Prurient

As much as any genre name or classification fails to provide an accurate summarisation of an art form or a subcategory of one surely the most pointless label to be lazily tagged on to an artist is the descriptive of ‘noise’.

Who draws the line at where music becomes noise? Are we to believe the words of dismissive parents that have probably been repeated regarding everything from Slipknot to The Ronettes, or is there something close to an actual boundary, however blurred it may be? To be succinct: does it matter? In the living room-like setting of Nottingham’s Chameleon Café, Mantile Promotions’ latest night, compromised of four solo sets in the strictest sense of the word, does little to answer such half-philosophical bullshit.

Opener Soft Option Killing does nothing to set a promising tone. Built around an infinitely repeated vocal sample his set evolves (nor devolves) very little beyond the point of a few decibels worth of feedback. Whilst the sample itself, a gravely voiced narrative speaking of an unknown substance that “doesn’t burn clothes but the skin underneath” is interesting enough in its first six repetitions Soft Option Killing’s reluctance to do fuck all, musically nor actually, kills any atmosphere.

Maybe an answer lies in conviction., as Sunroof’s set, an alarmingly brief burst of sandpaper-shined guitar ambience and deadpan vocals, is an infinitely more enjoyable experience, delivered as it is with such raw, if alien, emotion. His is the sound of Kevin Shields’ heavenly six-string squalls falling from cloud nine into a labyrinth of snarling metal and forgotten faces. No one else makes the guitar sound this ecstatic.

Yet the word ‘ecstatic’ is all the more suited to Wisconsin native Prurient. Here, if the continually assumed belief of an actual passage from music to noise is a short travel from A to B, Dominick Fernow races past Z into countless undiscovered alphabets, armed with only a microphone, a table of effects and a voice that hushes devils, and whilst Dominick’s recorded material often feels clinical and sterile in the live environment it is hideously organic, with the man throwing himself into seizures semi parallel to the atom-bomb like effloresces of sonic brutality he creates. Still his creation is closer to the works of Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part than that of the hundreds of two-dimensional chancers he rises above; so close are not only the hypnotic qualities but the sheer devotion to their composition.

Last buses call before Kevin Drumm can unleash a conclusion, but some questions are best left unanswered. The line between music and noise will never be accurately drawn, and nor does it need to be.