Kevin Drumm - 2010 - Necro Acoustic 5xCD BoxSet

 

Pica Disk – PICA019  1.74GB FLAC

Necro Acoustic is not a retrospective in the usual sense of the word. It does not line Kevin Drumm’s work along a clean chronological hallway, attach explanatory plaques, and demonstrate the orderly development of an artist. This five-disc construction feels more like entering a condemned building whose rooms were sealed at different moments between 1996 and 2009. Some contain newly finished work, others hold recordings recovered from limited cassettes and vinyl, and one preserves a performance once believed lost. The changes in equipment and method are enormous, yet the same intelligence remains embedded throughout: Drumm’s fascination with what happens when a sound is forced to remain under examination long after most musicians would replace it. Noise, silence, drone, frequency, distortion, prepared guitar, and crude organ chords become different tools for applying pressure to attention.
The title is exact. “Necro” suggests dead matter, disinterment, and forbidden handling, while “acoustic” points toward sound’s physical life in air, metal, electricity, magnetic tape, and rooms. Much of the set resurrects recordings that had disappeared into tiny editions or private archives, but nothing is embalmed. Old pieces return as active material whose decay, technological age, and incomplete history strengthen their presence. Lasse Marhaug’s Pica Disk presents the five albums in a black, gold-embossed box, each disc occupying its own wallet beside a booklet of abandoned interiors. The package resembles a compact archive recovered from a ruined institution. Open it and the machinery inside is somehow still running.
Lights Out, recorded between 2006 and 2008, begins with only two pulse generators, a filter, and feedback. That restricted equipment does not produce minimal results. “Spraying the Weeds” seems to expose separate layers of electrical toxicity: low pulses, brittle static, and a narrow ringing frequency that gradually becomes difficult to ignore. The title suggests an ordinary act of chemical maintenance, but the music enlarges it into environmental warfare. Something is being systematically poisoned, although the vegetation may be growing inside the amplifier. “Blistering Statick” places piercing high frequencies against bass swells and strange scraps of near-melody, while “Needleprick” condenses pain into two minutes of concentrated upper-register pressure. The closing “Idle Worship” is an eighteen-minute idol made from insect buzz, feedback, and nearly fixed distortion. Its apparent immobility becomes hypnotic because microscopic changes keep disturbing the surface. Worship here means kneeling before a sound that offers no comfort and may not even notice the listener.
Malaise changes the scale completely. Originally issued as a limited Hospital Productions double cassette, its eleven numbered pieces were recorded in 2005 and 2006. The sequence feels less like a set of completed compositions than a diagnostic file documenting different forms of physical and psychological depletion. Brief tracks appear as spasms, electrical headaches, or moments of disorientation; longer pieces allow the discomfort to become environmental. Drumm’s title avoids theatrical horror. Malaise is ordinary, vague, and difficult to locate. It is the feeling that something is wrong before the wrongness receives a name. The album repeatedly converts that uncertainty into sound through low drones, sharp electronic intrusions, suspended frequencies, and passages that seem to lose strength while they are playing.
The numbered structure prevents language from telling the listener what each section represents. One piece may resemble distant machinery heard through winter air, another a faulty medical device repeating an unreadable warning, but these images remain temporary. “Malaise IX,” nearly fifteen minutes long, gives the condition time to spread. Frequencies hover and overlap without resolving into a stable center. The quieter stretches are not relief from Drumm’s violence; they are its inward form. Instead of striking the body with the overwhelming density of Sheer Hellish Miasma, Malaise creates the suspicion that the disturbance has already entered the nervous system and is now operating beneath conscious control.
Decrepit is the most visibly archaeological disc, gathering work from several periods alongside material previously scattered across rare vinyl. Its thirteen tracks move rapidly among methods, sometimes sounding like notebooks torn from entirely different laboratories. “Stomach Acid” opens with corroded electronics whose title implies that the machinery is digesting itself. Another “Blistering Statick” appears, longer and differently shaped from the Lights Out track, turning the phrase into a recurring diagnosis rather than a fixed composition. “Band Pass,” “Take the Focus Off,” “Stale Content,” “Bustelo,” and “Trash” read like instructions and labels found around Drumm’s workspace: technical processes, attention disorders, old information, coffee, garbage. The plain titles refuse to inflate the recordings into grand statements, even when the sounds themselves behave like electrical weather.
This disc reveals how humor functions inside Drumm’s work. The jokes are dry enough to remain almost invisible, but they prevent extremity from becoming self-important. A piece may be titled “Older Shit 1” while containing a remarkably exact organization of tone and abrasion. “Dilemma” and “Dilemma 2,” previously issued together on a one-sided LP, treat repetition as a problem that cannot be solved by stopping. Patterns continue until they become simultaneously irritating, fascinating, and oddly devotional. Elsewhere, small sound fragments are allowed to remain unfinished, preserving the moment when an experiment revealed one useful fact and did not need to be developed into a monument. Decrepit makes incompletion productive. The archive is not valuable only because it contains lost masterpieces; it is valuable because sketches, failures, obsolete setups, and accidental discoveries expose how an artist learns to hear.
