Back in stock.

Grim stuff, this. An obsessively detailed and evocative examination of the hellish experiences of WW2 Allied paratroopers behind enemy lines. Ideas concerning 20th Century militarism and armed conflict have appeared else where in Dominick Fernow's work, but this Prurient release stands out in both themes and execution. A limited-edition 2019 release, Garden Of The Mutilated Paratroopers is in some ways a skin-blistering return to Prurient's early 2000s harsh noise / feedback-driven power electronics attack, a double disc delving into arcane World War II military history and sensorial mega-violence through short and brutal blasts of ultra-distorted skree. Self-described in signature Dom Fernow style as “Airborne Electronics for the 75th Anniversary of Screaming Eagles Radio and 82nd Neptune Death Row”, each of the two discs focus on a specific set of situational aspects with strange, vivid imagery via the track titles, mysterious lyrics, even first-hand quotes from D-Day paratroopers themselves, researched recollections of the brutality of the air-drop into Normandy on June 6th, 1944. And that overarching imagery all gets swallowed up in an immediate ear-assault that hits you full-force, both discs 101 and 82 (each one roughly twenty minutes long) delivering extreme frequency assaults that seriously fuck with your nervous system. It's not like Prurient ever really abandoned this form of thorny, filthy noise and power electronics, but Paratroopers is definitely one of the harshest releases that I've picked up from the project in years.

Disc 101 hits full blast punishment with "Ocean Skin", laying down the template for the rest of the material: relatively short shocks of severely over-modulated sound and echoing drone, high-frequency feedback searing the air around you, low-fi tape hiss, blown-out vocals, creaking and squealing machine noise, destroyed audio cables, walls of black crumbling distortion, and mindless chittering electronics. Ugly, horrific stuff, settling into drawn-out sprawls of morbid rumble when it's not earfucking you with dental drill precision feedback and nerve-shredding mic abuse. Each of the ten tracks employs these elements in varying degrees, friom the sputtering death-drone power electronics of "Overlord Meeting" and the wind-tunnel whoosh and mumbling, impertinent delirium of "Sex History”, to the mesmerizing sewer-churn of "Everything About You Comes From Him", the crashing junk-noise chaos of "Soul Device", and the squall of looping skree and monstrous roaring of "Death Row Messiah". Basically none of the cinematic soundscape work, hypnotic nocturnal electronics, or gorgeous cascading noise constructs that's marked a big chunk of Prurient's more recent output. Nah, this is pure caustic abrasion, with a similar kind of nauseating wrecked-PE vibe as Fernow's early-to-mid aughts stuff like Shipwrecker's Diary, Troubled Sleep, or even Black Vase. But with much more hideous and wretched vocals. And there's that hypnotic quality to so much of this, with lots of repetitious noise loops and circular feedback, but also really abrupt, with tracks seemingly cut off at arbitrary points. Like a fractured dream-transmission of someone's hallucinations on the battlefront.

That incredibly blown-the-fuck-out over-modulated sinewave attack explodes across the beginning of the 82 disc, unleashing more of that mesmeric, repetitive dread as "Airborne Electronics - Breathing the Air Of Dead Men" grinds away, brutish warbling sawtooth drones cutting through the air like barbed-wire stretched taut and hit by a thousand tuning forks. From that, the second disc slugs you with the brief power electronics thuggery of "Die Continually" and "Without Resurrection", disease-riddled dronescapes and crackling black electronic murk in "No Ribs And No Dust" and "No Foreseeable Future ", and the rhythmic terror in "We Must Follow Where The War Goes"'s military stomp, like a million boots beating the scarred earth in unison. The whole second half of Garden is a total hellscape, a vast tangle of monstrous grunting vocals and muffled shouts of desperation, acrid and garbled distortion and eardrum-piercing frequency violence, no catharsis, only pain, suffering, and abject nihilism. This thing is unadulterated bad vibes.

The two-disc presentation is interesting, with an elegant simplicity and stark design juxtaposed with the incredibly filthy, barbaric skree and withering, war-ravaged distortion. Each of the two CDs is essentially a 3" CD, but pressed as a standard 5" disc (for easy playability) with a large clear edge around the disc proper.