Particles and Smears occupies a fascinating point in Kevin Drumm’s history, before the volcanic electronic pressure of Sheer Hellish Miasma became the work most commonly associated with his name. Here he meets Montréal turntable artist Martin Tétreault inside fourteen relatively brief improvisations where almost every sound appears to have been detached from the machine, instrument, or gesture that produced it. Guitar does not behave as guitar, records seldom behave as recordings, and the turntable is no longer a neutral servant rotating someone else’s music. The duo listens beneath those familiar identities, locating a microscopic acoustic life in motors, needles, pickups, damaged surfaces, electrical hum, feedback, metal, rubber, friction, and the unstable contact between one object and another. The album’s title is unusually precise. These pieces are made from particles, tiny events that flash into existence and disappear, and smears, sounds stretched, rubbed, or blurred until their original shape becomes uncertain.
The recording was made during Drumm and Tétreault’s first meeting, yet it contains little of the cautious conversational behavior often heard when improvisers are testing a new partnership. They do not introduce themselves through recognizable personal signatures and then negotiate a common language. Instead, they immediately begin erasing the borders between their equipment. Drumm uses guitar and electronics while Tétreault works with turntables, but identifying who produces a particular click, drone, scrape, pulse, or brittle interruption is often impossible. This ambiguity is not a puzzle requiring a correct answer. It is the central pleasure of the record. Each musician has chosen an instrument whose electrical and mechanical by-products can closely resemble those of the other. A guitar pickup can become a contact microphone, an amplifier can expose room current, a turntable motor can become an oscillator, and a needle can produce a harsh metallic line without reading a conventional groove. Their shared vocabulary exists in the neglected margins of playback.
Tétreault’s contribution is especially important because his turntablism had moved far beyond scratching or juxtaposing recognizable records. By this period, he was often concentrating on the turntable itself, amplifying its motor, placing the needle against mechanical components, altering the stylus, and using prepared vinyl only as one material among many. The machine that normally disappears behind the recorded music is pulled into the foreground and forced to disclose its own awkward body. A platter does not rotate with perfect silence. A motor vibrates, a tonearm carries pressure, a cartridge converts tiny physical disturbances into electricity, and a stylus can be made to encounter far more than a manufactured spiral groove. Tétreault treats every one of these facts as available composition.
Drumm approaches the guitar with a related skepticism. He had already spent years laying the instrument flat, inserting materials among its strings, exploiting grounding problems, and treating pickups, pedals, and amplifiers as an interconnected field rather than a chain designed to deliver notes. His sounds here can resemble insects, leaking valves, loose electrical connections, glass being rubbed, or metal cooling after heat. The guitar’s cultural weight as an expressive vehicle has been almost completely removed. There are no riffs, chords, heroic gestures, or recognizable extended-technique demonstrations. Drumm does not ask the listener to admire how strangely he can play a guitar. He allows the guitar to become strange enough that the question of playing begins to dissolve.
The fourteen untitled tracks give the album a fragmented structure that suits its materials. Most last between two and five minutes, with only one extending beyond seven, so each piece feels like a temporary laboratory arrangement rather than a chapter in one long performance. A specific relationship between two noises is established, examined, and abandoned before it becomes comfortable. In one track, isolated clicks and soft electrical stains may leave large areas of open space. In another, denser buzzing forms a temporary surface over which smaller sounds crawl. The brevity prevents the duo from turning discoveries into habits. Once a combination begins to announce itself as a stable method, the track ends and the next small ecosystem appears.
This structure also makes silence active. The spaces between events are not pauses in which nothing is happening. They expose room tone, residual hum, and the listener’s own uncertainty about whether a faint sound belongs to the recording or the surrounding environment. Drumm and Tétreault repeatedly work near the threshold at which attention can lose its object. A scrape begins so softly that it may be mistaken for movement elsewhere in the room; a thin frequency emerges, remains just long enough to become irritating, and then vanishes before its source can be imagined. The music rewards concentration but also destabilizes it. Listening more closely does not necessarily make the sounds easier to identify. It often reveals additional layers of uncertainty.
The fourth track, the longest of the set, demonstrates how much tension the pair can generate without increasing volume dramatically. A sparse beginning gradually develops into overlapping surfaces whose interactions feel more crowded than loud. Drumm and Tétreault rarely produce conventional crescendos. Density arrives through the accumulation of small incompatibilities. One texture rubs against another, a faint pulse refuses to align with an irregular sequence of clicks, and a sustained buzz acquires movement because something quieter beneath it keeps changing. The piece expands by internal multiplication rather than by spectacle.
