"When I was around two, I loved to slide on freshly mopped linoleum floors," Dominick Fernow said. "It might even be my earliest memory. I would run and slide, and once, I cracked my head open on a dishwasher. You can see the scar." He points to his forehead. "I was rushed to the hospital and I was so hysterical that they put me into a straitjacket. Suddenly it was turned into this deep memory of being in a fucking straitjacket, a flat palette with velcro straps that folded on top of me."Fernow is one of the world's most prominent noise musicians. He makes relentlessly dark and confrontational music that runs the gamut from noise to techno to ambient, and contorts himself into bent, jagged shapes in his throat-shredding live performances. He traces his anxious and misanthropic streak back to that childhood incident, and the memory of the straitjacket, which he said is "clearly the root of these issues." It comes from other things as well: being raised in a religious household, a certain self-loathing and a general disdain for the world."I did a lot of personal work to try and understand why," he said. "Why do I hate the person sitting next to me? Why do I hate that the ceiling is rounded and not square? I realized that I had obsessive compulsive disorder. OCD is what allows me to sit there and cut out a thousand tape covers by hand with a pair of scissors. And to concentrate on tracks. But it's also this constant torture. And techno has forced me to deal with these issues. It's forcing you to be in the moment."Fernow told me this an hour and a half into our interview, after I went to stop the recording. "No. It's boring, I didn't give you enough," he insisted. Despite being absent on social media and having few interviews to his name, Fernow was eager to talk. We end up spending five hours together, eventually moving to a Russian bar in Friedrichshain where he speaks more freely, loosened by earl grey with Jameson.We began the interview in the offices above Berghain, the world's most famous nightclub. It's a location that would have seemed totally nuts for Fernow, once a luminary of America's extreme DIY and noise scene, just a few years ago. At this point, though, his life—both personal and professional—revolves around techno. It's been a gradual shift that started in 2011 with Fernow's first release as Vatican Shadow, an experimental alias that has grown to become his most successful project, taking him to some of the most prominent electronic music venues in the world.When we met for the interview, Fernow was recovering from a cold he got following an eight-hour DJ set back-to-back with Ancient Methods in Tbilisi, a marathon that Fernow wasn't exactly accustomed to. (At one point, Ancient Methods told him he looked exhausted and that he should go home.) Just before that, he'd played live as Prurient, his longest-running project, where he spills out his soul through tortured screams and piercing high frequencies. It's not the kind of thing you'd usually see at a nightclub, but Fernow has a special way of bridging worlds.These days, Fernow has Vatican Shadow for dance music, Prurient for noise and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement for dark ambient, a project focused on artificial field recordings that has been exhibited as an installation at festivals and art galleries. He's also become aligned with the Canadian label Profound Lore, arguably the most adventurous and influential platform for underground extreme metal today.Fernow has been connecting different realms since the beginning of his career in the mid-'90s. After rummaging through the archives of his label, Hospital Productions, which turned 20 in 2017, he found some forgotten early releases that resembled techno, and were even referred to as such in label flyers. As Fernow tells it, influences flowed freely back in the messy DIY days. No one really understood the implications of what they were doing or what others were doing around them.Hospital Productions has been a driving force in American underground electronic music for the last two decades, releasing around 600 records, tapes and other projects in that time. The label is responsible for some of noise music's landmark releases, like Prurient's 2002 album. More recently, it's become a sanctum for dance music's darker personalities, signing records by Shifted, Phase Fatale, Ron Morelli and Silent Servant.Fernow's fascination with techno is nothing new. Though he grew up as a metal head of sorts, he cites Richie Hawtin's FUSE albumas his all-time favourite, and he was a rave kid back in Wisconsin. He started to collect DJ mixtapes—his only exposure to recorded dance music at the time—and it was the makeshift nature of the Midwest rave scene that would come to influence the way he operated as a noise artist."This tape by DJ Anonymous was so profound to me because it had two cassettes taped together, back-to-back," he explained. "One side had an S&M picture of a man tied up, and the other side had a picture of a woman. One was jungle and one was gabber. And coming from the death metal world, there was a connection between this idea of making demos [on tape]. And it really made an impression about what could be done if you don't have the means—just do it. If you can't find a case to hold two tapes, just tape two cases together."Death metal was also a key part of his connection to electronic music. In the '90s, many death metal bands started to work electronic passages into their albums, as eerie intros or interludes, which caught Fernow's ear."It was such a departure from the 'band world,'" he said, "Where everybody does everything—they all play their own instruments. There's a kind of a literalism that comes with rock music. Techno was the most mysterious thing to me, coming from death metal. I didn't know anything about the machines, about the gear—I still don't. Even the idea of playing records that someone else made, records that were designed to be mixed with other records—it was such a departure.""I decided that there must be something more extreme than death metal," he continued. "We'd heard about industrial music, but the only thing you could really find at the time was dance industrial, like Swamp Terrorists. So there was this program called Scream Tracker 3, just a dot matrix program where you get sample banks and really rudimentary effects. We couldn't find anything that we thought industrialsound like, so we were gonna try to make it. It was me and my buddy. His stuff became techno and mine became noise, but it started out as this slow kind of techno. The very first music I made was on that program. CD-Rs weren't domestic yet, so we were always trying to dub the tracks onto a tape deck, but it never sounded good. We eventually had the tracks transferred from a desktop computer to a CD-R machine, and it cost like $100 a disc."After progressing into noise music, Fernow moved from Madison to New York and started to amass releases on Hospital Productions. He opened a storefront for the label, which became a gathering point for seedier parts of New York City's underground electronics scene.Fernow began putting put out hundreds of records and established a confrontational and sometimes frightening live persona armed with nothing more than a microphone. A video of one performance, at an in-store in Lowell, Massachusetts in 2001, stands out. Fernow writhes in front of a rudimentary stack of speakers, screeching into a microphone with his back to the audience. Another video shows a shirtless Fernow in New Paltz, New York doing a more spirited version of the same performance, wringing out unholy feedback from the speakers before violently plunging his microphone into one as if he were trying to destroy it.It was only after years of Prurient and countless other harsh noise aliases that Fernow reconnected with the dance music that excited him so much as a teenager."Jim Siegel, the shop manager at the time, was bringing Sandwell District stuff in, and I was like, 'What the fuck is this? This is so good!' I didn't realize it was Karl [O'Connor, AKA Regis]. I knew British Murder Boys, but I didn't know Regis's solo stuff. Just seeing the records, the aesthetic, and the titles most importantly. This is what I'd been missing all that time. I cannot emphasize the importance of what all those guys did. That was the doorway back in for me."Fernow had already started to experiment with more straightforward electronic music on, released through the avant-garde metal label Hydra Head in 2011. The album had some of the clearest and most straightforward Prurient music yet, featuring discernible lyrics, melodies and plush synths—albeit delivered in angry screams with harsh distortion. It marked a sea change from shows like that in-store performance in Lowell. Around the same time, Fernow started a new project, Vatican Shadow, with a tape of lo-fi beats called, which was first released on Hospital Productions and later reissued by Type.featured a stark, smiling portrait of Nidal Hasan, better known as the Fort Hood Shooter, a US military psychiatrist who shot up an army base in Texas in 2009. The titles were borrowed from newspapers and headlines, adding a menacing political tinge to Fernow's music. The tracks sounded like acid-eaten techno and industrial, with harsh, repetitive beats puncturing the spooky atmospheres Fernow had been exploring in his recent music.