JK FLESH & PRURIENT - Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination

The latest release from the (sadly) dying Hydra Head is a two-faced split that encapsulates a distorted universe, poised between the sick, cacophonous worlds of its creators, Justin K. Broadrick, founder of Godflesh and later Jesu, and Dominick Fernow aka Prurient.



A magnificently twisted and paranoid work, shot through with massive rhythmic lines and pathological atmospheres, “Worship Is The Cleansing Of The Imagination” is split evenly between the two American artists, though that's little more than a mathematical nuance.

The two halves are in full communication, a creation-destruction motion pulsing in circles within an album that tries to weld together multiple layers and levels of imagery.
For Broadrick (in his new guise as JK Flesh) it's about taking a post-industrial metallic world back into his hands and paraphrasing it in an electronic language, somewhere between techno and the most deconstructed experimentalism.

“Fear Of Fear” is a cyber-techno-drum'n'bass assault, as much a descendant of Godflesh and Techno Animal as of the most agoraphobic Black Rain. The following “Deceiver” carries on this electronic violation, while icy synth lines seem to echo off sacred, lysergic walls, bearing witness to an act of initiation.

The central pairing, “Obedient Automaton”–“Chosen Books”, is the bridge joining the two artists: a viral osmosis of illbient darkness and hyperkinetic rhythms pierced by shrieking flights of feedback. A hypnotic gangrene that slowly crystallizes, wrapped in the anesthetic placenta of “Entering The Water”, where Prurient manages to synthesize a murky environment in which din and urges are muffled by glacial, circular walls.


The closing “I Understand You” is perhaps one of the most dreamlike and tender sonic constructions Fernow has ever crafted. A wintry atmosphere looming over bare, short-circuiting mechanisms, propped up by brief distorted shudders and a few nostalgic synth notes that manage to stitch, across the track's roughly seven minutes, a phosphorescent dawn, an almost spiritual emotional density capable of closing the process begun by the demophobic chaos of “Fear Of Fear”.

It's sad to think that this release is almost an epitaph for the historic label that gave us cornerstones of extreme music such as: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Dillinger Escape Plan, Cave In, Cult Of Luna, Isis, Sunn O))), Harvey Milk, Merzbow and many, many others.

It's only natural to think they wanted to seal their attitude by gifting us a majestic work from two of the most interesting (and historic) exponents of an advanced vision of radical music, Broadrick and Fernow, capable of synthesizing sonic violence with a sick poetics, the restless atmospheres of a present with no bearings for the future, save for their own flesh, by now torn apart and rendered unrecognizable by the many mutations it has undergone.

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12/02/2013