Kelly Moran portrait by Katharine Antoun
Music writers. Who needs ’em? We recently had the opportunity to get Kelly Moran and Dominick Fernow together (over the ether) and left them to have a conversation about their individual practice, without any interference. Kelly Moran is a composer and multi-instrumentalist known for her work with prepared pianos and innovative techniques in electronic music. Dominick Fernow is more commonly known by a number of aliases including Prurient, Vatican Shadow and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, under which he produces techno, industrial and noise/ambient.
The pair share a split LP called Chain Reaction At Dusk, which is out now on Hospital Productions. The record was originally intended to support a joint American tour (with Merzbow). They originally met in 2018 while both working as part of Oneohtrix Point Never’s debut MYRIAD show at Park Avenue Armory.
Kelly Moran interviews Dominick Fernow
For as long as I have known you, you have been touring and traveling nearly constantly. A few months ago when we caught up, we were talking about how the pandemic has changed our goals and creative practices. Can you talk a little bit about how having to stay at home in NYC and not travel has impacted your creative practice and your perspective about your plans for the future? Do you feel differently about performing live now?
Dominick Fernow: The transition has been one of creative necessity instead of creative postponement. Gigs and traveling are both
a rewarding privilege and a treacherous carrot chase. All too often the touring cycle can act as a Band-Aid to [avoid] facing
mountains of administrative work that is anything but glamorous but is a reality for many self-employed artists. It’s not
the stuff they teach you in school but damn it feels good to ‘get your shit together’ and clean up those old hard drives,
toss the unsold CDs from the storage space and realise that those old size M shirts are a ‘young man’s game’.
Limitations have always inspired me, so figuring out the Rubic’s Cube of production in a small apartment is something that appeals to the OCD part of my brain. On the other hand, having the time and space to test materials, analyse and edit my work has been a blessing in disguise. I’ve also been able to approach studio practice in regards to ‘special packaging’ for my handmade cassettes; this has been a lifelong passion and comes from a short-lived lineage of 90s noise I would argue was a singular moment in music history. I mean, in what other genre can you
package cassettes between two pieces of Wonderbread?
I remember when we were performing together for MYRIAD, one of my roles was to help cue you for your entry on the song ‘Same’. As a classical musician, my first instinct was to try to explain how many beats and measures your entry came after a certain musical cue, to which you replied you do not count at all in music and don’t follow time that way when you are performing. So tell me, how do you perceive temporal dimensions in music? Is it all intuition?
DF: Working in clubs and DJing (which I owe to the early endorsement of Karl O’Connor) has helped me to a degree with timing. It’s actually made me a better guitarist weirdly enough and more consistent with picking, but on the stage – timing is less a factor than risk. The sense of things falling apart at any moment is a struggle for control that feels worthwhile for me to keep performing as a person without formal music training.
In general, I’m curious how the music making process begins for you. Do you start composing your music using voice first, lyrics, or gear? Where do you start from?
DF: Most of what drives my music comes from reading and words – despite suffering with dyslexia and struggling with writing. So,
there is never a shortage of inspiration – it just rarely comes from sound alone. I just need that context in order to ‘care’ or feel that it’s worthwhile for someone else to consider experiencing.
You have many different projects and monikers. When you’re working on music, do you usually start out consciously thinking about which one you’re going to be making music for, or do you just start working and figure out later which home those sounds belong to?
DF: Monikers are simply a reflection of content and contextual starvation. If I can’t find something that I’m looking for
regarding a topic or perspective (usually dealing with taboo) I tend to just try to make it myself. I use monikers as a
device to remove the pressure from the audience, but also to give emphasis to the art itself rather than the ‘identity’ behind it. Does it always work? Hell no! But Vatican Shadow started as one of those very ‘topical’ fixes so as Dave Adelson from 20 Buck Spin says ‘Even Steven’.
How do you think your sound has evolved from when you first started making music?
DF: Prurient sound sources can be influenced or come from almost anywhere. Sound is another aspect of collage just like clippings from the newspaper. The sound can reference nearly any frequency spectrum. I define noise as the freedom to pursue obsession outside of genre. As long as the roots of destroyed sound, whether literally and or through referential juxtaposition, are preserved, I’m good. My development as a performer has been slow as hell. It took me ten years to go from screaming at a wall to facing an audience. The only excuse is that the stage compared
to the studio is a constant battle between controlling the random elements of the club and it’s circumstances. A gig is a process of trying to convince people that this totally artificial environment and expectation of a show is “real”.
