Over the last 21 years, Dominick Fernow has established a cult following among noiseniks for his Prurient project. “Were the Marquis de Sade alive, he’d find Prurient a trifle overblown,” I wrote about Prurient in these pages 11 years ago. Since 2011, Fernow has also conducted a rewarding side hustle as Vatican Shadow. For top labels such as Hospital Productions and Ostgut Ton, he’s created tenebrous abstract electronic music and pugilistic techno that lets no color into its matrices except black. If German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, etc.) were around now, he’d be into Vatican Shadow’s will-to-power techno and its S&M beats. by Dave Segal