No Edit returns Drumm to prepared guitar, the instrument with which he first developed his reputation in Chicago’s improvised-music community. Recorded in 2009, its two long pieces use a remarkably meager system: prepared guitar, equalization, two pedals, and a tiny Marshall amplifier. The title promises procedural honesty, but it also creates danger. Without editing, the performer cannot remove hesitation, repair a transition, or reorder an event after discovering its consequence. Drumm must remain inside the sound as it unfolds. The miniature amplifier seems continually close to physical collapse, coughing out thin distortion, radio-like interference, metallic vibration, and squalls that possess none of the luxurious depth associated with expensive amplification.
That poverty of means gives No Edit its peculiar intimacy. Sheer Hellish Miasma can feel planetary, but these recordings allow us to hear the small machine suffering in the room. The prepared guitar is not transformed into an anonymous orchestra. Strings, pickups, objects, unstable connections, and amplifier limitations remain perceptible even when their relationships become abstract. Drumm’s performance turns listening into continuous adjustment. A brittle frequency appears, persists, and is gradually joined by another irritation; a noisy texture weakens until the room around it becomes audible; an accidental pulse establishes a rhythm and then collapses. The two pieces demonstrate that his command of large noise structures grew from close physical contact with fragile equipment. Immensity was learned through the microscopic.
The final disc, Organ, travels back to 1996. Jim O’Rourke recorded Drumm playing two organs through guitar amplifiers and effects, producing nearly fifty-five minutes of alternating sustained chords, overloaded drone, and violent key strikes. An edited portion later appeared on Comedy, but the complete performance remained unheard for years and was believed lost. Its recovery provides Necro Acoustic with both an origin point and an ending. The set concludes not with Drumm’s most advanced technology but with a brutally simple early action: hold chords, force them through amplification, listen to the pressure accumulate, then strike the keyboard and alter the structure.
Organ is primitive without being crude. Its long duration allows the simple materials to acquire enormous emotional ambiguity. Certain sustained passages resemble sacred music heard through damaged electrical infrastructure. The organ’s association with churches, funerals, solemnity, and transcendence survives, but amplification contaminates it with doom, industrial vibration, and physical threat. When Drumm attacks the keys, the gesture can sound comic, furious, or desperate. The instrument is incapable of maintaining dignity under such treatment, yet it continues producing grandeur. The piece gradually establishes a complete architecture from a tiny vocabulary of chords and impact. What appears rudimentary becomes inexhaustible because every sustained tone interacts differently with distortion, room resonance, and the memory of what preceded it.
Placed after Lights Out, Malaise, Decrepit, and No Edit, Organ reveals that Drumm’s career has not been a straight movement from prepared guitar toward electronics, or from quiet improvisation toward harsh noise and drone. The methods coexist because they address the same deeper question: how long can one remain with a sound before its apparent identity breaks open? A pulse generator can become bodily, a guitar can become an unstable radio network, a quiet frequency can feel more hostile than an explosion, and two organs can construct an hour of slow electrical catastrophe. The artist’s signature is not a particular texture. It is the refusal to release a sound before its hidden behavior becomes audible.
Necro Acoustic therefore works as five individual albums and as one enormous anatomy lesson. Lights Out isolates electronic pain; Malaise turns illness into atmosphere; Decrepit exposes the workshop and its discarded experiments; No Edit restores the physical struggle of prepared guitar; Organ uncovers an early foundation beneath everything that followed. Together they demonstrate why Kevin Drumm cannot be adequately contained by “noise artist,” “improviser,” “electronic musician,” or “drone composer.” He moves among these territories without treating any of them as a permanent identity.
The box is also a tribute to underground formats and the people who prevent them from vanishing. Double cassettes, one-sided LPs, split releases, unpublished recordings, and forgotten tapes are gathered without erasing their original scarcity or roughness. Marhaug’s compilation does not make Drumm’s past tidy. It preserves the disorder while giving listeners enough space to recognize its larger pattern. Necro Acoustic is an archive with exposed wiring, a history of work that remains dangerous when powered on. Anyone who encountered the Hospital cassette, the Dilemma or Kitty Play vinyl, the original edited appearance of Organ, or Drumm’s live prepared-guitar performances from these periods is warmly invited to add memories and technical details from the rooms where this material first breathed.

