Hospital Productions – 641
Originally slunk out on a tape edition of 125 copies in 2011, ‘Pakistan
Military Academy’ sees Dominick Fernow calibrate his night-vision
goggles to scan the most potent, affective visions of dark ambient and
militaristic techno in his war chest. At the time of release, only
months after the capture of Osama Bin Laden by US Army SEAL “Night
Stalkers”, the project really came into its own as a form of
impressionistic reportage, daring to grasp the nettle of contemporary US
geopolitics in a way that, as music and art history will only make
starker, everyone else broadly avoided at the time.
In place of literal lyrics, a mix of quotes from newspapers and official
government communiques, together with evocative photo documentation,
supply the song titles and narrative/aesthetic framework for what are
essentially abstracted emotions related to American military and foreign
policy. Depending how much you read or buy into it, for us at least the
music rarely fails to evoke the shadowy unease and precarity of that
era, as the sound betrayed an underlying mood that also spoke to the
realignment of borders between musicks and socio-economics.
The A-side is worth the cost of entry alone for ‘Whitewashed Compound
Stealth Helicopter Crash’, a spine-freezing tract of arcing synth pads
leading to one of this decade’s most memorable codas, but when we factor
in the scudding techno-stepper ‘Staccato Bursts of Gunfire’, plus the
haunting late period Muslimgauze styles of ‘CIA Contractor Freed Over
Pakistan Killings’, and the deep systolic thrum of ‘Prime Minister
Defiant As Pakistan Outs CIA Agent’, this plate becomes an absolute
essential for any and all connoisseurs of modern industrial and dark
ambient music.