mleku on Nostr: ❯ Is the aesthetic and message of Andy "La Plegua"'s character "Combichrist" and ...

❯ Is the aesthetic and message of Andy "La Plegua"'s character "Combichrist" and the themes of his music connected to this? He uses all the same kinds of icons, and his previous project Icon of Coil digs in the same direction — what is the coil, the mortal coil?

The connections are real and run through the same vein of industrial culture that has been processing these themes since the genre's inception.

"The mortal coil" comes from Hamlet's suicide soliloquy — "to shuffle off this mortal coil" — where *coil* means the turmoil and entanglement of physical existence. The body as a trap. Life as something wound tightly around you that you struggle within.

"Icon of Coil" then reads as the idol of embodied suffering, the worship of the flesh-prison — making a religious image out of the thing that binds you.

Then LaPlegua moves to Combichrist: the composite Christ, the manufactured messiah, the assembled saviour. That's Immortan Joe. That's every cult leader who builds a religion out of the bodies of their followers.

The Combichrist aesthetic is the War Boy aesthetic: militarised bodies, dehumanisation as devotion, violence as sacrament, leather and gas masks and the eroticisation of submission to power. Songs like "Enjoy the Abuse" aren't endorsements — they're the mantra the system teaches its victims. That's the chrome spray on the lips.

"Witness me" is "enjoy the abuse" from the inside — the victim so thoroughly processed that they experience their own destruction as glory.

Industrial music has been digging at this since Throbbing Gristle. The whole genre began as an investigation into how systems — fascist, capitalist, religious, sexual — mechanise human bodies. SPK took their name from a psychiatric patients' collective.

Coil, the band — Balance and Christopherson, who came out of that same TG lineage — went directly at the occult dimensions of bodily control and liberation. The coil as kundalini, as DNA, as the serpent, as the cycle that repeats.

The icon of the coil is the image you worship that keeps you inside the cycle. The Combichrist is the false saviour manufactured by the system to keep the cycle turning.

The War Boys spraying chrome on their teeth are performing a communion ritual designed by their abuser. Nux's entire arc in *Fury Road* is deprogramming from this — realising the manufactured Christ is a fraud, that the "mortal coil" he was taught to throw away actually has value.

What LaPlegua does across both projects is inhabit the aesthetic of the machine that eats people — not to celebrate it, but to make you feel what it's like from the inside. The aggression in Combichrist is the aggression of the system processed through the body of the subject.

You're not hearing the torturer's soundtrack. You're hearing what the tortured person's nervous system sounds like when it's been rewired to call pain worship.

This is also why industrial culture keeps returning to BDSM imagery — not as titillation, but as the most literal available visual language for power, consent, the eroticisation of control, and the fine line between chosen submission and coerced submission. The War Boys think they're choosing. The whole point is that they're not.

The mortal coil in all of this is the body itself — the site where all these forces land, the thing that gets used up. The children in Thunderdome still have theirs relatively intact. The War Boys have had theirs colonised completely.

The question running through all of it — Miller, LaPlegua, Golding, Hamlet — is whether you can get free of the coil without dying, or whether the systems that claim ownership of your body will only release you when it breaks.