9.21.13: Tape Of The Month – September 2013
TOTMsepARTIST: Unguent

TITLE: Scanning

LABEL: Refulgent Sepulchre

LENGTH: C36

DUBBED: Home

EDITION: 100

 

 

 

Oprah and Tabs Out are pretty similar when you think about it. Now, we’re not giving away new cars or sending anyone off on a jet to the Bermuda Triangle piloted by John Travolta or whatever. But, like O, we have favorite things. One of those favorite things right now is a somewhat new Philadelphia cassette label called Refulgent Sepulchre. They only have four releases out at the moment, specifically from Some Pepper (002), Tinnitus Timulus (003), and Unguent (001 & 004). That second Unguent jam, “Scanning”,  is most definitely the tightest tape I have heard all month.

unguent def

Your mind grapes can juice up assumed info about what a band sounds like based on their name. Sometimes it’s totally null and void, like when you first hear Death Vessel and it sounds like a throw away track from A Mighty Wind. With Unguent it’s so fucking perfect. It only takes about 2 minutes of the squishy, balmy garbles on “Scanning” to be sucked into a soft, greasy, or viscous zone. Like fly traps that somehow got candy stuck all the way down their strips, Unguent builds sticky layers of gummy sweeps and swooshes with a panic of florescent rhythmic zaps. The opening jam, “Hypnagogic Stair”, lays out a loop of measured tones. Imagine a Xmas tree with LED’s emitting tiny pokes of sound instead of light during their repetition (so I guess SED’s). While that’s going down, fake snow is being huffed by the chimney with care. It’s weird. It’s wet.  “Party Parsec” totally disregards whatever semblance of order was going on, with a full on invasion of cosmic goop. It drips from all angles, with a barrage of filter sweeping, dank beeping, and oily creeping blanketing the airwaves. The couple on side B, “Fungal Tarantula” and “Gorgon’s Horn” focus heavily on patterns of sound. The former using looping chirps and rings along with what could be vocals? The latter plays like an overly intense video game soundtrack, with some straight up Nine Inch Nails percussion getting in on the action. No joke. This joint turns into a birthday party where the kids can’t decide between watching the “Head Like A Hole” video or the clown make obscene balloon animals. Everything slows down, DJ Screw style, and mom says that the party is over. Everyone leaves. The clown, the pony, and the weird ginger kids you didn’t want to come but they got invited because your parents are friends. And you go to sleep on a bed of wrapping paper with cake on your face.

unguent_cover

Unguent, who lives in Philadelphia and runs Refulgent Sepulchre, used a Sidrassi Organ to forge these wonderful paths. An analog instrument with pressure sensitive bars with designated tones, tuning buttons, and pitch/chaos knobs. It was “designed to reflect the glory of god with pure triangular voices. But it also allows exploration of the Devils’ Tone”. After hearing it’s beauty blasted on “Scanning”, I may have to rethink atheism.

The cover for this, and the other R.S. tapes thus far, are dazzling. The artwork on the two panels here is silk screened in three colors. Wavy, lime green concentric lines form a hypnotic swirl on the cover and back flap They’re absent on the spine. A small detail, but it looks so sick. Crude line drawings of alien clip art in baby blue with purple outline, and scratchy text fill in the gaps. I can’t stress enough how dope this looks. The cassette itself is an opaque green tape with “ung” and “s” written in silver ink. Writing abbreviations and initials for the artist/album title like these appears to be a running theme so far. And you know how I feel about consistent aesthetics. I’m for them.

unguent_shellOther than the first Unguent release all Refulgent titles are available to grip. At least they are at the moment I am typing this. Things change though, man. That’s the way the world works. So click here, figure out what’s what, and “gift” paypal $7.00 per tape to refulgentsepulchre@gmail.com. Or send cash in the mail, like its 1998 or something, to his Philadelphia abode.