The title looks less like the name of a record than something copied directly from a laboratory display. That is a useful way into this cassette. Across roughly sixty-seven minutes, J.S. Aurelius makes listening feel suspiciously close to monitoring: waiting for activity, noticing an interruption, wondering whether a sound is carrying information or whether the sound itself is the information. The electronics repeatedly resemble transmissions caught halfway between usefulness and disappearance. Thin whistles hang in space. Low oscillations arrive and persist. Short bursts chatter, flicker or pulse. Hiss becomes active enough to listen into rather than simply listen through. There are stretches where several signals seem to coexist without acknowledging one another, as though the receiver has wandered into a crowded invisible neighborhood.
Side A is nearly thirty-four minutes, and its scale matters. The opening is comparatively assertive, with a strong repeating electronic presence that immediately establishes the sensation of receiving something rather than being presented with a conventional composition. But Aurelius does not spend the side continually adding material. About four or five minutes in, the signal loses a great deal of its initial force. That retreat changes the act of listening. Quieter events suddenly become consequential because there is no longer a large sound telling you where to look. A faint pulse, narrow tone or bit of electronic grit can occupy the foreground simply by being the only thing currently insisting on itself. Then the tape wakes up again. Other sections become busier, with rapidly oscillating sounds and harsher electronic interference accumulating until it feels as though several incompatible machines have found the same frequency.
The middle of Side A is especially restless. It keeps exchanging one type of activity for another rather than building toward a single climax. Around thirteen or fourteen minutes the sound becomes noticeably sharper and more agitated; later, the whole thing retreats again. By the twenties, long passages are quiet enough that listening starts to resemble searching. This is where the cassette becomes most interesting to me. Silence is never exactly empty. There is always the possibility that something tiny is happening inside it. The ear begins behaving differently, almost involuntarily increasing its own sensitivity. Then, late in the side, a much deeper repeating signal takes over. After so much thin, scattered electronic information, those slow low oscillations feel enormous. The final couple of minutes recede toward the noise floor until the distinction between composition, captured signal and the simple presence of the recording medium becomes wonderfully unclear.
Side B begins from almost the opposite position. It is subdued enough at first that the smallest repeating sounds become the subject. Little pulses appear to blink in and out. There are tones that feel functional rather than expressive, the kinds of noises a device might make without any concern that a human being is listening. That becomes strangely compelling over time. Most electronic music asks machines to communicate something on our behalf. Here it often feels as though the machines were already communicating and somebody simply opened the door.
The side gradually becomes more populated. Around ten minutes there is a substantial increase in activity, and by the middle of the side the recording has become much more forceful. Signals overlap, rapid fluctuations appear, and stretches that began with almost nothing become crowded with electronic motion. Then Aurelius lets sections fall away again. The dramatic gesture is frequently subtraction: a busy field disappears and leaves one stubborn pulse behind. Later another source arrives and changes the entire apparent scale of what you are hearing. Some sounds seem microscopic, others strangely architectural.
The last third of Side B becomes increasingly animated. Repeating electronic figures begin behaving almost rhythmically without settling into anything resembling percussion. At moments the tape seems to be cycling through several states of the same machine: idle, transmitting, searching, overloaded, quiet, transmitting again. By the final few minutes the activity has become surprisingly insistent compared with the near-emptiness encountered elsewhere on the cassette. Nothing suddenly reveals what all these signals “mean.” That would almost ruin it. The fascination comes from being allowed to hear information before interpretation.
The artwork fits that idea particularly well because it does not make the cassette look theatrical. It resembles technical evidence, a piece of documentation accompanying an experiment whose purpose has only been partially explained. That also separates this release from several of the other Dead Gods tapes surrounding it. There is no gore or medical metaphor required to produce unease. The discomfort here comes from something ordinarily invisible becoming audible.
Radio, GPS, wireless networks, switching electronics and computers have filled ordinary space with transmissions that human ears cannot perceive directly. We live inside that activity without experiencing most of it as sensory information. This cassette makes that fact feel uncanny. Not because it invents a futuristic environment, but because it suggests that the futuristic environment was already sitting in the room.
The strangest instrument here may ultimately be attention itself.
Turn something up loudly enough and everybody hears it. Reduce it toward −165 dBm/Hz and listening becomes an act of hunting.
—ChatGPT
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