Prison Religion: Hard Industrial B.O.P
In the age of the algorithmic ushers and gatekeepers dressed as godheads; in valleys cut from silicone rather than towers carved out of ivory – Prison Religion release their possible answer to a list of possible questions and kicks against them with nothing short of conviction, of honesty as the best kind of noise a band can make. By Ryan Walker.
‘The flows of power generate the power of flows, whose material reality imposes itself as a natural phenomenon that cannot be controlled or predicted, only accepted and managed’ – Castells, The Informational City, 1989.
Also comes along the new album by Prison Religion. Hard Industrial B.O.P reaches into the pits of a dark place you promised yourself would never be returned to but you can’t help but sense overwhelmingly resonate with the madness gallery of the modern globe, the cosmic gallows, the shattered amassment in the amusement arcades of contemporary residential isolation and daydream decay. An album meditating on the instant moment as of the minute you read this sentence. As well as the moments before the moment actually happened (predicting what the pandemic did to live performances, predicting what kind of tricks would eventually trap us, pontificating on the powers that be which have eventually sapped space of space, bone sucked clean in facilities physically and psychologically far and wide, surfaces deprived of meat below the encircling gaze of an all-seeing, political vulture committee).
But the cautionary tales as told from the bloodstained scriptures from a soothsaying, industrial noise band that captured so many ideas, that contained so much information between 2009 and 2021 when it was composed in various states and places remain all the more wholesome, the more welcoming, the more aggressive, the more viscerally cerebral, the more cerebrally visceral, unable to be surpassed in terms of daftness and action, unable to be suppressed in terms of volcanic heats, intense depths and augmented speeds – it’s a form of harsh noise and hot thought wired to a big picture pieced together below the nose and, in the face of all we have become. It’s an artwork, an attack, an album in itself, as an instructional, post-industrial socially augmented commentary about an era entirely ours, a symptom distinctly here; stood in the shadow of a self-destructively self-confident 2022.
A culture of cancellation, a culture of criticism, faceless and of joining in, of jumping on- both of which are symptomatic of our loss of control, the now-natural lack of logical plans that illuminate a safe way forth, the now-commonplace, ridiculous live death of our inept televisual icons and inebriated routine role models, the depletion of mental energy as a jaded nation-state on the edge. We can predict nothing, plan little with any real stability, asymmetry distorts and poisons all – so we sit there and swallow it. An ‘imagined community’ as Benedict Anderson refers to it, composed of participants in our own execution. Killers of our own industries.
However, in the west, there is more than meets the infected, globalised eye. Poozy makes sure to confirm his appreciation of what those pockets, those lacunae of culture, manage to move us. And it can do so from the past, from the present day: ‘I am constantly inspired by new, emerging work, especially that which lives in the recesses, undeveloped by industrial demand, and burning with the spirit of being Human. Or by revisiting the past, in areas/eras where subversion took social change by the ears, whether or not the consumer/listener was prepared’.
It’s a notion I very much stand by, because it’s not all bad, it’s not all bland: ‘I don’t intend to completely denigrate western music, as there is so much interesting work that comes from its recesses”. With or without preparation, I listen to the album. With or without preparation, I interview with the group. In all its wonderfully immersive, innovative ideas, in all its inversive, it’s a breath of fresh air like a blast furnace to the face, an album, a work, able to either attract fellow noise-guerrillas or intimidate others untrained, penetrating the unprepared.
In 1957 Blakey recorded an album called Hard Bop. It was a continuation of Blakey’s conservative ideals, a journey rather than transformation, about what jazz stood for, about what it spoke of. And we find at it’s crux: an array of blues, soul, and gospel sounds that were an indestructible, enduring feature of the increasingly magnetic hard bop scene, essential to Blakey as the appointed bandleader, after Horace Silver, of the Messengers.
