Remember Your Black Day

Working as Prurient, sound artist Dominick Fernow amassed an immense discography of bleak experiments in harsh noise and punishing power electronics. Vatican Shadow is the name he goes under when making minimal techno, and the deep, relentless beats and murky bass throb of Remember Your Black Day are every bit as menacing and pained as his more formless noise material. While almost entirely instrumental, save some incoherent vocal samples, the eight repetitive and darkly hypnotic tracks here seem to be focused (in their titles at least) on themes of terrorism and war in the Middle East. Industrial-flavored tracks with titles like "Tonight Saddam Walks Amidst Ruins" and "Not the Son of Desert Storm, But the Child of Chechnya" create grim, queasy landscapes and offer the listener no hope for resolution of any kind from their thick uneasiness. ~ Fred Thomas