Available on: Spectrum Spools LP
A quick glance at James Donadio’s blog suggests that he has plenty of venom to go around. “If you feel so inclined to put my picture up with your article referring to me as a ‘techno noise project’ then at least use this approved photo. Thank [sic] and Fuck you, James A. Donadio,” reads one post, accompanied by an image of what might be Donadio urinating against a fence bearing the word “Prostitutes”.
It’s easy to see why the Cleveland producer might be resistant to the noise-techno tag, in spite of his timing (the first Prostitutes record appeared in 2011, the same year as Container’s Spectrum Spools debut and Pete Swanson’s Man With Potential). Though Donadio certainly has a background in noise, having played bass in a number of outfits since the 90s, the suffocatingly dry, oppressive sound of his Prostitutes output exists in a forbidding world of its own. Added to which, the implications of bandwagonry which tend to come with bundling an artist into a “scene” are doubtless infuriating to someone who was picking up Chain Reaction and Tresor twelves from Bent Crayon as early as the mid 90s.
Still, it’s only in the past couple of years – in parallel, yes, with a number of other US noise refugees – that Donadio seems to have hit his stride. Petit Cochon, the producer’s debut for Spectrum Spools, follows a string of releases which have steadily broadened and refined the Prostitutes sound. Unsurprisingly it’s his most developed yet, pairing the newfound nuance of his recent double-pack for Mira with an impressive stylistic breadth.
The moments of bared-teeth aggression will probably catch your ear first: ‘The Bluffer’s Corporation’, part rust-dulled gabber, part hip-hop break locked into bludgeoning repetition; or ‘Suck Out The Reason’, whose blasts of live-sounding drums are a reassuring Prostitutes trademark. But there’s another side to the record too, a sort of dull-eyed kosmische hypnotism which is more quietly effective – best evidenced on ‘Suffocate, Purchasing’, whose arp pattern is almost Clusterian, though it slips naggingly out of time.
For someone who clearly relishes shock factor, Donadio flicks between these modes with surprising deftness, dovetailing tracks together or sitting them snugly end to end. As such Petit Cochon is easily the producer’s slickest record to date. But although there are only a few genuine clunkers (‘Build Your Kits’ sounds, appropriately, like kit-built techno), that slickness does seem to come at a cost. Perhaps it’s compositional, and perhaps it’s purely down to sound quality (certainly, the bracing red-raw surface of Donadio’s earlier work seems to have been sanded down to something smoother). Whatever the cause, the result is a partial loss of the atavistic quality that made Donadio’s best work – Diagonal EP Shatter And Lose, say – so thrilling.
Fortunately, on occasion Petit Cochon thrives in spite of this loss. Closer ‘Four Basic Forces’ is almost gentle in places, its expansive synth drones sitting at odds with the strange swagger of its groove. It’s deep and absorbing where, in the past, Prostitutes releases have tended towards the stark and discomfiting, and it really works. Perhaps this is the direction Donadio’s headed in; if so, at least it makes any “technoise” comparison more tenuous then ever.
