Sigillum S

condition (cassette/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

An early Sigillum S cassette on Bari's Minus Habens imprint, dating from the project's foundational Eighties phase, before the trio (Eraldo Bernocchi, Paolo Bandera, Luca Di Giorgio) had fully stabilised its long-form LP practice. Studs And Divinity belongs to what Bernocchi himself has described as the project's most concentrated ritual-industrial period, when the vocabulary was still being worked out in short-run cassettes before it received the full album treatment on subsequent vinyl releases.

The title gives a reliable indication of the two poles the record operates between: the "studs" side referring to the fetish-material surfaces and BDSM imagery that the Sigillum S visual identity drew on consistently across the Eighties; the "divinity" side pointing toward the ritual-esoteric frame that made Sigillum S one of the most philosophically ambitious projects in the Italian industrial scene. Between the two poles sits the actual musical content: electronic noise beds, treated voice, metal percussion, tape manipulation, arranged with a structural rigour closer to the contemporaneous Nurse With Wound than to any of the Italian power-electronics contemporaries.

As with most early Minus Habens cassettes (catalogued MHM-series), Studs And Divinity was pressed in a small run, packaged in the label's characteristic plain-card sleeves with photocopied inserts. A scarce foundational document of the trio whose work would culminate in the long run of 12"s, CDs, and LPs that followed across the Nineties and 2000s.