Album Review: Arrowhead by Prurient

Ultimately, "noise music" is as tricky a genre tag as the much-debated "indie rock." Critics and fans use "noise" at least as broadly as "indie," and in some ways the generalization has an even greater leveling effect on the music it describes, considering that "noise" can be traced back to avant-garde classical music -- in particular the musique concrète developed by Pierre Schaeffer in the late '40s and '50s. Stretched to its limit, though, the term encompasses all music that focuses on texture to the exclusion of traditional music markers: harmony, rhythm and melody. An umbrella term like "noise," however, can only begin to point us in the direction that Prurient's Arrowhead takes its listeners.

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Most people’s reaction to the shrill feedback of a microphone would be to stop it. Prurient, a.k.a. Dominick Fernow, isn’t like most people. Instead, he has taken that startling sound, one we all instinctually recoil from, and built a lexicon out of it, a symbolic mirror of how the conscious shrinks from what the sub-conscious throws at it.

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