PRURIENT - "Through The Window" cs (Blackest Ever Black)

 

  The always fantastic Blackest Ever Black label has been killing it in 2013, and now they've given us their second cassette release, the latest full length from Dominick Fernow's long running Prurient project. Fans of earlier Hospital Productions (which Fernow owns and operates) releases may be hesitant with this one, as it only dives further into SM techno and panoramic synthesizer pieces. Straying from the harshness of feedback, noise, and other machine manipulations, Through The Window is a truly full bodied piece of industrial music, instrumental, and worthy of both the clubs and chemical wastelands, quite possibly inspired by his move to Los Angeles.

 

  The three tracks that make up this monstrous album are unlike anything you've heard from him, outside of the Vatican Shadow moniker anyway. These songs are wide open, lengthy landscapes, filled with rich analog strides and sinister vibes from front to back. Layers of carefully crafted arpeggios and sequencers weave throughout the songs, and rarely, if ever make it in the red. He seems to be focusing on a more droning, melodic drift backed by a steady thump, than the scathing environments you may love him for. That's not to say this record doesn't have it's share of menacing moments, it's got a deeply masochistic tone that reigns supreme, one that's hard to place, more of a vibe that comes a bit later. A bit of a turn for Prurient, and once you've looked past that, and you will, it's terribly good album from this major player.

 

Get it on LP/CD from Blackest Ever Black.

 

PRURIENT & KEVIN DRUMM "All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord" (Hospital Productions)

Kevin Drumm has been laying low for, like, five years now. Compared to other artists of his age, talent and near-mythic stature, his music is vastly under-documented. In fact, the only truly satisfying, large-scale work he has released since 2002's Sheer Hellish Miasma was 2007's remastered rerelease of Sheer Hellish Miasma. Hopefully, his forthcoming cassette, Purge, on iDEAL can satiate the masses, because All Are Guests In The House Of The Lord does not. In 2007, Drumm release two high-profile collaboration albums with other A-List noise dudes-- this one with Prurient, and the disappointing Gauntlet with Daniel Menche. Both suffer from the same problem: the dominating aesthetic is that of his collaborators and not his own. There is almost nothing recognizable of Drumm on this tape. Presumably, he provided Prurient's Dominic Fernow with the creepy droney pads which sit under Fernow's embarrassingly histrionic vocals. But did he really need to? This sounds just like a Prurient tape-- a little doomier than some of his other stuff, but if I hadn't seen the cover to this tape before I listened to it, I'd have thought it was Fernow solo, no question. I don't mind artists I love playing second fiddle to artists I only kinda like, but if Drumm's going to keep doing collaboration tapes as favors to his friends, where all of his own input sounds completely usurped into the other's style, he needs to at least give his fans a new (solo!) masterpiece every once in a while.