The packaging has the same deliberately murky quality as the recording. Dark photographic imagery is reproduced through a muted green/blue cast, with black areas swallowing detail and the whole thing looking closer to an artifact pulled from a drawer than a clean piece of contemporary graphic design. The cassette and folded artwork do not give much away. There is no elaborate explanation waiting inside to tell you how to hear it, just Whorl Of Sepals, the physical object and Dead Gods catalog number GODS11. That sparseness works especially well here because the approximately fifteen minutes of audio are unusually concentrated. The two sides use related materials but occupy very different physical spaces.
Side A runs about 7:31. It begins comparatively quietly, with a sustained low tone and thin upper-frequency activity gradually gathering around it. Within the first minute the recording grows considerably louder and denser. What follows is less a sequence of obvious events than a continuously shifting body of sound: low fundamental tones, distortion, feedback-like overtones and rough harmonic layers pressing against one another. There is a surprising amount of internal movement despite how static the basic construction can initially seem. Frequencies flare up, smear together and retreat. At times a tone becomes recognizable enough to feel almost musical before saturation roughens its edges again. The strongest low material sits underneath a much brighter field of upper harmonics, so the sound has both weight and a strangely glowing top end. It never becomes anonymous broadband noise. There are pitches buried inside it, along with beating frequencies and small changes in pressure that become more noticeable the longer the side continues.
The recording quality is part of the piece. Side A is substantially louder than Side B and often feels close to the limits of the cassette, but the overload is useful rather than merely destructive. The distortion generates additional texture around the sustained tones, and the slightly unstable surface keeps them from turning into sterile electronic drones. There is audible grain around everything. Around the six-and-a-half-minute point the large central mass suddenly loses most of its weight. Instead of ending at its maximum intensity, the side collapses into a much quieter final stretch where residual tones and tape-level noise are exposed. After spending several minutes inside such a dense field, that reduction feels enormous. The ear has adjusted to pressure, so the absence of it becomes its own event.
Side B, about 7:42, immediately changes the scale. It is noticeably quieter and darker, with far more of its energy concentrated at the extreme bottom of the spectrum. Deep sustained frequencies sit underneath the recording for most of the side, sometimes low enough that the sound is felt almost as much as heard through speakers capable of reproducing it. The upper-frequency material is much more restrained than on Side A. Instead of the brighter, abrasive cloud hovering over the first side, this one works through slow alterations in bass weight, resonance and harmonics. Small changes matter. A low tone thickens. Another frequency enters and produces beating against it. A higher overtone becomes visible for a while and then sinks back underneath the fundamental. Because the overall volume is lower, the cassette hiss and roughness around the signal are easier to hear, giving the sound a more exposed physical edge.
What I like about hearing the two complete sides together is how little Whorl Of Sepals needs in order to create contrast. Side A expands upward and outward until it becomes a dense, bright, distorted field, then drains away. Side B seems to turn the entire cassette downward, concentrating on sustained bass and slower internal motion. There are no conventional rhythms, melodies or obvious song structures organizing the experience. The structure comes from density, frequency, volume and duration. Even the unequal levels between the sides become useful information rather than something I would want corrected out of the rip. They preserve the sensation of turning the cassette over and encountering a different physical environment.
This was originally posted to Private Release in September 2017 with almost no written description. Hearing the cassette again from a fresh side-by-side rip makes that old post feel unusually incomplete. There is enough happening here to reward listening closely, but much of it occurs at the microscopic level: tones rubbing against one another, distortion producing new harmonics, the cassette surface appearing whenever the music thins, and the enormous difference between the brighter pressure of Side A and the low subterranean pull of Side B. It is a small tape with a very narrow set of materials, but it keeps finding different ways to make those materials occupy space.
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