During the last five years, I've probably spent more money collecting the musical output of Dominick Fernow than that of any other musician. As the wildly prolific Prurient, Fernow sometimes pushed harsh noise to dangerous and defiant extremes; at other times, he webbed static through a tangled haze of broken drums, haunting screams, and oddly romantic pleas. Each new release felt like a surprise to be unwrapped and examined, so over time, I've obtained as many as possible. Of course, if that were the limit of his output, the quest would be much easier: In the black metal melee Ash Pool, the brazen dance band Cold Cave, the crackled-and-crass noise of Exploring Jezebel, and a dozen other short-lived and incredibly named projects, Fernow has issued a veritable flood of music during the last 15 years. At this point, gathering all the pieces seems patently impossible. And that's not even taking into account his long-running multimedia and multi-format imprint Hospital Productions or his latest venture, the new label Bed of Nails.
So far, at least, Bed of Nails has been easy to trace. When the label launched in June, after all, its first release was a four-song EP from Fernow's latest solo guise, Vatican Shadow. Under that name for the last two years, Fernow has manipulated images and tropes of military tragedy (his first proper LP featured a photo of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan on its cover) with an interest in dimly lit, tangent-prone techno. His best work yet under the name comprises Ornamented Walls, the project's debut effort for Manchester-based imprint Modern Love. Like notable labelmates Demdike Stare and Andy Stott, Vatican Shadow's music could be vaguely categorized as eerie electronica. The beats are never direct or obvious; rather, they bounce around in halls of broken sounds, with samples and static and squall surrounding them in bursts of activity.
Ornamented Walls isn't an LP so much as a collection of material you might have missed and an addendum of tracks you don't want to miss. The 23-minute A-side is actually a reissue of an earlier digital EP built from live rehearsals for "Operation Neptune Spear", the code name of sorts for Vatican Shadow's live premiere in Los Angeles in May. (If discography-obsessive detail is your thing, Fernow also released two such tracks at the show itself, in a cassette run limited to 17.) The second half, though, combines six tracks recorded shortly thereafter but not yet released. The pieces on both sides plunder the same sonic premise-- beats tumbling through claustrophobic nightmares, arriving at one punishing terminus or another.
But it's telling that Fernow fits twice as many tracks onto the B-side in roughly the same amount of time. During the A-side's rehearsal workouts, Fernow is processing digital samples through a cassette system and manipulating them again on the other side. There's a sidewinding sense of indeterminacy here, then, where a theme appears and sometimes quickly vanishes for good, the precipitate of a restless mind and process. "Operation Neptune Spear Part 2", for instance, creeps through subterranean bass and a lazy, long drum sample until, without notice, Fernow splices in the sound of a Jordanian man singing. It soon fades away, replaced by a blown-out sequence of beats and bass that seem salvaged from an all-night rave.
For the B-side, though, he works one idea over until reaching a definite and logical end, whether that takes eight minutes or only one. The backside's first and longest piece, "Cairo Is a Haunted City (Mythic Chords)", builds steadily, with several strands of drone (alternately harsh, soft, damaged, and warm) wrapping slowly around a militaristic march; think Emeralds rerouting their typical ascendance through urban muck. The relatively brief "India Has Just Tested a Nuclear Device" unfurls as a lulling invocation, with war drums softly rattling alongside shooting stars of faded electronics. Closer "Boxes Were Wired to Batteries Then Loaded Into a Brown Toyota Cargo Truck" shifts the action to the sampled drums. The already broken rhythm trips over itself every so often, eventually tumbling toward an oblivion of repetition as the gauze of noise beneath vanishes. If Side A is open-ended exploration and Side B is closed-system execution, Ornamented Walls is provocative manifestation of the same unresolved and unlimited approach that Fernow has used throughout his career.
Both for its use of jarring imagery and subverted symbols and its unfailing willingness to nest one genre's sounds within another's modes, Dominick Fernow's body of work is a study in implicit transgression. In the heyday of Prurient, for instance, he'd dismiss claims that the project was the result of his interests in black metal; this was about noise and electronica, not about pissed bros in corpse paint. And now, although Vatican Shadows depends upon traditional electronic elements (or the dismantling thereof) like beats and keyboards and samples, the various pushes and pulls of his other experiences are exactly what make Ornamented Walls so intriguing. Listen for the creep and sudden punishment of black metal at the back half of "Operation Neptune Spear Part 1", or the relentless insistence of power electronics during "Yemeni Telephone Number": Ornamented Walls is not only an enticing new entry for Vatican Shadow but also a continuation of the overwhelming oeuvre that preceded it.