Your music and performances resonate so heavily with people because of your raw honesty and authenticity. How do you pull these things from your inner core to your satisfaction?
DF: Honesty and authenticity are for the audience to decide and determine. My ethos as a performer is simple. If I’m not experiencing pain why should the audience believe me? However I’ll say physically hurting and injuring myself on stage seems to help them along the road to a conclusion one way or the other. Pain can come in many ways, risking humiliation and risking exaggeration can be just as rough as any frequencies and my favourite of all pain – boredom.
This aspect of ‘monotony’, ‘stagnation’ and ‘tedium’ seems to fall short for many listeners but is an essential device in
discomfort. This isn’t ‘business class’ where every corner is filled with entertainment devices and drugs to do everything possible to avoid reminding you of the fact you’re in a damned airplane. Turbulence still exists in ‘first class’.
You have such a massive output. Do you ever get writer’s block or have periods where you’re unable to tap into your creativity, and if so, how do you get yourself out of it?
DF: I excel at starting. I suck at finishing stuff. I’m great at making a big mess quickly but somehow am never available to clean it up.
Which part of your extensive catalogue are you most proud of, and why?
DF: Pride isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of my catalogue. It’s baggage. Like sifting through the possessions of the deceased or an overall decline in penmanship (but I still happen to be breathing and writing… kind of). My work was never intended to stand alone but rather become a cumulation of ’research’ (smaller releases focussing on specific content and sounds) and the result of this research would be called ‘albums’ which deal less in specifics and incorporates the wider spectrum of that research.
I’d say that Frozen Niagara Falls is the most developed document of my interests: genre discomfort, contradiction,
paradox while holding on the core inspirations of pain, individualism and industrial values of fierce independence,
ambiguity, black humor and cynicism.
You and I were both raised Roman Catholic. Does Catholic shame factor into your art at all?
DF: Guilt perhaps but closer words would be fetishishm , sado-masochism, iconography and most importantly mythology. In a rhetorical sense the language of mythology is symbols. Religion is an easy target but remains a huge influence for me as an artist. If science wants to assert social dominance it must learn to incorporate the language of mythology – an essential tool in our brains to deal with abstraction and the fact that all human beings have an inevitable visitation from the Grim Reaper. The cross is the reconciliation of opposites and as the child of divorced parents…
Do you have a system of notating your music? Is everything by memory?
DF: If complete chaos and disorganisation counts, then yes. It’s more of test of endurance since there is such an overload of content. Closer to a journal to see what I can remember. If I remember it then it has passed some sort of internal test. On a more mundane level, it’s what works in a live setting and what works on an airplane just the same. I do actually listen to my own music in order to better understand it. The process is one of discovery, not exacting an outcome. Perception may change and intent is great but let’s be honest – most of the time the end result is anything but intentional.
What’s an influence on your music that might surprise me? (Doesn’t have to be musical)
DF: The opening credits to Regarding Henry.
Dominick Fernow portrait by Sven Marquardt
Dominick Fernow Interviews Kelly Moran
The vast atmospheric collision of your production connects to a lineage of modern classical and avant-garde electronics – anything from Arvo Pärt to Donato Dozzy to Maria Chavez and Raymond Dijkstra, but the production stands in contrast with the extreme maximal/minimalist abyss of massive drones punctured with crystalline broken melodies. Is genre obsolete or a necessary point of departure? As music genres become less and less defined by audiences, is it intent that matters to a performer? Is it skill? Do you have an audience in mind for your work or is it coming from the interior world, or is it an academic deconstruction in response to your background in music theory?
Kelly Moran: I personally think that studying genre can be very useful for finding ways to deviate from it. Remember how much chaos Hunter Hunt-Hendrix caused when she inverted the tropes of black metal into her own form of transcendental black metal? It upset a lot of people, but I thought it was a brilliant concept in its own right. That was something that was emphasised in my training from a young age – it’s good to study the traditional path because you can always depart from it while building on the lessons you learned from it. I think it’s how we can transform tropes and aesthetics associated with established genres and synthesise them into something new. I don’t think about audiences when I write my work, though. When I was in academia, I used to feel insecure that my music wasn’t complex or lofty enough – almost that it was too poppy or accessible, and of course now as an artist I’m often shoehorned into the “experimentalist” category, so people will always perceive you differently based on their own projections. You can’t think about audience, it will inhibit you if you are thinking about pleasing others. You need to do it for yourself first.