In Blakey’s mind it was seen as the next evolutionary musical step after bebop, his own noise, his own riposte against jazz that placed little emphasis on the blues nature of the music with an unstoppable locomotive force (Blakey) kicking the music into muscular, Afrocentric action with primal, electrodes-at-the-ready harmonic spikiness. It was not bebop. That kind of esoteric, avant-garde jazz with cohorts Coltrane and Coleman as the main vehicles for this species of explosive music. It was a return of sorts.
A lot like the new Prison Religion album is a return…of sorts anyway.
‘Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid, but also they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it’. – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977.
In 2022, Prison Religion release Hard Industrial B.O.P. Their first since 2017’s Cage With Mirrored Bars on Blackhouse Records. They do so through Lee Gamble’s UIQ label (responsible for the fantastic Lanark Artefax and Sim Hutchins EPs from 2016 and 17 respectively). A hardcore noise project with a thought-provoking, studious root but a simple message throughout, they were forged in Richmond, Virginia and its members are Poozy (Parker Black) and False Prpht (Warren Jones). The pair have been collaborating since 2016. It’s an album reflecting the goings-on of a basement studio in Brooklyn to bedroom setups in Copenhagen and London, then re-entering the states with co-producer and experimental classical composer and deconstructed club from LA artist S280F, and finally finished in their home state of Virginia.
But more importantly; what’s reflected in that disparate, distanced set of circumstances is the location of the self in an increasingly overheated mediatised environment. More prescient is the presence of one person in amongst the flummoxing oscillations between good and evil, between right and wrong, an individual somehow connected to everyone and central to everything, but somehow so alien, so isolated, so peripheral despite the walls of noise and flood of things that wait, baiting us, baying beyond the door, beyond the world within one’s room.
A room of subscriptions and streams: ‘this literally changes how listeners perceive music–from active listening to passive consumption’. One where the heart and soul speak to each other through morse code. The one where space declines time and we find ourselves adrift in a cesspit of activities: ‘the music becomes merely an aesthetic background while you’re at the register, or working from home’. All on offer on a dystopian half-board platter feeding lies to the unsuspecting masses with their eyes concealed in a blindfold weaved together with a fabric thicker than the finest simulacra, myth to mouth. Myth pitted against myth. Myths about stardom. About narratives that acknowledge nothing if you follow the loop for long enough. Myths about the system. A system upheld by strings. Then a bigger system upholds those strings. Myths about myths. Or as the group excellently term – ‘single-hero myths’.
The primary example is this notion that music has been demoted to a utility, an accessory, a repeat prescription, a guillotine, an inflection, an appendage to the everyday, an addition to the room glowing from the corner of our eye, a glistening playlist as a glamorous demonstration of how well taste can be cleanly curated in cyberspace, a published-through-punishment object of exploitation, something that needs permission, lesser than and lowered below everything else that occupies a higher, but greater ephemeral rank on our idling list of things to do.
Poozy tells me that ”music has become an accessory to culture in the West by the long process of capitalistic immurement (or entombment). Except the music captive doesn’t meet death, but becomes removed, revitalized, tortured, and entombed again”. In musical terms, the constant dragging and displaying of the corpse we have come to cradle like water runs, like air is inhaled, again and again and again. It’s become a bill. It becomes a receipt. A monthly reminder of a feeling, but you need to tip the one who served it to you. It’s become taxable. So how do we rip up the bill and start again?
He also goes into detail about his travels to Jamacia in February that cleansed his perception about what music had turned into: ‘it was there I re-acknowledged that music does not have to have this industrialized purpose, but can live in the street amongst people and thru shrieking life that echoes off the trees and breaking concrete. It was living proof of music. Of course, this is not a new observation in the world, but one within myself I needed to confirm’.
Opener Bite then sets the tone for the album beautifully. A barrage of extreme power electronic noise that erases the skin from the surface of your face with one almighty exhalation. It’s slow as hell. The kind of slowness that warps your body with all it wraps your mind up in. A magnet on either side of your left and right arms gradually ripping one piece from the other – bitten indeed.
