120121 enters quietly enough to be mistaken for background atmosphere, but Kevin Drumm has never made harmless background music. Even at his most luminous, he constructs sounds that alter the apparent dimensions of a room. The six pieces gathered here rarely attack, rupture, or overwhelm in the manner associated with Sheer Hellish Miasma. Instead, they hover at the edge of perception, allowing sustained frequencies to overlap until stillness becomes physically complicated. What first appears to be a placid drone gradually reveals beating tones, soft harmonic collisions, buried melodic movement, and slow changes in pressure. Drumm has reduced the visible machinery, but the music remains active beneath its frozen surface. The difference is that its motion must be discovered rather than survived.
The title resembles a date, catalogue notation, password, or filename temporarily assigned to something that was never expected to become an album. That ambiguity suits the music. These pieces were produced across roughly twelve months and initially appeared through several small digital releases before Vaknar assembled them into a double-cassette sequence. They retain some of that archival informality. Titles such as “0.75ed,” “C,” and “Grey Screen” seem like labels attached to works while they were still being made, but their lack of explanatory grandeur leaves the sounds unusually open. Drumm does not tell us whether to hear recovery, grief, sleep, illness, weather, or spiritual consolation. He establishes conditions under which all of those associations can briefly form.
“Far Off From Difference” begins with clustered sustained tones whose internal movement is almost imperceptible. The title could describe two sounds approaching similarity without ever becoming identical. Individual frequencies remain close enough to produce friction, pulses, and phantom notes between them. What appears to be one broad organ-like chord is actually a gathering of slightly incompatible presences. They occupy the same space without fully merging. Drumm’s long drones often create this illusion of simplicity before exposing immense internal population. A listener may initially hear one stable mass, then notice a higher tone suspended above it, a darker current below, and tiny fluctuations that seem to pass through the whole structure like changes in light.
There is something almost liturgical in the piece, but it does not resemble a church service with a defined beginning, ceremony, and conclusion. It suggests the building after everyone has left, when the last organ vibration remains caught among stone surfaces. Drumm’s music repeatedly approaches sacred atmosphere without committing itself to doctrine. The sustained tones can feel devotional because they ask for patience and concentration, yet they do not present transcendence as a clean ascent. The harmonies remain clouded, physical, and slightly unstable. Whatever spiritual opening exists here is reached through damaged equipment, accumulated frequencies, and the stubborn persistence of sound in air.
“0.75ed” introduces a more visibly human element. The piece originally appeared on Sundays, whose credits identify piano and voice from “F” alongside Drumm’s organ and effects. Within 120121, that collaborative origin is not loudly advertised, yet it helps explain the track’s unusual warmth. Piano tones appear to float inside a slowly illuminated electronic field, while traces of voice function less as language than as another soft body within the resonance. The title suggests something reduced to three quarters of its intended state, edited before completion, or existing just below wholeness. The music finds tenderness in that incompletion. Nothing needs to arrive at one hundred percent in order to become emotionally complete.
The twenty-minute “MayorOfPosen” is the album’s gravitational center and its most direct memorial. Drumm recorded it after the death of Joe Camarillo, a Chicago drummer affectionately known as the Mayor of Posen. Rather than commemorate a percussionist through rhythm, Drumm creates an enormous suspended harmonic field. A central organ-like tone remains almost motionless while blurred frequencies gather around it. The absence of drums becomes expressive. There is no attempt to imitate Camarillo’s playing or summarize his musical personality. Instead, the piece creates space around the fact that someone who once generated rhythm is no longer physically present to do so.
That stillness does not feel empty. The sustained sound seems crowded with afterimages, partial melodies, and harmonics that appear only when attention settles deeply enough. Drumm allows grief to exist without arranging it into stages. The music does not move from sorrow toward acceptance, nor does it build toward a cathartic release. It remains beside the loss. This may be one reason his drone work can feel more emotionally exact than music that announces its feelings through dramatic changes. Actual grief often does not progress according to composition. It repeats, hovers, recedes, and unexpectedly returns with its original weight. “MayorOfPosen” gives that temporal disorder a stable acoustic body.
“Grey Screen” was recorded in Chicago during 2021 and dedicated to Peter Rehberg, the Pita musician and founder of Mego and Editions Mego who died that July. Drumm’s note to Rehberg was characteristically plain: his departure left a hole that could not possibly be filled. The music responds through nearly eighteen minutes of slowly shifting oscillation. It has less of the organ-like sacred atmosphere surrounding “MayorOfPosen” and more of an electronic suspension, as though the listener is staring into a screen after the signal has vanished but before the machine has been switched off.
