Prayer and transcendence have been clearly opposed since the spread of recorded music. Prayer is aligned with rigidness and strictness, Christian Rock and other not cool stuff. Transcedence, well that’s Pink Floyd stuff; zone out and feel the noise, let it take you somewhere else. It seems odd because prayer is supposed to lead to to transcendence. The Noise underground has typified this battle pretty well. Noise is supposed to be a form of ecstasy taking you to the heavens while soaked in trash sounds. Prayer, however has been openly mocked with a million photocopied c10s bearing the Pope with a Swastika made of dildos, or whatever, on the cover coming out of the scene over the last 30 or so year. Prurient, gets at a connection with his newest project and record. Fernow is the dude behind Prurient and one of the biggest movers and shakers in the whole Noise thing we all love –tr00 NOIZE that is.
This record taps into the transformation those who were truly with the Noise in the mid 2000s have made into a more Goth beat laden sound. The record is thoroughly turgid and washed out with watered down beats that are sharp and scary rather than thick and pulsing. The whole album revolves around the kind of minimalism seen in techno with beats taking shape from the removal and input of different sounds. For the most part these beats do the talking with slightly less turgid, but still turgid, synth patterns and drones finding their way into the foreground and background. The repetition and focus on a limited pallete of sounds –the drum sounds are extremely similar from track to track– leads to a head bobbing trance where the listener forgets what the listener is hearing and moves onto to deeper thoughts. Sound familiar?
Each track has a decidedly “dark” or “scary” feel to it –in line with the Noise aesthetic. However, the coldness, lack of humanity, and focus on shorter and darker sounds almost makes zoning out easier. There are no lush synth arpeggios to be amazed at the beauty of. There are no deep thick drones to decipher, layer by layer. Most of the sounds are familiar and codified parts of the electronic landscape. Since they’re now codified and understood they are no longer “scary images of the future” or any other Kraftwerk-ism, rather they are something non-human, non-futuristic and non-contemporary. The sounds have entered into the eternal, this sense combined with the minimalism and trance inducing structures shows that the monotony of prayer can lead to transcendence –irony of the title or not.