Prepared vinyl becomes more recognizable in the eighth track, but even there Tétreault does not use a damaged or altered record as an automatic source of chaotic noise. Repetition remains controlled and oddly delicate. A groove fragment may catch, cycle, and begin creating rhythm, yet the duo resists allowing that rhythm to become the unquestioned center. Drumm introduces sounds that blur its edges or shift the listener’s attention toward frequencies surrounding the loop. The record fragment is not treated as quotation. Whatever music may once have occupied the vinyl is reduced to a physical trace, stripped of historical authority and placed on equal terms with hum, friction, and electrical residue.
The tenth track contains one of the album’s busier passages, with Tétreault producing a quick succession of activity that momentarily suggests a more traditional display of turntable virtuosity. Even here, speed does not lead toward spectacle. The gestures remain dry, abrupt, and materially specific. Rather than hearing an artist controlling a machine with flawless fluency, one hears a person provoking a collection of unstable mechanisms and responding to their resistance. Drumm’s sounds enter around this activity without attempting to match its speed. The relationship resembles two different systems operating in the same confined space, occasionally colliding but never required to synchronize.
Some listeners may experience the album’s restraint as excessive politeness, especially when approaching it after Drumm’s later harsh-noise recordings. Yet its refusal of obvious peaks is fundamental to its character. Particles and Smears does not organize itself around release. It keeps tension small, local, and unresolved. The duo is interested in what happens before a sound becomes dramatic enough to name. A buzzing wire, skipping fragment, or amplifier tremor may contain all the information necessary for a piece. Enlarging it into a climax would destroy the scale at which its behavior can be heard.
The album belongs to a period when improvisers across Europe, Japan, North America, and elsewhere were reconsidering what interaction could mean once traditional instrumental dialogue had been set aside. Instead of trading phrases or responding through shared rhythm and harmony, musicians could alter the acoustic conditions surrounding one another. A faint drone might make a click sound louder without changing its actual level. A sudden silence could transform a previously insignificant hum into the central event. Drumm and Tétreault interact continually, but their interaction often occurs through framing. Each places sound around the other’s activity, changing how it is perceived rather than simply answering it.
This makes the record feel surprisingly organic despite its mechanical sources. Tiny events form populations. High frequencies behave like insects skimming water, low vibrations suggest movement beneath a surface, and scattered impacts resemble seeds or debris striking a window. The Wire’s description of the album as a viable acoustic ecosystem is especially fitting because no individual sound dominates for long. Each exists within a field of dependencies. A particle becomes noticeable because a smear surrounds it; a smear gains texture because sharp particles interrupt its continuity. The music grows through coexistence rather than hierarchy.
Todd Carter recorded the session at 60DUM in Chicago on August 31, 1999, and Malachi Ritscher mastered the finished album. Those names quietly connect the release to the city’s dense experimental network at the end of the century. Carter’s own work with TV Pow explored electronic improvisation, while Ritscher documented an immense range of Chicago performances and sessions. Their presence matters because Particles and Smears depends upon careful capture. Its smallest details could easily have disappeared beneath noise reduction, aggressive mastering, or an attempt to make the recording sound more conventionally vivid. Instead, the album retains its fragile scale and uneven breathing.
Released as the sixth title on Erstwhile Records, the disc also helped establish the label’s commitment to collaborations in which instruments were being reinvented from the inside. The pairing was not based upon superficial contrast between a guitarist and a DJ. Drumm and Tétreault were already pursuing parallel investigations into devices designed to reproduce or amplify music. Both understood that these machines possessed their own unwanted voices, and both were willing to abandon conventional instrumental identity in order to hear them.
Particles and Smears remains an important record because it refuses to make experimentation theatrical. Nothing here announces itself as a breakthrough, yet the album steadily changes what a guitar, turntable, and duo improvisation can be understood to contain. It listens to playback systems as physical objects, treats defects as vocabulary, and discovers form among sounds that ordinary recording practice tries to eliminate. The result is neither harsh noise nor quiet ambient abstraction. It is a close inspection of matter becoming audible, fourteen temporary worlds assembled from the dust, static, friction, and electrical life surrounding music before music has even decided what shape to take. Listeners who heard the original Erstwhile edition, know more about the 60DUM session, or can distinguish Tétreault’s turntable preparations from Drumm’s guitar electronics are warmly invited to add their own observations to this remarkably fine-grained encounter.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.