Vatican Shadow

I didn't know Teatro Lo Spazio, tucked away behind San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, but I knew it was becoming a new temple of techno, helped along by the previous Rrose set that I'd unfortunately missed.

An unpleasant loss I didn't want to repeat with the arrival of Dominick Fernow in the guise of Vatican Shadow, who in his (bulimic) recent output had managed to thrill all the strung-out techno crowd drawn to its most rotten, industrial undercurrents.

The evening opens in almost liturgical fashion with the set from Mai Mai Mai. An unknown entity, hidden behind rags fit for a jester or perhaps an ancient monk, stages an alien liturgy of dark, magmatic tones.

In a continuous fusion of techno mechanics, devouring noise regurgitations and rumoristic collage, an organic, fluid dark-ambient took shape in front of confused visuals, dancing sickly among tangled wires, endlessly tampered circuits, ravaged tape decks and devoured cassettes. A set of profound emotional impact, gathering the allure of the darkest, most pessimistic Demdike Stare together with that orgasmic, tribal energy that would shortly after saturate the room: the orthodox techno of Fernow.

An orthodoxy that goes beyond mere energy to toy with violence in a continuous sonic breakthrough. An extreme trajectory that fully picked up from his last two releases, “September Cell" and “Ornamented Walls”, and translated the lesson of Regis, who remixed his 12” “Iraqui Praetorian Guard”, dragging the crowd through more than an hour of electronic fury.

Dominick proves to be an animal strung out and addicted to his own rage, thrashing about relentlessly, at times abruptly halting the flow only to pick it back up from another direction.

A hyper-fast, mathematical, percussive sadism that left no room for footing or analysis, only the passive invasion of the body.

By the end of the set, the venue seemed to have sealed itself into a metallic resonating chamber of flesh and sweat, a totalizing experience that certainly has little in common with the more ambient, drawn-out Fernow of some of his recent cassettes.

Salvaging the ruins and starting over was hard work, willing victims of an uncompromising sonic beating that fused aesthetic sadism with a strung-out, technological tribalism.

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