Sigillum S, Gerstein

condition (cassette/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

A collaboration between Sigillum S and Gerstein, the Italian ritual-industrial project named for the Nazi SS officer Kurt Gerstein (who tried to expose the Final Solution from inside the apparatus). Gerstein was one of the key projects of the late-Eighties Italian esoteric industrial scene alongside Ain Soph, Lashtal, Capricorni Pneumatici, Thelema, and Rosemary's Baby: a loose network of projects committed to combining acoustic instruments, analogue synthesisers, and lyrics drawing on occult and esoteric philosophy.

Sigillum S's engagement with this scene was constitutive rather than peripheral. The first-decade Sigillum S sound (droning ritualism, ethnic explorations, ceremonial tape-work) was developed in direct dialogue with Gerstein, Ain Soph, The Sodality, and related projects, and the cross-pollination that resulted produced a distinct Italian branch of European post-industrial music. Sigillum S themselves have subsequently acknowledged Gerstein alongside Ain Soph, The Sodality, Iugula-Thor, Out Of Body Experience, Dive, and others as formative working partners across their four decades.

Collaboration material between the two projects circulated primarily through Eighties and early-Nineties Italian cassette editions and compilation tracks, and has since surfaced on various reissue and retrospective compilations. The collaboration remains a key artefact of Italian esoteric industrial's first generation and should be understood as one node in a much denser network of exchanges that extended across the entire European ritual-industrial scene of the period.