vatican shadow

what else sounds like vatican shadow

http://www.factmag.com/2012/04/01/prurient-and-still-wanting/

The tapes you released in 2009 as Vatican Shadow – Kneel Before Religious Icons and Byzantine Private CIA – sound to me like precursors to Bermuda Drain, in the sense that they’re rhythm-led, atmospheric and decisively electronic pieces. Is it fair to say that that what you’ve learned from that project has fed into the way you do things as Prurient?

“Well, in some ways it has and in some ways it hasn’t. Quite simply, Vatican Shadow was the first time that I was experimenting with making beats, and in that sense it did lay some groundwork for Bermuda Drain. I love certain sides of Muslimgauze records, and I kind of ran out of that sort of music to listen to, so that’s partly why Vatican came about…I mean, a lot of what motivates me in general is that when I can’t find something I want, I try to create it, to satisfy that need. And in many ways that’s what Bermuda Drain is too – I’m looking for this thing and I can’t quite find it so I think, ok, so I’ll make it myself.

“You could also say that Vatican is the total opposite and antithesis of Bermuda Drain, because it doesn’t address the personal world thematically. It’s really more about headlines…I like to describe it as being like a spy game, an espionage board game where you don’t know who’s winning or what side you’re on. I think that’s fair. I like the idea that there are multiple events happening simultaneously, and they may be unrelated, but somehow they’re creating a larger picture. I like the idea of things working behind the scenes, particularly in a sinister way. Even the name Vatican Shadow, and all the song titles, are based around this idea of fear and mistrust and…”

Conspiracy?

“I mean, it’s linked to conspiracy, but I actually have no real interest in that and am not advocating any of those theories. I find [conspiracy] interesting as a symbol for collapse, a total lack of trust, a total global failure – I think that’s what’s interesting. I have no agenda. I like the atmosphere of degeneration and fear that Vatican conjures. It’s very poetic. When you read the news and see these headlines sometimes you just think you’re reading poetry. They’re so absurd.” [laughs]

There was an error parsing the BBcode in your post:
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he is a pedophile
― JW (ex machina), Thursday, May 25, 2006 3:17 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's prurient amirite

So many Vatican Shadow options this year but this one was my favorite:

River of Ectoplasm (Cass, Ltd, C120)
A1 Had 'Em Throwin' a Party for a Bunch of Children
A2 While All of the While the Slime Was Under the Building
A3 Grabbed the Proton packs off the Back and They Split
B1 The Bones Over the Door Rattled as Venkman Entered the Shop
B2 Dana Walked Down the Street with Venkman Retracing the Path of the Runaway Buggy
B3 The Improved Ectomobile Roared Out onto the Street
B4 Its Ghostly Siren Moaning and Wailing

― Andy K, Wednesday, December 12, 2012 12:55 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some of the Christian Cosmos stuff is really dope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUXD6BUqNNk

i want to post one of this dude's press shots in lonely guys thinking baout things

i'm certain that most of the people depicted in that thread are thinking 'would it matter if vatican shadow just released untitled albums in plain covers'

Beats aside there isn't actually that much difference between Vatican Shadow and someone like Burial, except there's a chasm of difference between calling your track 'In McDonalds' and calling it 'Chechnya's Ghosts Loom Large In Death Of Former Spy' when the musical differences are microscopic.

Of course Vatican Shadow himself knows this and he knows full well that this extremely broadsheet-friendly music is going to listened to by people who are at the same time reading accounts of all manner of atrocities. It's an album that's good to read to, it's an album that works strangely well on a Sunday afternoon. It's excellent background music, there's not much going on after a couple of bars.

The music SOUNDS fucking amazing, by the way.

i don't think it is narcissism of small differences to suggest that burial does not sound that much like vatican shadow

Vatican Shadow (dark techno / broadsheet techno)

Burial (dubstep / blood and soil electro)

Objective NON correlation, granular analysis PROVES differentiated soundtype arrays

I dunno, the beats are totally different but the sonically they're not very far apart - it doesn't have to be Burial though, the basic point can apply to any producer of grim-sounding abstract music.

Like I get the sense that this is record (not listened to the others) is actually meant to represent the unease of reading about atrocities rather than the experience of them. And he knows his audience and he's well aware of all this.

