Mort Aux Vaches captures Dan Burke and Kevin Drumm meeting inside a nearly hour-long improvisation where identity is less important than pressure, reaction, and the unstable border between silence and noise. Burke arrived with contact-microphone objects, guitar, and a G3 laptop; Drumm brought guitar and an old analogue synthesizer. Those materials suggest two recognizable working methods, Burke’s history of transforming found sound and electronic debris through Illusion of Safety, and Drumm’s ability to make the guitar behave as an electrical environment rather than a conventional instrument. Yet the recording does not unfold as a polite exchange in which one musician presents an idea and the other answers. Their sounds continually merge, obscure their origins, and force the listener to reconsider which gestures are deliberate, accidental, acoustic, electronic, or somewhere between. It is a collaboration based not on displaying personalities but on allowing each person’s methods to interfere with the other’s.
Recorded live at the VPRO studios and broadcast through Radio 5’s De Avonden program, the performance belongs to Staalplaat’s long-running Mort Aux Vaches series, a body of radio sessions that often caught experimental musicians in a state somewhere between concert discipline and studio freedom. The artists were not facing a club audience demanding visible action, but neither were they privately assembling a record over months. Radio created a peculiar third space. Every movement was happening in real time, every silence was potentially being heard in someone’s kitchen or bedroom, and there was no certainty that the next sound would justify the previous one. Burke and Drumm use that uncertainty as compositional material. The recording frequently approaches inactivity, then reveals that its apparent emptiness is populated by electrical grain, distant vibration, unstable tones, and tiny objects undergoing amplified stress.
The opening does not announce itself with a theme. It enters cautiously, almost below the threshold at which listening becomes conscious. Small creaks and electronic smears appear without explaining their purpose. A contact microphone can transform the faintest physical action into an enormous private event, bypassing the normal sound projected into a room and listening instead to vibration traveling through the body of an object. Burke’s contributions therefore possess a strange intimacy. We do not hear an object from the outside so much as eavesdrop upon its internal agitation. Drumm’s guitar and synthesizer occupy a similarly ambiguous territory. His tones may begin as string vibration, feedback, oscillator activity, or amplified interference, but they quickly lose their pedigree. The duo constructs a music in which sources matter primarily because each possesses a different resistance when pushed.
Silence in this performance is never neutral. It resembles a darkened industrial room where the machinery has supposedly stopped, although transformers continue humming and metal continues cooling. Burke and Drumm understand that restraint can become confrontational when the listener expects noise. Quiet forces the ear forward, increasing the significance of every scrape, click, and electrical fluctuation. When louder passages finally arrive, they do not merely provide contrast. They feel like consequences of the accumulated microscopic tension. Noise erupts because the silence has been storing energy. The dynamic range is therefore structural rather than decorative. The soft material tightens the room; the louder material suddenly changes its dimensions.
The piece gradually thickens into layers of abrasive guitar, low-frequency pressure, broken digital activity, and analogue tones that seem to bend under their own weight. At certain moments it becomes difficult to imagine that only two people are producing the sound. The duo generates something resembling a dysfunctional ensemble whose members include damaged motors, shortwave signals, exhausted computer processes, bowed sheet metal, trapped insects, and architectural vibration. This abundance never becomes a simple wall. Sounds occupy different depths and behave according to different physical laws. A sharp metallic signal may flash across the foreground while a heavier drone remains almost stationary behind it. Tiny interruptions puncture sustained tones. A guitar texture may initially resemble feedback before breaking into granular fragments that suggest the laptop has begun consuming it.
Burke’s work under the Illusion of Safety name has long resisted a stable distinction between industrial music, sound collage, electroacoustic composition, ambient space, and noise. His greatest strength is not attachment to one technique but an ability to turn heterogeneous materials into psychologically coherent environments. Drumm’s career follows a related refusal. He emerged from improvised music and prepared-guitar practice but developed a vocabulary wide enough to include near-silence, electronic drone, violent noise, and sounds so severely processed that instrumental skill must be understood as control over energy rather than notes. Mort Aux Vaches finds the two artists at an especially productive intersection. Burke brings an instinct for montage and environmental suggestion, while Drumm supplies an acute sensitivity to friction, density, and the exact moment when a sound should be permitted to become dangerous.
Improvisation here does not mean continuous spontaneity at maximum speed. Much of the work involves waiting, testing, and recognizing when not to add another layer. The musicians seem to place sounds into the room and observe how long they can survive before another event alters their meaning. A thin drone may begin as background but become the central structure once the surrounding activity disappears. A minor object sound may retroactively divide the performance into before and after. This makes the recording feel composed without sacrificing its instability. Its form emerges from attention rather than from a predetermined map.
The nearly hour-long duration is essential. Shortened excerpts might display the duo’s range, but they would remove the slow transformation of listening itself. During the early minutes, every unidentified sound presents a puzzle. As the piece continues, the need to identify sources weakens. The listener begins hearing forces rather than instruments: abrasion, suspension, acceleration, compression, decay. Burke and Drumm gradually teach the ear how to inhabit their system. By the time the performance reaches its denser regions, even severe noise feels less like an intrusion than the natural weather of a world that has been forming around us.
There is also a dry, nearly invisible humor in the duo’s refusal to deliver the expected spectacle. The Mort Aux Vaches title, literally “death to cows” but carrying the French slang implication of “death to cops,” arrives with considerable anti-authoritarian swagger. The music, however, does not translate revolt into a marching beat or obvious declaration. Its resistance is located in illegibility. These sounds decline ordinary employment. Guitar refuses riffs, objects refuse usefulness, the laptop refuses clean futurism, and the synthesizer refuses melodic nostalgia. Even radio, a medium designed to transmit recognizable information, is made to carry a long event whose meaning cannot be compressed into an announcement. The performance undermines order by building a temporary acoustic society in which nothing remains in its assigned role.
The original CD’s six-panel card package, secured with a brass fastener, extends that material intelligence into the object itself. The fastener makes the edition feel assembled rather than manufactured, closer to a file, diagram, or mechanical sample than a conventional jewel-box album. This suits a recording concerned with attachment and pressure. Sounds are fastened together provisionally, allowed to pivot around shared points, and never completely sealed into place. The physical edition may have been limited, but the performance remains open, its unresolved details continuing to invite new interpretations.
Mort Aux Vaches is ultimately a record about mutual alertness. Burke and Drumm do not compete for territory, and neither disappears into passive accompaniment. Each continually changes the conditions under which the other musician’s sound can be heard. Their collaboration resembles two people exploring a building without lights, occasionally touching the same wall from opposite sides. The resulting music is severe but not merely hostile, quiet but never restful, abstract yet intensely physical. It preserves an hour in which listening became a form of construction, and every scrape, tone, silence, and eruption helped assemble a room that vanished as soon as the broadcast ended.
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