Kevin Drumm - Land of Lurches
(Hanson)
Kevin Drumm, known primarily as a proponent of his own style of prepared guitar and its unorthodox sounds, had to be convinced by Jim O'Rourke to allow him to release "Organ," a piece of permutational organ minimalism, on O'Rourke's Mokai label. That piece, and the others that make up Comedy, serves as a sort of predecessor to Land of Lurches, and the swarm of noise in which Drumm currently resides.
Occasionally, Drumm's harsher work has been coined "black metal noise," and while perhaps this isn't the best codifier for his work, it does provide a sense of the scrambled electric tidal wave of sound that begins Land of Lurches. The first untitled track begins with a mix of clean tones and more distorted and dirty ones before beginning to decay into a convulsion of noises, writhing and squirming in and around each other like a pile of maggots, so loud that, even at a low volume, the music's hard to escape. A cloud of ragged electronic thunder bursts forth from this maelstrom, oppressive and unrelenting, and rages loudly before being augmented by the echoed swirls of science-fiction beeps and squeals. After sixteen minutes, the slowly shifting sonic mass ends suddenly, and a few moments of silence precede the second track.
Track two begins with wet squiggles of rhythmic sound quickly and suddenly interrupted by electronic howls and mechanic undulations of harsh, siren-like sound. While not as massive or dense as Land of Lurches' opening track, these six-and-a-half minutes offer no more of an escape, as jagged laser beams of noise and high-pitched aural eruptions leave little room for the listener to fully orient themselves within Drumm's masterful din. Towards the end of the track, it begins to sound as though Drumm's constructing the most demented video game soundtrack in history, as what could easily pass as Nintendo sound effects begin to further crowd the music by forcing themselves underneath the existing cacophony.
A fourteen-minute return to Drumm's long-form alchemy, the third track begins on an almost ethereal note, with shimmering waves and undulating streams of bubbly exhaust. A menacing whine, however, begins to make it presence known soon enough, however, and it's not long until a thin veil of static has been lowered over the music, and deeper drones take over. Though no less impressive and unyielding, this third track offers a bit of a cool down exercise; music that, in this context, is almost meditative. The sheets of static return to create a constant and endless waterfall of sound, one with less attack that Drumm's preceding works, and one that slips away quietly at the end of the disc.
It's fitting that Land of Lurches was released by Aaron Dilloway's Hanson imprint, as it finds Drumm harnessing sounds similar to some of those in of Wolf Eyes' arsenal, and creating an equally dark and unsettling sonic environment. Dispelling with silence as a tool of suspense, a technique Wolf Eyes have mastered, Drumm goes for the jugular early and often, with equally effective results.
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