Kevin Drumm - 2022 - 120121

VAKNAR – VAKNAR 55  271.05MB FLAC

 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.

Kevin Drumm / Martin Tétreault - 2000 - Particles and Smears

 

Erstwhile Records – erstwhile 006  215.46MB FLAC

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.

Kevin Drumm / Jason Lescalleet - 2014 - The Abyss 2xCD

 

Erstwhile Records – erstwhile 073-2  519.29MB FLAC

The Abyss begins with less than a minute of birdsong, a fragile patch of ordinary morning placed at the lip of an enormous artificial depth. “Dawn” is not an introduction in the conventional sense. It is the last recognizable ground before Kevin Drumm and Jason Lescalleet begin removing the listener’s coordinates. When “Anger Alert” enters, the natural environment is scorched by hissing frequencies, unstable electrical pressure, distant fanfares, organ-like descent, and voices whose meaning has been separated from their bodies. The transition establishes the double album’s central method. Familiar things are not simply replaced by abstraction; they are drawn into it, stretched, buried, repeated, and returned in altered form. Birds, engines, voices, piano, guitar, organ, tape, and amplified objects remain somewhere inside the work, but they no longer guarantee that the world containing them is stable.
Drumm and Lescalleet are unusually suited to such a collaboration because both have spent decades making instruments betray their assigned identities. Drumm’s guitar can become electrical weather, and his restrained drones often carry the same threat as his harshest noise. Lescalleet approaches tape less as storage than as a machine for making memory physically unstable. Edits, loops, saturation, room recordings, and amplified objects let him turn documentary sound into something psychological and spatial. Drumm is credited with guitar, piano, electronics, and tapes; Lescalleet with Hammond 136J, Casio SK5, amplified objects, tapes, and computer. Those credits identify the raw materials while revealing almost nothing about who is heard at any particular moment. Their identities have been mixed into the construction.
That construction matters because The Abyss was recorded and assembled across more than a year rather than captured as one uninterrupted improvisation. The album behaves like a collaboration conducted through accumulation, excavation, and mutual alteration. One musician’s sound can become the other’s source material, setting, interruption, or buried foundation. Lescalleet’s final mixing does not arrange Drumm on one side and himself on the other. It creates a shared acoustic fiction whose layers appear to belong to different distances and historical moments. A sound may feel immediate while another seems recovered from a tape stored for decades. The result is not a portrait of two performers interacting in real time but a composite place neither could have entered alone.
“Anger Alert” demonstrates the album’s violent form of montage. Its abrasive opening is severe, yet the piece refuses to remain a noise assault. A brass flourish suddenly appears with the authority of a ceremonial announcement, only to decay into an atmosphere unable to support ceremony. Voices and organ-like tones drift through the debris, briefly suggesting narrative before being absorbed again. An alert is supposed to clarify danger, but every signal here makes the situation less readable. “Flaws Played Thawed And Flayed” continues that process through piano impact, buried rumble, brittle electronic detail, and material that seems repeatedly exposed, frozen, warmed, and stripped. The title behaves almost like a recipe for their studio practice: play the flaw, alter its condition, then remove its protective surface.
“Abuse,” at just over three minutes, is the album’s most concentrated punishment. Its short duration makes the high-frequency pressure feel less like a landscape than an object applied directly to the hearing mechanism. Yet even here, the duo’s work is not indiscriminate. The sound has shape, attack, internal vibration, and an abruptness that becomes structural. It clears the room for “Boatswain’s Call,” whose title suggests a whistle used to command attention aboard ship. Instead of guidance, the piece offers suspended tones and uncertain voices, as though orders are being transmitted from a vessel already lost below the waterline. The maritime implication enlarges the abyss into a place where communication continues after location has failed.
“Outside Now” returns to nocturnal environmental sound, but “outside” no longer means safety or reality. Human presence, insects, distant activity, and slowly darkening electronics occupy the same unstable plane. The piece moves from field-recording intimacy into thick electronic collapse without presenting the two states as opposites. Natural sound often provides relief from electronics, a window opened after enclosure. Drumm and Lescalleet make the open window another entrance into uncertainty. Outside is simply a larger room.
