The first side begins in the mouth. Not metaphorically in the sense of voices or speech, but physically: the sound lives in the part of hearing that seems to catch behind the teeth. For several minutes Coteries holds an intensely bright electronic field almost completely above the weightier part of the spectrum. It hisses, burns and needles forward with very little underneath to soften it. The remarkable thing is how long that condition lasts. There is no need to immediately demonstrate range. The recording simply stays there until the ear has adjusted to an environment that initially feels almost uninhabitable.
Then it starts descending. The change is slow enough that it would be difficult to mark the exact point where the first state stops existing. Five or six minutes in, deeper material is becoming easier to notice beneath the glare. By eight minutes, the balance has unmistakably shifted. The harsh upper layer is still present, but the recording has acquired a body underneath it, and from there the migration continues. The abrasive surface loses more and more of its authority while lower vibrations take its place. Somewhere in the middle of this long transition, the piece seems to pass through almost every intermediate state between hiss and rumble.
That movement becomes especially dramatic after ten minutes. The sound keeps sinking. What had initially occupied the head begins to feel increasingly located in the room and then in the body. By twelve or thirteen minutes, very little remains of the opening brightness. Deep sustained vibration has taken control, and the final third becomes almost entirely subterranean. The volume also begins recovering after having gradually weakened through the middle, so the low sound does not merely replace the high sound. It grows.
By fifteen minutes, Side A has effectively become another piece without ever having changed pieces. The last several minutes are dominated by a huge low presence, astonishingly distant from the abrasive opening. It feels less as though Coteries introduced a second sound than as though the first sound has been stretched downward until it became this one. The side ends with substantial physical force in a part of the spectrum that was barely participating twenty minutes earlier.
Flip the cassette and Side B begins exactly where Side A spent so long arriving. The low vibration is immediately enormous. For the opening minutes there is very little ambiguity about where the center of the recording is located. A deep tone presses continuously underneath everything else, sometimes close to a single sustained fundamental, sometimes roughened by smaller movements around its edges. Instead of beginning with irritation and acquiring a body, Side B begins as body.
For nearly ten minutes Coteries remains remarkably committed to this condition. There are alterations inside it, but the great low presence barely loosens its grip. The sensation is closer to being held inside sustained vibration than listening to a sequence of events. Because the sound is so stable, tiny changes become strangely conspicuous. A slightly brighter edge appears. The vibration gains a roughness it did not have before. Another overtone becomes briefly audible and then slips back inside the larger hum. Time stretches because almost nothing offers itself as conventional punctuation.
Then, around eleven minutes, the floor suddenly gives.
The recording becomes noticeably quieter and the massive low foundation loses a surprising amount of its authority. After spending the first half of the side almost completely submerged, the ear is abruptly allowed upward. What follows is not a return to Side A’s opening all at once. The climb happens gradually. Rougher middle-range activity becomes increasingly visible; then thinner and sharper material begins appearing above it. Each minute seems to move the recording a little farther away from the giant fundamental tone that dominated the beginning.
The final several minutes complete enough of that ascent to make the architecture of the whole cassette clear. Side A travels from abrasion toward vibration. Side B begins as vibration and works back toward abrasion. They do not trace perfectly identical paths, and that is important. This is not a symmetrical electronic exercise. The return journey has been altered by where the cassette has already been. The sound does not come home unchanged.
That makes the title particularly effective. Oris Circumcisio roughly translates as a cutting or circumcision of the mouth. The phrase is bodily, procedural and uncomfortable, and the recording spends nearly forty minutes relocating sensation around the listener’s body. Side A begins where harsh sound almost seems to touch the teeth and gradually sinks toward the chest and gut. Side B starts inside that bodily vibration and slowly exposes the sharper edges again.
The images on the physical cassette add to that atmosphere without providing an explanatory key. The body is treated as something that can be photographed, cropped, reproduced, obscured and subjected to procedure. The package does not turn the title into a simple story, and the audio does not illustrate the photographs. They share a colder relationship: the sense that something physical is being examined while simultaneously being altered.
Coteries was already making what Richmond coverage described as “enveloping atmospheric noise,” but this recording takes the enveloping part unusually literally. It does not merely surround the listener with noise. It moves the apparent location of that noise over time. Nearly forty minutes become one extremely slow relocation.
Side A goes down.
Side B comes back up.
What returns still has the cut on it.
—ChatGPT
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