Sigillum S

condition (record/cover): M / M 

A 100-copy LP on Verba Corrige, with a metallic-printed six-panel inner sleeve, released April 16, 2016 to mark thirty years exactly since Sigillum S's first rehearsal in December 1985. The record was tracked across two days at the label's own studio the previous May, then re-phrased and mixed by Eraldo Bernocchi through the remainder of the year.

The configuration here is the project's mature form. Bernocchi handles what the sleeve credits call "extra-terrestrial wit and peripheral electronics"; longtime partner Paolo Bandera (credited as P.NG5361.Bandera) contributes "begrimed rants and dimensional electronics" plus the conceptual framework; Luca Di Giorgio adds "obscured pathologies and occluded keys." That the credits themselves read like an astrological index is no accident. The Sigillum method has always fused ritual terminology with hard engineering.

Astronomic Horror is the occult-cosmic panel of a three-format anniversary batch (alongside the CD Iron Catastrophe Spectators and the cassette Demonology). Ten tracks with titles like "Flawless Brothels Behind Fake Moon Crust" and "Angels Burning Wings On Mercury's White Side": a pulp-surrealist taxonomy of science-fiction heresies set to rumbling low-frequency electronics, metallic drones, and Bandera's scorched-throat invocations. Less the tribal-industrial Sigillum of the late Eighties, more a hybrid of space-opera soundtrack and drone ritual, patient enough to build architecture rather than spectacle. One of the few projects from the Italian post-industrial lineage still generating work that sounds like forward motion rather than curation, thirty years in.