Then again it is late on Christmas Day and I am drunk but I still think this is one of the best records of this year.

i think it's cyberpunk adorno music

how could we rebrand vatican shadow

there are about a trillion releases so if one were so inclined to carefully repackage one of them and send press releases etc, how could it be presented

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH9-d2YQqHU

an NRO contributor greatly concerned w/rise of Islamism plays techno

like even though it only sounds like burial to drunk people, what if we use the burial concept but alter the signifiers from grotty suburban london to some industrial city in china, press releases would focus heavily on the anomie of living in a smog cloaked exurban wasteland

all of the lp covers would be photos of shopping trolleys in canals, track names would be broken english with random chinese characters, it would be the work of a producer born in harbin in 1983 who spent a year studying industrial design in kiev and is now living a shadowy existence hiding from the CCP, emailing flacs surreptitiously from internet cafes

If he wants to rebrand he has to change names. Vatican Shadow is DF's war-themed bedroom techno project, just like Exploring Jezebel is his femdom/male-humiliation fetish-themed noise project and Christian Cosmos is his Christian-themed ambient-industrial project.

Is that Exploring Jezebel thing any good? It looks like every track is 45 minutes (!)

I haven't heard that one. 8 x C90 sounds like a great way to release music! Also, lol @ each side being called a "Dildo": http://www.discogs.com/Exploring-Jezebel-Penis-Torture-Chamber/release/2384418

It's on digital release, too, looks like.

is there any ilm thread about the arbitrariness of paratext in electronic music

like what if drexciya instead of black science fiction had been about a counterfactual reality where the british empire never finished

roman empire never ended iirc

what else sounds like vatican shadow

Vatican Shadow I've heard was pretty close to Sandwell District and their off-shoots (go and listen to the Silent Servant album if you haven't heard that yet). Also maybe Morphosis too.

it sounds like early 80's SPK

Fernow put out Silent Servant's album this year (Hospital Productions is his label). It's a bit like VS but better and without the war on terror titles

He's also in a black metal band, which I'm guessing won't come as a massive shock to anyone - http://www.last.fm/music/Ash+Pool

Also merry christmas everybody

i have the silent servant album which is my kinda thing, but apart from one or two tracks it hasn't quite clicked (yet, maybe)

the christian cosmos youtube crut posted is great

thanks to whoever mentioned morphosis and reminded me to listen to that album

andy stott and actress are much better ref pts than burial imo

Andy Stott definitely, Actress doesn't have quite the right kind of echoey dank sonic murk going on (it's about tone, not beats or whether one is dubstep or industrial or techno). But Andy Stott's titles are pretty innocuous so he doesn't fit the point I was making like Burial does - as far as I know there's no discourse or mythology around Andy Stott that stems almost entirely from track titles. People hear associations in the music because the producer has led them there largely through extra-musical means (although the music is certainly sombre enough to fit). As far as I know VS isn't actually sampling music from war zones, although I'd guess he uses some heavy imagery in the live show.

Other stuff from this year that you could probably link somehow to VatShad:

Cut Hands - power electronics mainstay goes techno while roping in themes of fear, violence and imperialism from other people's woeful histories
Shackleton - labyrinthine Fourth World post-dubsteppe haunted with the ghosts of lost tribes, murdered monks and dead intelligence operatives
Shifted - interminable grey slog across a shell-pocked landscape all to the deadened thump of a post-Gas kick drum as heard from the shitty confines of a cold, dark car boot
Shed - combat zone techno with big blocks of sound rumbling into position on the backs of scud transporters under sporadic but futile small arms fire from renegade snares
Raime - bleak but pouty post-goth electro played at doom metal slug speed, something tells me these guys tuck their jeans into their lace-up boots, but probably more out of sartorial pride rather than agricultural necessity

darkwave darkwave darkwave, i feel like i've come over all martian

There's a Prurient album coming out on BEB next year, and the last track was on some BEB radio show recently (it's on Doufcloud somewhere) - I only listened once a few weeks ago, but it sounded pretty awesome - going further in a techno direction, I guess.

Greedily checking out anything I haven't heard of on this thread in the hope of finding something I love as much as the Silent Servant album (the VatShad is p. good too, since I'm on his thread)

No one's mentioned Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement yet (at least according to a quick check a moment ago), and they deserve to be mentioned, esp. since it's on Hospital Productions, is already another really prolific project, and is most likely D. Fernow yet again (either solo or maybe with Kris Lapke as on the Christian Cosmos material).