I definitely utilise my background in music theory constantly when I am writing music, though sometimes I wish I could actively turn it off. Sometimes it’s just fun to do little theory exercises to keep my brain fresh. One of my professors in grad school Kei Akagi (who played keyboard for Miles Davis) taught me this great exercise where you write a melody in a specific key, but then harmonise every note with a chord that doesn’t fall within that diatonic scale. It leads to really strange and unusual results that can help jolt me out of my normal way of composing, because I have ingrained physical tendencies from all my years of playing piano. (Like, certain chords physically want to resolve in a certain direction because of muscle memory and theory, so it can take effort for me to shift out of that.)
The ubiquity of electronic music is in nearly all facets of entertainment and technology. You are one of the few working in electronics with formal training – how did you go from the tactile process of prepared piano to the set up I saw you working with in OPN’s MYRIAD? Your performance was certainly physical – and for a long duration – did the integration of synthesis allow you to become an even more visceral player? Or was it an ‘escape’ from the material quality of the piano?
KM: At this stage in my life, I am definitely most comfortable as a performer when I’m on an acoustic piano. For MYRIAD, I had a pretty simple setup – I used Mainstage to play different VSTs on a full-sized weighted keyboard. I’d cycle through different sounds for each piece, but I had the luxury of only playing one piece of gear – everyone else in the band had slightly more complex setups since they were triggering sounds in other ways. I just did everything on the keyboard since my job was playing the bulk of the intricate melodies. The synthesis was a fun departure for me – but I think I’m most expressive as a performer when I’m on a piano because I know how to bring out the nuances of that instrument better than any electric instrument I play. I think MYRIAD brought out a different side of me as a performer though, it was a very unique experience. I felt immense pressure to deliver and not fuck up because I would often be really exposed with the parts I was playing since they were often the main melodic part of the piece, and it’s always a different experience when you’re playing someone else’s music instead of your own. I was always extremely focused and tense, whereas I’m usually more relaxed during my own live performances.
Music is a contradiction in that we tend to visualise and associate sound with images, but it also speaks to a body language of how we react to frequencies. When we hear drums/ bass/ guitar/ vocals we tend to ‘visualise’ the instruments being used – but there is an undeniable abstraction that enables us to ‘leave this world’.
KM: When I first started putting out music that was centred around prepared piano, a lot of people had no idea what instrument they were hearing because prepared piano is not the most common timbre in popular music. It really delighted me that I was confusing people and that they weren’t sure what instrument it was because I felt that unknowing allowed listeners to shed any preconceived notions about what this kind of music was supposed to sound like from a stylistic perspective. It made me feel really free, like I had cracked this special code that allowed me to do whatever I felt like doing with prepared piano. I am deliberately trying to obfuscate what the piano sounds like so that I can transcend the traditional associations people have with the instrument. The piano is a sound everyone is familiar with, so it brings me a level of satisfaction to disorient peoples’ perceptions and enable them to enter a sonic world they don’t recognise. I always want to transport people to a unique sound world with my compositions, that’s definitely something I strive for. People often think my prepared piano is a gamelan or some other percussion instrument. I think that is something people enjoy about my music, because not only am I using a sound that is pretty uncommon, but I’m also taking an extra step to surround the prepared piano with synthesizers and electronics so I can further detach it from the associations people would otherwise have with it (i.e. John Cage/academia).
Does the combination of linear drone and bass with the severity of your single note patterns create a contradiction for your compositions that harken to this abstraction/literalism? The quick and delicate image of the pianist versus the dense weight of the drones you also create?
KM: Sometimes I feel like my compositions on Ultraviolet are like mini-concertos where the piano is the soloist and all of my electronics and synths are the backing orchestra. The piano is leading the way from a melodic standpoint and the drones create the harmonic and textural world to envelop it. I have worked as a piano accompanist since I was 12, so the ability to follow a soloist and support them is something that is deeply engrained in me. I tap into this mindset and switch roles when I’m in the composer seat because I’m also the soloist and orchestra all at once. I know how to best support myself, and I know how effective contrast can be. That’s why I am so attracted to using thick, heavy drones to counterbalance the delicacy of the prepared piano.
