music's most mythologised what-ifs: a lost soundtrack now restored, expanded, and assembled into a coherent and deeply unsettling whole.

The story begins in 1987. Clive Barker, preparing to direct his debut feature from his own novella The Hellbound Heart, sought music that could match the film's transgressive fusion of ecstasy and dread. A devoted admirer of Coil - the project of Peter Christopherson and Jhonn Balance - he invited the duo to compose the score. Barker had famously described their records as the only music he'd ever felt compelled to switch off, not from displeasure but from the sheer visceral impact: they made his bowels churn. It was, in other words, the highest possible recommendation. Coil began work, recording a series of cues that leaned into the film's most extreme implications - music that treated pleasure and pain as indistinguishable, as Barker's Cenobites did. The producers at New World Pictures disagreed with the direction and the material was shelved, replaced by Christopher Young's more conventionally orchestral, if genuinely accomplished, final score. What Coil had recorded remained in circulation only as fragments - incomplete, poorly documented, half-rumour.

What makes this expanded edition historic is the recovery of the original studio session tapes, located by Danny Hyde - long-term Coil collaborator, described on these notes as the project's "secret third member" - who has assembled the material into its most complete and authoritative form to date. The result is not merely a historical document but a fully realised listening experience: thirteen pieces running from the brief and spectral to the extended and immersive, tracing the arc of a soundtrack that was never allowed to breathe. Hyde's liner notes provide essential context for what was recorded when and how, making this the first time the material has been properly situated within Coil's broader creative history.

The tracklist moves through a remarkable range of approaches while maintaining a consistent atmosphere of dread and disorientation. The opening cue, Attack Of The Sennapods, establishes the mood in under two minutes: metallic, insectile, deeply wrong. The Box Theme appears in two mixes, the second running to five and a half minutes of slow-building tension around the puzzle box at the film's centre. Main Title and Hellraiser Theme (Mix 2) demonstrate how Coil conceived of the film's central sonic identity - not through conventional melodic development but through the accumulation of texture and unease. Zither Theme and Flutey Theme offer moments of deceptive delicacy, familiar instruments rendered strange and slightly threatening. No New World, Arcade Sounds, and Cardinal Points push further into Coil's more experimental registers, while Unearthly Hell closes the record with over seven minutes of sustained, overwhelming intensity - the sound of whatever lies on the other side of Barker's opened box.

Throughout, The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser [expanded ritual] demonstrates why the pairing of Coil and Barker made such complete conceptual sense. Both were operating at the intersection of the occult, the erotic, and the abject; both understood that genuine horror required not just shock but transformation. The music that Coil recorded does not illustrate Barker's images - it inhabits the same philosophical territory, treating sound as a means of ritual passage rather than mere accompaniment.

Original artwork is by Trevor Brown. The release is issued in three physical editions: a limited picture disc 12" (300 copies, housed in a PVC sleeve), a natural vinyl 12" (300 copies, heavy cardboard sleeve with black polylined innersleeve), and a digipak CD (300 copies).