- If you ever found noise music boring, you’d only need to listen to Dominic Fernow to be instantly cured of that. Honestly, by the time Fernow was finished menacing you with serrated-edged sounds, you may fondly remember the pleasantly reliable dullness of bordeom.

I say that, but it isn’t just threatening folks with sonic sharp things that makes this stuff interesting. With his last few albums as Prurient, Fernow could only be tangentially said to be still working in noise, as a genre, and on his latest, although menace and fear are still tools Fernow has in his kit, they’re hardly the overriding sensation you’ll take away with you.

Last year on Bermuda Drain and Time’s Arrow, cold-wave and industrial sounds led the charge into those thoroughly disturbing records; almost certainly influenced by Fernow’s membership in the comparatively popular Cold Cave. This year Fernow is reinventing himself again, this time with techno.

Just three tracks create the more than thirty minutes of pounding, in some ways repetitive, but hardly boring beats. The title track, clocking in at a hefty seventeen-and-a-half minutes introduces an ominous synth melody under which Fernow whispers horrors; indeed on the entire record his voice never rises above a murmur. A Prurient record with no screaming, that in itself might be enough innovation for one day, but there’s more to come. Soon enough we descend into the body of the work: an engine of pounding techno, accompanied by the howling wind, a roar that grows, subtly but surely, minute by minute. In this is the core of what made Prurient interesting back when the noise it spewed out was more recognisable as noise: the use of a maximalist but simple palette, constantly in flux, always challenging your mind to follow its relentless, winding pattern.

If you find yourself longing for more genuinely abrasive sounds, the four minutes of Terracotta Spine will throw a few jagged shrieks in your direction, slung forcefully into the mix with a relentless hardcore, industrial beat. Four savage minutes, accompanied by more indistinct murmurings that sound like a malfunctioning PA in some dehumanising Soviet steel mill.

With a feeling of hasty abandonment we’re launched into the final, urgent but spacey installment,You Show Great Spirit. Despite metal clanking in the background and bursts of white noise, this comes the closest of the three to being a rave anthem and is certainly the less interesting for it. There’s even an obscure hint of what sounds like a vocalist crowing in the background, to which one can imagine Fernow pumping his fist in the air, while hunched over the decks. Fortunately the conclusion, rolling waves of acid ambience are just chilling enough to make you forget the cheese you’ve been subjected to.

Industrially savage techno is, along with coldwave and other gothically electronic sounds, definitely having its moment in the harsh, bleaching sun, right now. Through The Window fits neatly into that window of opportunity. These brutally pulsing creations may not quite be to techno what Burial is to house music, but do represent another interesting chapter in the prolific and ever changing repertoire of Prurient.

- Chris Cobcroft.