The title carries several possible images. A grey screen may be inactive technology, undifferentiated weather, a visual field without information, or the stunned mental blankness following terrible news. Drumm reportedly lost two laptops while making the piece, a technical disaster that becomes almost darkly appropriate. The memorial to a figure central to experimental electronic music emerged through the deaths of two computers, leaving another form of absence encoded inside the sound. Yet “Grey Screen” is not despairing. Its oscillations continually generate delicate harmonic possibilities. Dissonant frequencies drift close enough to suggest chords without settling into them. The music discovers color inside grey, not by escaping the field but by looking more intently into it.
The connection between Drumm and Rehberg extended back decades. Rehberg’s Mego released Sheer Hellish Miasma, and the two musicians also appeared together on a split release and shared the wider international network that joined Chicago improvisation, Vienna electronics, noise, reductionism, and computer music. Rehberg was therefore not merely a label representative who manufactured Drumm’s records. He helped create an environment in which work this severe and difficult could travel, be discussed, and remain available beyond the local circumstances of its creation. “Grey Screen” honors that relationship without reproducing the violent digital energy associated with much of Rehberg’s own music. Drumm answers his friend’s absence with a deep, nearly motionless drift, making the missing person audible through the space left around each tone.
“C” originally appeared as the final section of Future When It Comes, recorded while Drumm was unable to work because of a hip injury. It has a thicker and more saturated body than the preceding pieces, resembling a tape drone lifted upward through successive layers of distortion. The album briefly seems to remember the abrasiveness of Drumm’s harsher work, although the sound never becomes an assault. Saturation gives the drone grain, weight, and a slightly burned edge. The physical circumstances behind it also complicate the album’s apparent serenity. Stillness may arise from meditation, but it can also be imposed by pain, injury, economic uncertainty, or a body temporarily unable to perform ordinary labor.
This tension runs throughout 120121. The music offers genuine calm, but it does not pretend that calm always emerges voluntarily. Sometimes one becomes still because movement has been restricted. Sometimes attention narrows because the surrounding future has become uncertain. Drumm’s drones transform those conditions without romanticizing them. A sustained tone can be confinement and refuge at once. “C” seems to test how much light can pass through a dense, degraded surface, gradually allowing brightness to emerge without removing the distortion that made it visible.
“Leap” closes the album in just over seven minutes, considerably shorter than the central memorial pieces. Its title implies sudden movement, risk, or the crossing of a gap, but the music does not conclude with an obvious burst of optimism. It feels more like a gentle loosening of gravity. After the immense suspended durations of “MayorOfPosen” and “Grey Screen,” the shorter form creates the sensation of returning to ordinary time. The album does not resolve grief, illness, or uncertainty. It simply permits motion to become imaginable again.
This collection belongs near Imperial Distortion and Imperial Horizon, but it is not a repetition of either. Imperial Distortion often feels poisoned, immobilized, and exhausted, its beauty emerging through illness and dread. 120121 is more transparent and outward-facing. The drones remain shadowed, yet they repeatedly open toward harmonic warmth. Age has not softened Drumm’s work so much as expanded his understanding of extremity. Violence is only one way to make sound total. A nearly stationary chord can become equally consuming when its duration removes every distraction and leaves the listener alone with minute changes in resonance.
The double-cassette edition, limited to one hundred copies and mastered by Ian Hawgood, gives these digital-era recordings a fragile physical body. Cassette is particularly appropriate for music concerned with drift, memory, saturation, and gradual decay. Tape does not present sound as an untouched object. It carries hiss, magnetic vulnerability, mechanical movement, and the knowledge that repeated playback slowly changes the medium. The album’s memorial dimension becomes inseparable from that impermanence. People, computers, bodies, labels, and formats all fail eventually, yet sound continues passing between them for as long as someone chooses to listen.
120121 is therefore not simply Drumm in his “ambient” mode. It is an album about remaining near what cannot be repaired. Its sustained tones do not fill the holes left by Joe Camarillo or Peter Rehberg, and they do not restore injured bodies or failed machines. They make those absences inhabitable for a while. Drumm turns grief into resonance, forced inactivity into concentration, and anonymous digital fragments into a carefully shaped sequence of remembrance and tentative renewal. Anyone who knew Camarillo’s Chicago work, witnessed Drumm and Rehberg during their shared history, or understands the identity of the mysterious “F” credited on the earlier source releases is warmly invited to add another human voice to these slowly glowing fields.
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