One of a half-dozen full-lengths to be released by New York noise artist Prurient this year, Arrowhead can be considered in either of two contexts depending upon your familiarity with the one-man-band's sizable discography or with noise music at large. If you're interested in Prurient, Arrowhead is a revealing transitional retrospective, intense but with precedent. If you're not, it's a shocking, singular piece of hair-raising noise. Either way, it's yet another essential piece in Prurient's metastasized catalog and one of the year's most obliterative and exhilarating releases.
Originally recorded in 2004, Arrowhead consists of three squelch-and-sustain tracks built by high-pitched microphone feedback, challenged only by spasms of drumming and the mutilated screams of Prurient mastermind Dominick Fernow. He infamously employed a similar approach-- a thin, powerful shriek of feedback that slowly warps and expands until it blooms into a boundless abyss-- on "Roman Shower", the brazen first track from his 2005 Load Records debut, Black Vase. Though exceptions abound, much of Fernow's recent output has been more "song"-oriented, meaning only that the settings have generally been shorter and less of a standstill (see the excellent Pleasure Ground or the second side of Adam Tied to a Stone).
In that historical setting, Arrowhead-- recorded the same year and in the same city as "Roman Shower"-- links many of the facets of Prurient's sound. In the first two tracks, Fernow gradually intensifies sinister, relentless rays until, like "Roman Shower", they become pained, bloody wastelands. The third and shortest track lunges forward, slowly becoming caked in static and sliced by feedback similar to that heard during the first 27 minutes. All the sounds smear, wiping across the speakers like a grimy, gory mess. Imagine Daniel Menche pushing the Fuck Buttons on speed, for four minutes, and you get the point. Together, these tracks-- "Sternum", "Ribcage", and "Lungs"-- show us where Prurient had been in 2004 and where he was delightfully going.
If this release serves as an introduction to Prurient, it'll be a trial by fire, but one well worth the burns. Sure, you'll find noise "bigger" than this, but you'll find little that's so dramatic and masterful. Listen for the control Fernow wields over his electronics as he grapples with the tone, letting it slide into chaos only to bring it back under his hand. There's a violent, lacerating ebb-and-flow to this work that's as nauseating as it is enrapturing.
Both in his Manhattan record store, Hospital Productions, and through his record label of the same name, Fernow peddles the most extreme black metal, a genre that-- at its best-- delivers an idea without apology and with exhaustion. Prurient sounds little like black metal here (with its drowned vocals and saturated, tidal murk, Cocaine Death-- another excellent 2008 release from Fernow-- does; and he's in a black metal band, Ash Pool), but Arrowhead functions in much the same way: Its stylized, specific, and unflinching sound roars with a singular menace, at once terrifying and captivating. These performances sound like the sorts of pieces that happen when every ounce of trouble the performer has gets sweated, bled, and screamed into the cutting room floor. Re-reading that sentence, I'm afraid I've made Prurient's searing power-electronics sound, well, emo. And I suppose, in the end, it is. But for 31 minutes, Arrowhead should keep you too fixated (or, as it were, repulsed) to care.