The unrelenting Brick Dust Banshee, Pale Fire, Landing encapsulate this idea, always walking on a tightrope between trippy, tranquilized hip hop rhythms, dismantled war dance trap metal, deformed and distorted techno brutalism with a taste for blood, Berlin School electronic synth-science and dada collage madness that borders on black magic conjoined to white noise. It quickly blows a hole in your smartphone and crawls through it with the manic, rabbiting Cornered. Only to be dragged through the same black hole by the deconstructed club implosion, the ambient car crash, the incessantly hammering, the tunneling voltaic nightmare, the hurricane of shattered glass in the stomach that is Turrent.
That Hard Industrial B.O.P actually bears a lot of resemblance to what Blakey and his superhuman cohorts unveiled to the jazz world decades ago. Albeit, an ‘ideologial’ blues. It bears some resemblance to what Blakey and his superhuman cohorts unveiled to the jazz world decades ago: an ‘ideologial’ blues. It’s a series of strong statements represented by the intensity of the music at the front of it: the album as a ‘reaction to the conventional’, but also ‘maintaining the foundation of sound worship’. An album seeking ‘scene subversion in the face of overwhelming hypocrisy’. So it’s bound to be good ain’t it?.
A correspondence takes place between Prison Religion and The Jazz Messengers (which included Kenny Dorham and Donald Byrd during its line-up), between Merzbow and Fats Navarro. The former is a contorted version of the latter. And the latter is a kinetic unpicking of melodies that find their place, restless yet perfectly settled, interlinked, the centre of attention yet on the cusp of combusting, of collapsing apart all the time, erratic in the middle of a dense, eloquent, elaborate, rebellious electric nest of everything else that chooses to move when it wants to. From Jackie McLean’s levitational, alto sax and Bill Hardman’s taut trumpet. From Sam Dockery’s staircase piano that pumps blood into each instrument by stabbing them in the chest to Art Blakey as the galvanic pulse leaking over everything yet lassoing it all as one percussive, punchy hive mind. Blakey as there, yet not there – assuming the stability of the mountain and the metronome, the earthquake and the butterfly. And between that, is a heart standing still with its tie on fire.
If Industrial Hard Bop is a reaction against something, specifically a response to what the band’s Warren Jone’s says is one sonically oppositional, acoustically antithetical to ‘the current ecosystem that we reside in’ then it’s also one to retune the actively capable, now passively cauterized powers of the listener and educate them, to ‘recalibrate’ them about how to break the spell that has settled upon them because ‘it’s not enough just to listen’. We need something more to make sense of what’s presented, what writhes in the undergrowth to control. And it’s one hell of a terrain built by Parker and Lilith (S280F).
A terrain that functions to expose the bones below the walls; pushing against the grains of what they consider to be ordinary, a psychotic reaction forcing its fingers through technological thresholds with a socio-political, chameleonic bent. A reaction that thrives on surprising the senses, routinely pushing them through thresholds thought unimaginable in all its multifaceted, shapeshifting complexion for ‘its very digestible if you choose to take acknowledge our present surroundings. It’s “noise” until the chaos is revealed’.
Rhythms are intact, but disjointed and mangled like being submerged in a bath of aching, animatronic body parts bleeding oil. Grooves do exist, but you just have to find yourself folded up within it. John Mayer for example practically puts a gun to your head and forces you to position your finger on one instrument swinging to its own tick, its own click, its own swing, its own laugh and cry, its own amputated swagger, and although it can appear to present itself in the absence of groove, of hypnotic bait in the form of a beat, the real challenge not to feel compelled to join in, to not jump on the sections of the tracks that are overflowing and forcefully so, with something else (sub-zero woolly mammoth bass, madman howls straight from the lunatic asylum, caustic rasps of feedback scratch against the skin until a layer or two is shed, angular and acrid).
But be warned: remain with that rhythm, persist with that challenge, and the remaining features of the fantastic picture materialise with rhapsodic vibrancy, with the tranquil, eerie bleep of an intravenous drip injecting noise into a forest of slumbering veins.
‘We may seem by now to have left the practico-social realm far behind and to be back once more amidst some very old distinctions: appearance versus reality, truth versus lies, illusion versus revelation’ – Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1984.
