You know you’ve been watching too much porn, the old joke goes, when you start directing your partner to look at the (non-existant) camera.  Or that you get overly excited when the photocopier in the office breaks down.  Or maybe, when your consumption filters into the music you make  Electronic music in particular seems to demonstrate this tendency, quite possibly because of the cliched (but accurate) combination of a bloke on his own, at night, in front of the computer with access to the most mind-boggling array of adult treats only a Google search away.

Whilst the old porn sample sneaks in here and there on albums (one that springs to mind is Aphex Twin’s “Come On You Slags”), Myrrman has gone one stage further and built an entire album from strident anthemic chords, martial and industrial beats and lots and lots of porn.  If the name wasn’t clue enough, the material gets more explicit as we go in, so by “ProNOsmag (Undone Task)” it’s pretty disturbing – devoid of images one is not sure if the women are in ecstasy or pain, and just how fake the scene is.  Perhaps I’m a bit of a lightweight but seven minutes of women screaming in my ears is not really going to invite repeated listens, no matter how interesting the music that accompanies it is.

When the porn is tempered, i.e. when we’re not being invited to ‘look at that little fuckhole’, Myrrman’s beats and atmospheres are actually pretty well crafted, the rhythms pounding away and delicate synth strings and choirs forming melodies over the top that manage to lift the whole album above the sordid morass.  I’m not sure if Myrrman is making any great statements with Pornosmagoria – but he might have created a work that underlines the often brutalising effect that too much porn has on viewers and participants, that the negative effects might subtly build up over time so we don’t notice until too late (like tar in the lungs).  It is possible to translate the work in that way, because the alternative – that Myrrman watches so much porn he just has to stick it all over his music without really notice – is not such an edifying possibility.

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