TETHAUM:
Hexagram: Cassette
For anyone who, like me, has found themselves twisting on the end of a string dangling from the koan “what’s the sound of a fecal plug forming in the ass of a hibernating bear,” Tethaum now provides us with an answer worthy of scraping off the bottom of one’s boots. This audio dungscape falls somewhere between one of those brainwave meditation devices and a recording of a guy who fell asleep on top of his synthesizer. After only a few minutes of listening to this, I was afloat in a laxative dream where I was synesthetically watching the barely perceptible movement of fog hanging over a belching pond of diarrhea next to an abandoned wooden leg factory. Perhaps I was a date-rape victim of all the magico-esoteric glyphs that make up the artwork of this cassette; I Ching hexagrams and western hermetic symbols that might’ve been scrawled by a waggish Aleister Crowley advertise the fact the people (or person) responsible for this cassette are acquainted with the dark arts and are probably very capable of impressive feats of sorcery. They’re certainly adept at casting narcoleptic spells. I kept waiting for the pulseless dirge to eventually burst into some crushingly industrial-metal doom chord riffage, ala Godflesh or Enemy of the Sun-era Neurosis, but it never happened. Or if it did, then I had obviously dozed off by that point. If there is a point to this murky music-less music, then I guess it’s lost on me. But it’s sure to tickle the gloomy bone of sulky darksiders who like to sip embalming fluid and enjoy preludes to nothing. But be careful, listening to this is likely to give you eye boogers. –Aphid Peewit (Sephirotic)