Other words, other questions, could include the group’s questioning of honesty: ”What is honesty? Words, gestures, and identities twisted through the perverse lens of a failing system? Who is actually listening?” It’s a postmodern calling into question of absolute truths that steer the wheels of our everyday lives: honesty versus fantasy, chaos versus order, to reiterate those old, aforementioned distinctions. Warren informs me about his aims to ‘actively find ways to escape reality. This is with the understanding that as a black person my current “reality” is a world built on white fantasy (i.e. capitalistic white supremacy) Lyrically this album stands as a back-and-forth conversation within myself. Intellectually I understand how to escape…’.
Just what is honesty? A perfect schematic chainmail of empty signs in a system of breadcrumbs that lead us to nowhere comprises the great mythological sum. A mass darkness without compromise yet the technological beacons from overhead remain blindingly illuminated. The browsing history of planet earth, of humankind, deleted with one cunning click. A totality of dead gestures and worthless words. A bottomless enmeshment of schizoid identities enshrined in timeless space, embalmed in pastiche, but the response to that, Prison Religion’s fucking response to all that, is the transmutation of one musical style and extracting from it the very essence that enables musicians to want to retaliate, to experiment, to endure, and continue the lineage, the tremendous trajectory of those pioneers. Those Art Blakeys, those Scott Walkers, Godflesh and Whitehouse, Absolut Null Punkt and Atari Teenage Riot, Throbbing Gristle and Odd Nosdam, of Tokyo Death Watch and Imperial Black Unit, Coil and Scorn.
As restless experimentalists, there is an insatiable yearning to discover something that works to refocus how well we understand what is going on within a song. The song that keeps on playing after it’s finished as a lingering experience ticking away at the core of the clockwork within ourselves. And at the core is question, the only cure able to be acquired that can confront, if cure, the infections of complacency and passivity directly injected with a sweet drip into our international mainframe. Questions that combat the notions of heavy and loud dynamics as somehow synonymous with hypermasculinity activity, a territory guarded by testosterone. It’s inherent in the duo’s blood to be this way: ”there are many conservative ideas infecting music, and how it is compartmentalized by the listener depends on the listener’s understanding. So in a way, we have found a way to turn a mirror on the listener’ says Poozy.
As artists, there is an insatiable urge, a need to indulge, to maintain an inspired mind, and recall a memory. A honest mind, an unforgettable instance shared by Warren: ”the listener in effect has forgotten how to listen, becoming a true consumer due to constant catering. I feel like honesty is a part of this gimmickless route to let the music speak and affect people without all the other accessories we have come to glorify’.
Because to hell with demarcations and being bored with your own product. Why not rejoice in the notions of commune, of transgression, of infidelity, of keeping progressive, of pushing the envelopes of expectation until the weights explode. It’s a disciplined, entertaining, paganistic ritual, artistically against, but oh so aware of, the abundance of ignominious, ultramodern platitudes and bespoke, sanctimonious tropes that underpins jazz, that underpins noise in its purist, pedagogical, observational forms – and finds something it likes, to latch onto, in the space between to reap, to reward itself with, irrespective of critique, as long as the intrigue is there.
It’s the act of trying to imagine the ordering of the chaos, or the chaotic scrambling of the ordered on behalf of Blakey and his Jazz Messengers to make an instinct-over-intellect mess of immense, otherworldly intuitivism and transpose those fundamental ideas, from hard pop, into the realm of hardcore noise. The realm that contains: honesty. That word again. That word cropping again. Warren Jones elaborates on this idea by saying: ‘honesty is maybe one of those tools used to combat this fantasy, by moving with intention and sticking to our convictions every action can be used as a tool for rebellion. I think trivializing honesty is why so many people fail at it. Be a social pariah. A killjoy’.
It’s the act of trying to imagine the staggering sonic achievements, the anarchic, antagonistic undoing of Altoist Jackie McLean, trumpeter Bill Hardman, and bassist Spanky deBrest, spellbound by the dazzling interplay, the telekinetic communicative prowess of each member involved, a pneumatic series of wires and valves and dials, synchronised into a thunderous sum by the spirit kicking against stripping against the room, and translate it over into what Prison Religion have, politically, accomplished here.
