Prurient & Kevin Drumm - All Are Guests in the House of the Lord

Famed experimental musician Kevin Drumm and Dominick Fernow in his Prurient guise collaborate on the abstract, layered, and hostile All Are Guests in the House of the Lord (Hospital Productions, 2007). I can't tell who's doing what, but it sounds like Fernow on vocals, which are evidently his first-ever intelligible ones. His spoken word goes through processing such as pitch-shifting and distortion. Plastikman's Closer has much of the same atmosphere.

First Memory of Pain
On This Slab

The vocals are portentous and somewhat pretentious, a grown-up version of the Snake Mountain microphone in He-Man (see original TV ad here). But they absolutely work, since the underlying textures move in response to them. These jams are dynamic, ranging from hovering synth ambience to all-out digital distortion attack. Symphonic soundbites and found sounds flit around in some of the best micro-sampling I've heard in years. Minimal techno has really turned me off to micro-sampling, over-using and cheapening it, but here the samples are actually emotional, like flashbacks of childhood memories. Perhaps this ties in to the vague theme of decaying imperial youth in Fernow's "libretto" (see text here).

Drumm and Fernow could easily have pounded out some hellishly abrasive aural enema. Instead, they've made something deeper and more open to interpretation - and thus ultimately more menacing.

All Are Guests in the House of the Lord is available from Hospital Productions, Reckless Records, Weirdo Records, and Mimaroglu.