Kevin Drumm – Kevin Drumm (Perdition Plastics) 1997
When I listen to records like this I just want to give up writing this blog. Must find words to describe sounds. Very hard. I suppose if I think of Kevin Drumm in terms of his recent output he takes on either the guises of the drone genius of Imperial Distortion and Organ fame or the noise beast on records like Sheer Hellish Miasma and Land of Lurches. When I first forked out my cash for his self-titled debut and the followup, Second, I was expecting something that, while I concede may not have sounded like those more familiar Drumm records, wouldn’t sound quite like this. This almost verges on sound art. The seven untitled tracks almost explore the vastness of silence and the listeners reaction to its disruption. There are long stretches of near silent amp buzz which are assaulted in various ways by what sounds like a plugged in guitar falling down a flight of stairs, strings being violently ripped out, an electrified pice of felt and … well you get the idea. Strange, uncomfortable and challenging. What does it all mean at the end of the day? I have no idea. I simply do not have the patience to work it out. Is it a good record? Sure. It’s a great record. I’m just not sure if it is an enjoyable one. It’s a very different experience to the normal record that Kevin Drumm has given us in the last 10 years or so. This is noise on an almost micro scale and the more I stretch my comfort zone to take in records such as this, the idea that what artists such as Kevin Drumm do is a series of noise rather than as a block of noise makes sense. Maybe this is what any noise record would sound like if you took a three second snippet, shaved off the layers and played it all separately as a long strand of sound. Maybe this is an exercise in unwinding noise DNA. I’m keen to hear other people’s experience with it. Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Ducks Battle Satan 
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