Laxative Souls

condition (cassette/cover): NM / NM

Edition of 100 numbered copies (this is nr. 0009) with insert.

One of the earliest cassettes in Italian industrial music and a milestone of the country's early-Eighties noise underground. Laxative Souls (shortened to LXSS on most material) is the project of Roberto Marinelli, based in Porto d'Ascoli on the Adriatic coast since the outfit began in 1980. The name takes its strange comic form from an attempt to translate into English the Catholic and Dantean concept of anime del purgatorio, a formulation the literal translation cannot preserve, which produces the deliberately nonsensical English title.

Marinelli's method draws on electronic rage, heavily processed vocal distortions, musique concrète procedures, feedback generated by self-assembled electric circuits, and cut-up documentary tape, radio broadcasts, and public-address recordings. The Soundohm descriptor (less dehumanising than Maurizio Bianchi, closer to an emotional reading of the social organism) remains the most accurate short framing: LXSS operates in the same climate as early MB but keeps a residue of affect that Bianchi's Symphony For A Genocide period deliberately evacuated.

The second numbered edition of the cassette (copy 0105, bearing an owner's stamp) is the one most commonly encountered on the collector market, packaged with a small insert and, in select copies, three related ephemeral flyers. Given how few copies circulated in 1982 out of Porto d'Ascoli, any surviving package with its paperwork complete is essentially a primary document of the period.