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Kevin Drumm

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Kevin Drumm, “Imperial Distortion” (Hospital, 2008)

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When it was first released in 2008, this massive (and newly reissued) ambient epic met with a rather polarized reception, but has gradually come to be fairly unanimously hailed as a classic. I am a bit conflicted about that: while it certainly is a fine album, I have seen it favorably compared to Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, which seems very wrong to me, despite their similarly bleary, haunted feel. The difference between the two albums is a massive, fundamental one: with Imperial Distortion, Drumm willfully abandons noise, melody, rhythm, and composition to fully embrace the hypnotic power of gently oscillating stasis. It is an experiment that works beautifully and yields very listenable results, but it is far from the apotheosis of Kevin’s work.

As far as “classic” albums go, this one had a remarkably humble and convoluted birth, as it was actually conceived of as a compilation to release in place of a different album (also called Imperial Distortion) that Drumm decided not to release. Feeling uninspired, he began digging through unused studio scraps that he ultimately assembled into a suite of self-proclaimed “go nowhere tracks” spanning 1995 to 2008, which Dominick Fernow liked enough to release. 

Despite Drumm’s somewhat dismissive (if accurate) assessment of the material and the lengthy span of time involved, Imperial Distortion weirdly feels like a very coherent and deliberate artistic statement that is basically the complete opposite of what Kevin is generally revered for: rather than being dense, sharp, and brutally dynamic, these six pieces are invariably sparse, lengthy, blurry, and muted. More colorfully, this is the sound of Kevin Drumm lulling me into an uneasy sleep rather than tearing my goddamn head off.

The most divergent piece is the opening “Gullaine-Barre” (named after a very unpleasant strain of ascending paralysis), which initially sounds like it is built from a distant murky recording of gongs or large bells. Gradually, however, it coheres into a blurry sustained drone that gently throbs and shimmers for nearly 20 minutes. That aesthetic of “blurry, sustained drones” then continues unabated for most of the next two hours, at which point Kevin finally diverges a second time (abruptly erupting into a grinding blast of white noise). Still, within those very narrow stylistic confines, some rather mesmerizing and deeply immersive music occurs.

The trick, of course, lies in the details, as Drumm’s hazy drones harmonize and oscillate uncomfortably with other noises to create a subtly swaying pulse and simmering low-level tension. As someone who can find quite a bit of beauty in both pure sound and the way notes interact, wobble, and bleed together, I am very appreciative of the generous time and space Kevin allows his simple motifs to unfold. 

Also, not all of the pieces slavishly follow the “go nowhere” aesthetic, yielding a few understated surprises. In particular, “More Blood and Guts” and “Romantic Sores” stand out, as both unexpectedly give way to comparatively warm and/or melodic passages after ten or fifteen minutes of lulling me into complacency with their sleepily quavering hum. The closing “We All Get It in the End” is quite striking as well, but that is entirely due to its sheer brooding menace rather than any sort of twist.

Mostly, however, Imperial Distortion is devoted to minimal, uneasily close harmonies and the subtle pleasures of oscillation, which are very absorbing in their own right and display an impressive ear and knack for restraint on Kevin’s part. While at its core this is basically just another drone album rather than anything particularly revolutionary, Drumm’s use of extreme song durations and his textural propensity towards hiss and tape murk still manage to elevate these pieces into something fairly distinctive (think Phill Niblock, but with a healthy dose of blurriness and vague dread). Given the healthy number of antecedents in this vein, I would definitely stop short of proclaiming Imperial Distortion unique or hailing it as any kind of masterpiece, but it is unquestionably a very good drone album by a very great noise artist.

Listen here.

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Kevin Drumm, “Relief” (Editions Mego, 2012)

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It has been a full decade since Drumm’s last solo album on Mego (2002’s massive and career-defining Sheer Hellish Miasma) and quite a bit has changed in the noise world since then. While more modest in scope this time around (Relief is a 37-minute EP), Kevin’s latest effort shows that an impressive evolution has occurred over those ten years, as he hits the perfect balance between his characteristic howling noise and his infrequently surfacing ambient side. That comes as no surprise to me at all, but I was pleasantly taken aback by the sheer ferocity of Relief‘s noisy side. Drumm is clearly not mellowing with age.

This EP has one extremely significant and immediately apparent characteristic that dwarfs all of its others, in that it is apologetically, spectacularly monolithic. I can randomly skip to any one-second fragment of Relief and it will sound almost exactly the same any other fragment. In fact, the only significant variance comes at the very end, and even that is pretty minor (the piece slowly fades out). Otherwise, the piece is essentially a non-stop roar of roiling entropy from the second it starts until the very end. 

That one-dimensionality only exists in a large-scale sense though, as Relief is far from dull: while the piece’s bleak and floating synth motif remains a relatively static backbone, the underlying noise is apocalyptically explosive and immense. There is a very good reason why Kevin is widely considered one of the world’s greatest active noise artists, as his layers and layers of squalling static and white noise basically sound like the world is collapsing.

Drumm’s ear-shredding avalanche sounds extremely clear and crisp and is both crushingly dense and bludgeoningly immediate. If I had a grievance with this effort (which I do not), it would probably be that the melodic component does not evolve as the piece progresses, or maybe that the piece does not actually progress at all. Instead, it more or less feels like being thrown into Drumm’s scorching cacophony midstream and staying there until he feels like fading out.

However, the sheer enormity, violence, and microcosmic vibrancy of it all easily makes me forget about its compositional shortcomings and the forlorn melody is merely there to act as foil for that face-melting eruption, which it does beautifully. Not so beautifully that Relief could be mistaken for anything other than a harsh noise album, of course, but the contrast it provides enhances the viciousness of the piece while simultaneously making it pretty listenable (by noise standards, anyway). In lesser hands, such a sustained, unrelenting eruption would undoubtedly become quite wearisome at some point, but in Drumm’s, it is a bracing, virtuosic tour de force.

Listen here.