The subconscious potential in sound and music is vast – even in pop, that is how radio music worked in the past, you turned it on and had a reaction (even a limited one), it didn’t require the listener to ‘think’ about it. Does your music reference subconscious as a form of psychedelia? Or is the regimented process necessary to reach that?
KM: For me, the regimented process comes later. Automatism is usually a critical starting point for me, I try to just sit at the piano let things happen from improvising. When I’m thinking too hard and focused on writing the notes down as I work, I can get in my head too much about what theory I’m using in that moment. I try to record myself improvising and then go back later to figure out exactly what I’m doing, and in the revision process I can make these regimented changes to structure so the music is more proportional and balanced. When you’re able to lose yourself completely in the process of improvisation, it can feel like a completely psychedelic out of body experience, it’s the best feeling in the entire world for me.
Does the immediacy of music supersede detached iconography?
KM: If I understand his question I think the immediacy of the sound itself should be more important, at least in my own work. But in our current era where people consume music through the internet, I also understand how important the latter is for giving people context and drawing them in. I think of “detached iconography” as like concept, vibe, artwork, aesthetic moodboard – everything that is not actually music in someone’s output. And of course, a frustration I feel most musicians give voice to at some point is this stuff can actually seem way more important than the “immediacy of music”. Like when black metal bands said they hated death metal bands for not wearing spikes and leather onstage, even if they liked the music. But I’ve also seen people won over in a live concert setting by something in a genre they wouldn’t necessarily associate with it, or even understand the distinctions of of. I used to play in a no wave band called Cellular Chaos with Weasel Walter and he would wear huge metal gauntlets on his forearms that would scratch off the paint on his guitar. He looked completely intimidating and scary, but the vibe of the band for our performances was actually incredibly fun, joyful and celebratory in its chaos. It never felt dark at all. I think the contrast of all the different aesthetics onstage with the music made the experience all the more ecstatic for the audience because of the contradictions. There was so much happening onstage that perhaps people didn’t always understand what every single one of our intentions were, but the impact of everything together made audiences absolutely adore the shows and the effect of the music.
My experience in the club world has shown an interesting side to sound collage through DJing. There is an expectation from the audience that they will hear something new, some new variation or sequence. With composed and performed music – are you improvising – does the compositional side allow you more freedom as improviser or is the challenge in delivery of complex technique in a live setting with the ever so real risk of breaking expectations?
KM: There is always an element of improvisation in my shows to a certain degree! Especially with the music I made for Ultraviolet – all of that music was generated completely through improvisation, which I then learned how to consciously and deliberately play after the fact. What was nice about the construction of my music on Ultraviolet is that only one of the songs uses a metronome, the rest are very loose from a temporal point of view because they are free and unmetered. There’s literally no time signatures or sense of regularity/pulse, it’s all rubato – I give and take how long a melody takes based on how I’m feeling it that day. When I’m performing, I have backing tracks with the synth drones and electronics, and I’m reading a notated score that has specific time markers. There are of course points I deliberately want to sync up with my backing tracks for important moments, but between those fixed points I am allowed to be pretty loose. Many of the songs have sections that allow for me to improvise and do things slightly differently each time. I always do things a little bit differently every time, it keeps the experience fresh and exciting for me as a performer.
Time is taken to the extreme in the DJ world. some sets reaching over 10 to 15 hours duration. Given your background in formal musical education, do the pressures come from within or is there an expectation around endurance? What is the longest set you have played?
KM: That’s a really good question! My pressures seem to come from within, but I’m sure those are subconsciously, inextricably linked to all the psychological fuckery I experienced from my training as a young classical musician. I had a few teachers who were extremely strict. But I think that I have done a decent job of releasing myself from those pressures because once I got to college, I realised I didn’t care about being perceived as what I think of in my head as a “pure” pianist – that being one who dedicates themselves to the craft of interpreting other peoples’ music. There are thousands of pianists who can execute that, and you can debate for days who is better at interpreting a better Schumann sonata. But I knew that if I focused on making my own music, I wouldn’t feel as much pressure to compare myself to others and would instead place a high focus on myself for achieving something unique in my own creative right. But there is a side of me that loves to showcase classically trained virtuosity from a technical standpoint when I am doing shows, that’s just the performer in me though! I like to give a good show. I haven’t played a lot of gratuitously long sets, though. As a solo artist, I have done two sets in a night that were each 45 minutes, but even 90 minutes of playing in an evening seems extremely tame compared to the marathon DJ sets you’re describing here.
