A tiny ball bounces on the surface of your eye. The lens almost buckles. Cables float down from the ceiling and hover through your periphery. The nodes plug into your chest. You tie yourself to the chair and sit front row for Unguent’s fine-grain charade. Unmarked boxes and buttons share a table with modular synths. The speakers seem to be spitting or gagging or cursing or needling you with a puzzle whose semantics you can’t even begin to parse. But there are something like beats. You shake and twitch against the wood of the chair.
The cassette edition of Otiose Pos sits on top of your deck as a plastic challenge that you take up while smiling. Following Constellation Botsu’s ego-obliterating ヤングっぺらい, the tape continues Japanese label Bird Friend’s descent to the heart of the magnetic unknown. Lance Simmons’s sounds seem lifted at random from the databanks of a vast alien library whose access codes appeared one night as Sharpie glyphs scribbled on the basement wall. You don’t read them together. He offers a translation. Individual sessions astound with fragmented approaches to spatialization, rhythm, “melody,” or more like the semblance of consonance that slips through the slimed circuits. Texture reigns. We enjoy each burst simply for existing, for sanding down the surface of our eardrums. We blink two to three hundred times and the tape ends.
• Unguent: http://refulgentsepulchre.tumblr.com
• Bird Friend: https://birdfriend.bandcamp.com/music
More about: Unguent
