kevin drumm: imperial horizon (hospital productions)

so as i lurch from one depressing personal tragedy to another i figured i need something ugly and harsh to soundtrack these rather grim days. and i figured what better fella to get involved in this than kevin drumm. the man who spawned, vomited, shat out, sheer hellish miasma. which at times provided the most gutjuddering ferocious noisemongerry (see the inferno for details) i’ve heard in long while. like burzum being fed legs first into an industrial shredder, recorded onto damaged tape and played down a long distance phone line on loudspeaker through amps the size of andre the giant.

but no. the fucker’s let me down. kindof. instead of an hour of self-flagellating aural brain scour i’m presented with an hour of thick-bliss melancholy, a slo-mo blizzard and the (un)welcoming sleep of a snow blanket.

y’see i haven’t heard anything of his since the miasma rerelease. haven’t heard imperial distortion, so i foolishly assumed he’d continued the loud sound (of a seven year old record, i realise…). not that miasma is entirely ugly, but it’s pretty far removed from this.

one track. just lay down and forget it. all the connotations that come with that title apply musically. how to describe something so inherently minimal, so utterly unwordy? why with my usual verbose prose, irritating hyperbole, iconoclastic phrasing and repugnant non-sequiturism of course.

be prepared to focus (on the hour of music, not this crumbling bilge), concentrate that mushy mulch of a brain of yours. there’s no point dipping in and out like some flitting, flittering, flighty a.d.d. haribo addict. you could play it in the background but frankly you’d zone out and think somebody next door’s hoovering. no i recommend a sit down, eyes closed, big headphones on. or go one better. on saturday i submerged myself in one of those isolation booths, you know where you float on salty water in a pitch black tank for an hour and feel yr consciousness bugger off to another place altogether. t’was an odd heaven. use this shit the same way.

it is quite frankly akin to substance abuse listening to just lay down…. it’ll alter yr mindwaves in a subtle hypno- way. reductionally it is nothing more than some ultra low frequency drone, a mildly fluctuating hum of submerged electrickerry, an all encompassing immersive wash of monotonic tone. but given time, zonked silence and a fortress of solitude, it offers a veritable pandoras box of minimalist delight.

drumm’s ouvre (man i dig that word…) inhabits some odd venn diagram overlap between merzbow (if his laptops voice broke) and popul vuh (at their most static). and like masami akita he’ll either test yr patience or deliciously warp yr fragile morrison-like wooly cotton infant brain.

it’s textured, smooth and cold and soft like someone playing wine glasses in a gentle snowstorm or delicate whiteout. notes, tones, sustained for seconds minutes hours, hang sometimes threateningly in the air. it undulates almost imperceptibly, unfurls indiscernibly, vacillates and mutates and fluctuates om-like. it gazes at you with the blank soothing terror of nietzsche’s void.

i dare you to stare back.

hospital productions