I think for me the biggest challenge to my stamina in terms of performances have been to perform Ultraviolet in its entirety and I get to the middle of my set where I perform ‘Nereid’. That piece is very intense to perform because it’s pretty much nothing but insanely fast scales running up and down the piano nonstop for ten minutes. That might not seem like a long time, but my arms are so freaking tired by the end of it. Just before the piece is over, there’s a brief pause where I stop playing the piano and just let the synth drones subside for about 40 seconds before I launch back into playing the last part, and I got into the habit of literally putting my head down on the piano and resting my arms on its shelf during that break. Sometimes when I do this the audience thinks something is wrong with me, but it’s my version of taking a little nap on stage. I just need to give myself a moment of recovery because the constant playing is the most exhausting part.
In my experience it’s harder to do a shorter set where you’re playing music that is physically demanding, as opposed to a longer set that’s perhaps not as technically demanding. When I did MYRIAD, the show was sometimes nearly two hours long, but I wasn’t playing the entire time. Even if I was still focused that whole period, it was less physically exhausting for me than my own solo sets. Sometimes I think about this when I watch figure skating because a program is only 3-4 minutes long, but the amount of stamina you need to endure all the jumps and elements will completely drain a person’s energy like nothing else. To me it’s one of the most intense ways you can push your body to its limit in a short period of time because you’re doing really extreme physical feats with essentially no recovery time. You can always improve stamina if you work hard enough at it.
You have spoken of John Cage and prepared piano as an influence – is it possible to approach the idea of the ‘prepared synthesizer’? The old industrial music that first influenced me was based around anti-instruments (like the Haters, and Aube) using sound sources like water, sandpaper, explosives, stapling records together etc. to generate sound. In a sense is this preparing something for its sonic purpose to destroy it? Can electronics ever truly be destroyed or just manipulated and abused/ controlled? Is preparation destruction?
KM: Preparation can certainly feel destructive and violent (especially since I’m working with heavy physical materials like iron screws and bolts that are typically jammed into other objects with force) but destruction also yields rebirth and potential for new ideas. You’re never going to get the same exact sound every single time, and that’s one thing I really love about preparing a piano – you have to accept that there will be anomalies in the sound that you cannot always control. Even though John Cage has written the most incredibly specific instructions for where to place the preparations on the strings of the piano and what kind of material to use, the result will always sound a little bit unique each time. No recording of Cage’s Sonatas And Interludes sounds identical, they all have timbral idiosyncrasies despite his composerly attempts to control them as much as possible! Especially because each piano is its own unique being with its own timbral quirks and resonances.
I think it’s funny that “prepared” makes the technique sound so neat and fastidious, while it’s actually pretty chaotic and unpredictable at times. I’ve never thought about preparation in an electronic sense though – I’ve only thought about it in the context of acoustic instruments. Someone I went to grad school with created a self-playing prepared guitar that incorporated mini-percussion sticks hitting the strings. It sounded absolutely whacked out and delightful. I tend to think of preparation as any kind of abnormal interference with the sound that doesn’t occur naturally. Given that electronics have to be synthesized and are therefore unnatural in the sense I’m discussing here, I wonder if there is even a way to translate this technique to them. Maybe it would be using a physical object to interfere with the creation of the sound as opposed to interfering with the electronic signal itself, like smashing a hammer on a pedal. Because then you’d get the attack of the hammer sound and the effect that the pedal produces. Honestly, this concept has a lot of twisted potential, I’m sure it’s been done somehow while perhaps not being thought of as “preparation”.
I hear a lot that melody is somehow ‘easy’ – it is true that movie music and sound effects often play to preconceived and learned emotion – but you seem to break melodies through structure rather relying on dissonance. Is melody a form of congestion that you’re navigating or is predetermined association inspiring this interference?