Ltd. cassette releases from the last year or maybe two have been made digitally available throughout 2012, to the extent that this catalog of downloads collectively made #9 on Boomkat's staff year-end list:

http://boomkat.com/search?q=Artist%3A%20RAINFOREST%20SPIRITUAL%20ENSLAVEMENT&fields[]=artist,track_artists

(Everything I've heard has at least been very good IMO, but FWIW, I'd recommend checking out either "Fallen Leaves Camouflaged Behind Tropical Flowers" or "Papua Land Where Spirits Still Rule" to start)

(In other words: Antipodean death-ambient eco-justice OSTs FTW?)

if you're looking for some dark industrial techno, this is outstanding : http://opaltapes.bandcamp.com/album/basic-house-im-not-a-heaven-man

this year's best stuff best stuff in the genre with carter tutti void & silent servent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keap3YKrcAk

this is more like it

"interminable grey slog"

lol

dl'd immediately from the descrip tbh

Prurient track I mentioned upthread is at 1hr 39m here:

http://soundcloud.com/n_u_t_s/2012-11-02-14-00-00-open-deck

feel like vatican shadow ppl would also like fatima al qadiri's GSX

Prurient album now streaming here:

http://pitchfork.com/advance/31-through-the-window/

Really can't get enough of this, esp. the title track (the one I linked above).

this is really great, title track is amazing. first prurient album i've heard - much more technoey than i was expecting

technoey deschanel

it almost makes me want to check out the other prurient albums, but I suspect they don't sound much like this?

most of them don't. it really depends, but most of them tend towards the harsh noise end of the spectrum.

the remix at the end of it is pretty good

True story: I was interviewing Ty Dolla Sign in late 2012 and he asked what I'd been listening to (he's very musically curious) and I pt him on to Vatican Shadow. No collab as of yet but there's still hope imo

Thanks due to this thread, obv

Based on the dates here it must have been early 2013, actually

interested to hear this

https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/23662

it's interesting! not sure how I felt about all the Genesis Breyer P-Orridge vocal clips used as a connecting thread although it was an interesting choice

the genesis stuff makes it a nope for me, which sucks cause i'd prob be into it otherwise

definitely seems like a very odd time to be making that particular decision

I guess I might have undersold the types of "interesting" there

I'm not sure "tone-deafness" is quite the right phrase in that RA review, it implies a kind of thoughtlessness. There's no way an artist as conscious of media narrative and violent imagery as Fernow didn't know exactly what he was doing.

maybe that consciousness isn't the same type people like to think it is

New LP out tomorrow, Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era.

His approach to titles is unsettlingly formulaic.

I'm surprised Persian Pillars has been ignored for EOY lists or at all. It's great.

Got Vatican Shadow on this evening, almost certainly as a consequence of that recent amazing post in the politics thread. I’ve got to give DF props for calling a track “more of the same” which is the most ridiculously on the nose title ever

New one features a track titled 'The Other Blackbirds Required Shipping to Their Final Resting Places Which Necessitated Their Wings Being Sawed Off by Worldwide Aircraft Recovery'.

Pretty good article going deep on Fernow's connections to the far-right:

https://jeanhugueskabuiku.substack.com/p/about-vatican-shadow-link-with-the

Didn't expect the side swipes at St0suy. They were fair, from the context of the article, but I thought everyone loved that guy. Anyway, saw St0suy posted something on his Twitter about it this morning, but I haven't had a chance to read that yet.

It is worth reading:

A piece on Dominick Fernow and his links to artists with right wing ideologies was published Friday. I spent the weekend thinking of my laziness and complacency re: these connections and wanted to post the below. It's from a letter I wrote to the piece's author, @amazinggaijin pic.twitter.com/CfyiNYMTfP

— brandonstosuy (@brandonstosuy) July 12, 2021

Disappointing, but not all that surprising. Every time someone who produces negative art that I connect with turns out to be a creep, I wonder what about it hooked me in the first place. It's a concern. I guess it's a thing where we're both angry about things - just turns out they were coming at that shit from the opposite side of the spectrum. I loved DSO before I found out about that dude, too.