The Rose Pillar in traditional Roman culture is used to mark the graveyard or mosualueam, as a signpost of death. Usually they contained carvings of birds and plants signifying rebirth. Taking inspiration from authors like Whitman, Lechev and Rumi, Prurient delivers its first major literary endeavor in Rose Pillar. Prurient combines text, image and sound in this uniquely packaged and presented release by the Heartworm Press.

What separates Dominick Fernow’s Prurient project from the rest of the contemporary underground cannon is its unyielding personal subject matter. From the inception of Prurient the concept has always utilized intimate details, photographs, letters and other ephemera culled from places where most artists would choose to obscure. Prurient draws these details into focus more than ever on Rose Pillar, a 180-page hardbound book of Fernow’s collage work and text supplied by his mother Jean Feraca from her previously published memoir I Hear Voices. Feraca tells the story of the death of Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist who was adopted into a Sioux tribe.

Feraca’s text is juxtaposed with Fernow’s collages of fallen empires, plant-life and industrial decline. The imagery presented is both stoic yet strangely profound and revealing as an analogy of death.

Rose Pillar also contains an 11” vinyl LP containing new material from Prurient that is the most profound and fully-realized work of his career. Prurient is not about an attack but rather a cry for help. Prurient takes the listener to the ends of human emotion as the range of sounds swell as the light of life fades. The climax of the album is the track “spins the worlds wheel again” which contains the most densely melodic frozen drone ever contained on a Prurient recording. What’s evidenced in these recordings is a sense of loss and destruction that can’t be replaced. The sound feels more like an erosion of steady decline, ebb and flow, storms, power controlled and power unleashed.

This multimedia project pries deeply through the depths of mourning on both a personal and societal scale. In conversation Prurient has exclaimed Rose Pillar to be the end of an era in both function and material. This is Prurient taken to its furthest and most satisfyingly complete conclusion. Nothing will be the same after this release as this is the ultimate result of Prurient’s process. Finality is a recurring theme with Rose Pillar and that says more than anything.

SIDE A:
1 – custer claims his arrow
2 – yellow trumpets grow in darkness
3 – gardener of the broken arm

SIDE B:
4 – hammer with forty names*
5 – spins the worlds wheel again
6 – tractor replaces the horse *
*Featuring Kevin Drumm

Rose Pillar has been pressed in an edition of 500. The book will be mailed in extremely safe packaging

Please see Heartworm Press to purchase.

“I could not speak. I became unconscious. I could not open my mouth because then I smelled something terrible . . . I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal . . . When crossing to my daughter’s bed . . . I collapsed and fell. I was there till nine o’clock in the (Friday) morning . . . until a friend of mine came and knocked at my door . . . I was surprised to see that my trousers were red, had some stains like honey. I saw some . . . starchy mess on my body. My arms had some wounds . . . I didn’t really know how I got these wounds . . .I opened the door . . . I wanted to speak, my breath would not come out . . . My daughter was already dead . . . I went into my daughter’s bed, thinking that she was still sleeping. I slept till it was 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon . . . on Friday. (Then) I managed to go over to my neighbors’ houses. They were all dead . . . I decided to leave . . . . (because) most of my family was in Wum . . . I got my motorcycle . . . A friend whose father had died left with me (for) Wum . . . As I rode . . . through Nyos I didn’t see any sign of any living thing . . . (When I got to Wum), I was unable to walk, even to talk . . . my body was completely weak.”