‘Our music lives in the perceptual world of heaviness or “darkness”, which is understandable as loudness and abrasion equate abstractly to chaos, an antithesis of social order. But we wanted to consider how we could start to subvert this idea. Can “extreme” music carry within it a positive catharsis?’ – Prison Religion.
Even more admirable is their admittance to seek scene subversion. In other words, to hunt, to long for, to separate themselves from the rest of the pack, but in doing so, suture together what seemingly appear to be, oppositional worlds. Yet Prison Religion, ever the provocateurs, relish in the richness of pulling on the logical structures that upkeep certain reputations, certain sacred repertoires, and punishingly push on them until those holy cows are slaughtered, until those golden ages are frayed, fried and greyed, and eventually fall through. In the wake of that, in the form of this, musically and ideologically, an agreement in reached, a coalescence between one way of working, and another.
Such things came about through language. Talking about what music talks about on universal scales to strike a chord with as many as possible: ‘Parker and I talk a lot about music as language, music is a universal language. Music is discourse. What do you do with this information once you receive it? We feel this lack of agency within listeners and musicians has caused music to become just utility, background’ Warren confirms about this process of an absence of agency, itchy for it when observing the informational swamp overflow.
All blasted through by an alarming swarm of caustic musical ingredients cemented together at their jagged seams but then break apart in all their brittle composition but soon return just as vivaciously fierce, just as venomously delirious. Ideas sonically put into perspective by the whirling alarm of Survival, Leave Me Alone with its propulsive pounding, penetrative, post-industrial ear-emptying assault on all objects before its feet or Quiet The Riot’s brain-cabbaging carnage like orthopedic twist drills in a concrete floor.
Prison Religion has produced a bruise on the surface of perfect space, a perfect page, a tilt in the balance of sonics, a reconfiguration of structure pieced together with a sound mind, a smudged blemish on the blue note, a cacophonous polyvocalic swell inside those distinct undergrounds and non-spaces. Spaces on shelves, spaces between each other, spaces within ourselves. It stands strong as an album symbolic of some tossing of a cup of acid on the canvas and laughing as it blackens, a testament to the tarnishing of universal truths, a disintegration of hegemonic dog food, and a celebration of a more relevant, a more real, revelatory truth found once more within communities, within cracks. In turn revealing a bloom of new shapes, a changing of the paradigmatic guard, and an invitation to explore new potentials and methods of getting there. The pair of them look on as brain-death dressed as entertainment, as maximum cost for minimum value.
But as always, is the welcoming of the big ‘would be’ when these things start to formulate. Breaking them to pieces before they ever began for real as though some secret clause lays dormant until the day it is required to spring forth and ensnare. Poozy believes ‘there is always a sort of asterisk at the end of what would prove to be performative gestures of community, togetherness, re-contextualizing music or space, or worse, in the social ethics of identity’.
It’s in the asterisk where the risk is: ‘the asterisk is the lack of fundamental or historical understanding, but still used as a means of fitting into a now-industrial narrative’. All played out within the invisible walls of the panoptic institution we keep on digging a little bit deeper for ourselves in this era of stuff, the era of overload, the era of corruption masquerading as consent, of the right choice running parallel along a system of other right choices, because there is no right choice, no wrong one too.
But we have the H.I.B album to remind us, to unearth certain emotions, to help relocate our spinning selves, unleash something unaccepted, in somewhere unknown, and rebirth certain sections of our intellect that have been replaced by something fitter, quicker, cleaner, cheaper, yet actually, is a million times more expensive, witnesses to the edict of spectacle, an occasion, and resisting with an utterance a homage, an ode, like this.
But an ode to what? An ode to honesty, an ode to the core of the human condition, an ode to the memory of space.
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Ryan Walker is a writer from Bolton. His online archive for Louder Than War can be found here.
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