From the viscerally punishing and nerve wrecking, to the wistfully sublime, Kevin Drumm‘s work often yield a ferocious intensity through the timbres of minute details.
On ‘Battering Rams’, sinister forces interlope with glimmers of respite and contemplation, while recurring drones ceaselessly crescendo to near paralysing effect, only for the album's final moments to offer a lofty reprise of boundless oscillation, dispelling all the pent-up tension into a sanguine state of bliss. Once again, underpinning Kevin Drumms’ genius of transforming seemingly trivial sounds into elongated microtonal worlds that stay etched deeply in your conscious, often long after the work's final reverberations have subsided.
Now, throughout this series of archival works dating from 2000 to 2022, his mastery is once again on full display and available via two new remastered formats.
PRESS:
Another serene deployment from Chicago great Kevin Drumm, 'Battering Rams' is a dissociated crackle of damaged percussion and errant feedback that stabilizes into the kind of bleakly sensitive atmosphere you'd usually expect to find on the back of a short-run black metal tape.
'Battering Rams' won't surprise any regular listeners but it's another worthy addition to the noise legend's canon, filling out the cloudier end of his sonic spectrum with more spacious industrial abstraction and the kind of pillowy drones we fell in love with the moment we first clapped our ears on 'Imperial Distortion'. The relative openness of 'Fire' wrong-foots us at first, with studio clatter amplified above an amplified whine that sounds like heavy machinery vibrating into obsoletion, but the mood shifts significantly on the brief 'Glory Only Once', heralded by eerie whistles.
We're led towards the crushing double blow of 'Dreams Now Major Events' and 'Old Shoes'. The former bends what sounds like synth choirs into bleak drones, slowly but perceptibly shifting the pitch and ramping up the tension, while the latter gives us the sweet release we've been waiting for, coaxing us towards the sublime. Here we're reminded of Drumm's most powerful serene material (think "Imperial Horizon"), lulled into a psychedelic slumber by billowing synths and distant keys.
-Boomkat
Chicago experimentalist Kevin Drumm’s main platform for his music recently has been his Bandcamp page, where he posts single tracks exploring moods of the day or the season, often incorporating ambient sounds of rooms around his house.
A subscription deal has tempted hundreds of listeners to sign up for regular updates from Drumm's home studio, yielding a weighty catalogue of work which, like Jim O'Rourke's Steamroom recordings on
Bandcamp, constitute a major new part of the artist's catalogue. The other side of Drumm's discography is made up of sporadic releases on labels such as A Sunken Mall, deep immersions in the mysteries and qualities
of electroacoustic sound.
Battering Rams consists of four pieces ofwildly differing lengths whose provenance are uncertain - even to Drumm himself - but were recorded sometime in recent years. “Fire” begins with the kind of dynamic, grinding physical battle familiar from his early guitar improvisations, before plugging into powerful swarms of opaque electronic noise. Like much of Drumm's work, the elements of the unknown and the unexpected are
a powerful drug.
“Glory Once Only” is a one minute interlude glowing with the same shimmering drone textures as Drumm’s classic Imperial Horizon, which suggests the use of his favoured tone generators with delay and phase effects. The rest of Battering Rams consists of two ten minute tracks which explore the deepest depths of drone. “Dreams Now Major Events” has the unsettling feeling of Shepard Tones which appear to shift chaotically throughout. “Old Shoes” is one of those spectral Kevin Drumm pieces whose tones and harmonies feel close enough to touch but then shift imperceptibly, lie trying tofollow the colours of a sunrise.
The fascination of Kevin Drumm's work, whether in everyday recordings or surprise projects, is how with disparate tools he always manages to sound just like himself, and Battering Rams is another tantalising part
of the puzzle.
-Derk Walmsley. The WIRE
credits
released May 5, 2023
Pre-mastered by Kevin Drumm, Mastered by Ian Hawgood.
Tehran-based sound artist Tegh (aka Shahin Entezami) and violinist Adel Poursamadi offer stirring, unsettling take on ambient. Bandcamp Album of the Day Jul 18, 2022
Dreamy ambient from Tokyo's Betts(JP) that captures the impermanence of emotion in elegant washes of synth and field recordings. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 14, 2022