KM: Who says melody is easy? Melody is really hard for me. I find textures and harmonic progression to be far easier to cull, personally.
Curator and artist Robert Crouch from Los Angeles once told me ‘art practice isn’t special’ and it was a moment I have held on to and interpreted as ‘art is normal and a necessity’. As I grow older (old as hell), I find myself drawn more to music as a forum for visual art. Your covers have incorporated specific colour spectrums. Are these palettes a kind of ‘logo’?
KM: My grandmother was a painter, so I grew up making visual art though I don’t do it as frequently anymore. But I am a very visual person and I appreciate how the synthesis of visuals and music can intensify the experience for the listener while also providing a deeper perspective into the artist’s intention. I often have inexplicable and vivid visual associations that I see in my head while I’m playing music. When I was creating the piano music for Ultraviolet, I had very specific color associations that felt directly emotionally tied to the music. When I was writing ‘Nereid’, the whole piece felt inexplicably red and orange to me, like I was inside a volcano. I told my visual collaborator Cassie McQuater that I wanted the visual projections for that piece to feel like a descent into hell with those colours. It’s loose enough of a parameter that I can let her have a substantial amount of creative freedom with it, and she did an incredibly beautiful job with all of the video work she created for my live show. It felt necessary to try to communicate those visual ideas in my head to the audience during a live performance in order to give them the full perspective of how it feels for me to play the music. It’s part of the emotional journey. But there is something I really love about seeing music take on a physical representation, it’s part of why I worked with choreographers and dancers for so many years. Seeing a physical form inhabit your sound and transform it into a new dimension is one of the most beautiful things to me.
One of my favourite raw psychedelic projects from the past was the band The Skaters created by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark. The project name originates from the poem of the same name by John Ashbery. The opening of the poem’s first stanza:
These decibels
Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound
Into which being enters, and is apart.
As a person who suffers from anxiety disorder ice skating feels dark to me – not to be confused with ‘negative’. Is there a relationship in your ice skating with your music or from endurance, danger and control?
KM: Figure skating is a pretty extreme sport in almost every regard. It takes an immense amount of physical discipline, mental strength, and time in order to make substantial progress. Learning the sport as an adult is even more maniacal because you have a greater risk of hurting yourself from falling, so it’s easy to get mental blocks from fear of getting injured. And you will absolutely get hurt learning this sport, so you have to accept that pain is sometimes part of the process. You are not going to land every single jump you attempt, especially when you are learning new elements. You have to conquer the mental side as well as the physical side. You also need to have a very dedicated, regular practice that includes going to the rink multiple times a week because it’s extremely easy to regress if you are not skating regularly. Even a week off will set you back.
But I love the discipline required for skating – when I started taking lessons two years ago, I realised my obsessiveness as a pianist translated so well to learning the sport because I am already accustomed to practicing the same motion several times over in order to master it. It’s a different kind of muscle memory, but it requires the same kind of focus and dedication – if not more, because making a mistake while skating is much more painful than making a mistake playing piano. There’s nothing more satisfying for me than to completely suck at something but then master it after practicing it obsessively. I get addicted to thrill of learning new tricks, and that’s part of why I love the sport so much. Being able to see marked progress in something really difficult is immensely satisfying. You kind of have to be a little bit insane to dedicate yourself to skating, because it is so physically and emotionally gruelling.
Pretty much every person I have met in this sport has an extreme personality in some way, it’s not for the weak-hearted. Another thing I love about skating is that it’s a huge escape for me. Like you, I also suffer from anxiety disorder, but being on the ice is the one place where I truly forget about all my problems outside of the rink. There’s simply no space in my head to worry about anything aside from the task at hand – you need to be so focused because if your body is out of alignment at all, you’re not going to be successful executing the moves. You have to constantly be aware of your centre of gravity, keeping your upper body balanced, bending your knees – all while leaning on the edge of an extremely thin blade. If any part of your body is off centre, it will throw everything off. You have to be completely focused on what your body is doing, otherwise you will get hurt. The hours I’m on the ice I’m only thinking about what my body is doing and what it can accomplish, so it’s an incredible mental escape for me that makes me feel stronger every time I do it.
The Prurient/ Kelly Moran split, Chain Reaction At Dusk, is out now on Hospital
