Dominick Fernow is not here to make things easy for you. In recent years, the noise trailblazer and Hospital Productions founder has drifted toward respectability, with his military-themed techno project Vatican Shadow taking him out of grimy basements and installing him in superclub DJ booths around the world. Fernow was once characterized as a noise bro, but his work is seldom satisfying in a beer-chugging, rock ’n’ roll way, and often can be deliberately taxing—either actively painful (see the sustained feedback screech of Prurient’s 2008 album Arrowhead) or flirting with monotony, as the negative and depressive energies that course through the project are converted into sound.
Rainbow Mirror is not designed to be easily digestible. Released in honor of the Prurient project’s 20th anniversary, this collection clocks in at over three hours in length, spreading out to four CDs or—phew—seven slabs of vinyl. It’s consciously forged in testament to the project’s seldom-documented early days in rural Milwaukee, a period which is memorialized at length in the liner notes, alongside a piece of original fiction written by Fernow and Scott Bryan Wilson. Way back when, Prurient was a trio, and for Rainbow Mirror, it is again. Recording live, Fernow is accompanied by a pair of Hospital Productions regulars, Matt Folden of Dual Action and Jim Mroz of Lussuria, and the resultant sounds have been mixed after the fact by dark-techno magnate Shifted. The music is in a style Fernow calls “doom electronics,” which forsakes Prurient’s familiar blend of feedback pyrotechnics, surging synths, and shrieked vocals in favor of long, sluggish canvases of sound that grind like rusty machinery, or ooze and seep like hot tar; think a 21st-century update of the Eraserhead score, or the exquisite, entropic improvisations of Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report, and you’re on the right track.
It’s hard not to be impressed by Rainbow Mirror’s sheer scale. Put it on, go downstairs, bake a cake, mow the lawn, come back, and it’s still going, a swirling void of sound that simmers with morbid unease. The three-man lineup ensures that for all this music’s live, improvisatory provenance, these tracks crackle with textural detail. “Walking on Dehydrated Coral” is a miasma of watery blips and foul synth drool. “Chaos -
Sex” intersperses moments of rumbling ambience with passages that sound like a band saw cutting metal, while the foggy drones and muted percussion of “Path Is Short” might be industrial music for a post-industrial age, where automated processes are pushed to the edge of collapse. Occasionally, moments of unexpected prettiness emerge from the wreckage—see, for instance, the naïve, three-note synth melody that surfaces from the droning turbulence of “Falling in the Water,” though here it is left to revolve ceaselessly until its beauty withers on the vine.
Fernow started the decade with a spree of glossy, rhythmic records like 2011’s Bermuda Drain and 2013’s Through the Window that reflected a burgeoning fascination with dance music, refracting noise and power electronics through techno techniques. Rainbow Mirror feels like a swing of the pendulum back to a more freeform, primitive spirit, away from the urban centers of New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin and back toward the Rust Belt that spawned him. For all its imposing scale, though, it lacks some of the dramatic finesse of classic Prurient. Fernow’s poetic lyrics, spoken or shrieked, have been a key hallmark of the project, and without them, these abstracted noisescapes lack the narrative character of his best work. But Prurient also remains defined by its sense of constant evolution, and by burrowing back to its earliest beginnings, Rainbow Mirror feels like a new arc in the Prurient story. Where next remains to be seen.