The title track takes thirty-three minutes and thirty-three seconds to establish the abyss not as a hole but as a mass. Low frequencies swell until the surrounding air seems to acquire weight. Corroded orchestral or choral forms appear at a distance, grand enough to imply monumentality but too degraded to provide transcendence. The sound permits caves, ocean trenches, ruined cathedrals, or outer space, but none is required. More important is the bodily fact of the piece: bass pressure activates furniture, walls, headphones, and the listener’s chest. The abyss is not over there waiting to be imagined. It enters the playback space and converts ordinary objects into secondary resonators.
Despite its duration, “The Abyss” does not develop through a conventional chain of events. It deepens by altering the apparent scale of what is already present. A low drone becomes an environment; a distant chord becomes a structure; a small change in upper-frequency detail makes the entire lower field seem to tilt. Drumm’s long-form work often reveals how duration can turn sound into a condition, while Lescalleet’s tape practice makes conditions feel layered with history. Their strengths converge here. The track seems ancient and mechanically produced, static and continually decaying, emotionally overwhelming and almost impersonal. It does not dramatize a descent. By the time the listener recognizes the depth, descent has already occurred.
“The Echo of Your Past,” occupying the entire second disc at forty-nine minutes and forty-nine seconds, returns to the insects and passing-world atmosphere heard earlier, but now those sounds seem to belong to memory rather than immediate observation. An echo cannot return the past intact. It preserves contour while losing detail, arrives later than its source, and changes according to the space through which it travels. That is also an exact description of magnetic tape. Lescalleet’s medium stores events by translating them into another physical form, then permits them to be slowed, reversed, layered, damaged, or made to repeat after their original context has vanished. Drumm’s sustained frequencies provide the depth through which those echoes travel.
The long piece repeatedly changes the listener’s relationship to distance. Crickets and engines suggest an exterior world; thin high tones move unnervingly close to the ear; organ-like drones create a vast interior; low-frequency pressure erases the distinction between recording and room. The composition seems to surface and submerge several times. Environmental details return after near-total abstraction, but each return feels less trustworthy. The past is not being remembered accurately. It is being metabolized by the present, converted into atmosphere, pressure, and incomplete recognition. When softer chords and night sounds reappear near the end, they do not provide redemption. They show that the ordinary world has continued while the listener was elsewhere.
The exact track lengths are part of the album’s peculiar order: 0:55, 11:11, 8:38, 3:03, 6:26, 7:33, 33:33, and 49:49. Several are mirrored or repeated numbers, suggesting a system without explaining it. This numerical neatness sits against music full of blur, contamination, and unstable scale. The durations may be playful, ritualistic, or another structure hidden in plain sight. Whatever their origin, they make the album feel measured by an unfamiliar clock. Brief pieces can feel enormous, while the two longest tracks suspend ordinary sequence until duration becomes spatial.
The six-panel digipak extends that sense of designed enclosure. Audrey Lescalleet’s photography and Yuko Zama’s design give the physical edition a visual body without forcing a single interpretation onto the sound. More importantly, the double-CD format preserves the album’s two-stage architecture. The first disc is a chain of doors leading into the title track. The second is the aftermath, reflection, or echo generated by having passed through them. One disc ends and another must be inserted, a small manual action at the boundary between abyss and echo.
The Abyss succeeds because neither artist uses the collaboration to display a résumé. Their familiar methods are present, but the album is not a tour through recognizable techniques. They submit those methods to a larger form. Individual authorship becomes less audible as the work deepens, which may be the most honest meaning of its title. An abyss is not merely darkness or terror. It is a scale large enough to make personal boundaries difficult to maintain.
This is why the album remains compelling long after its most dramatic sounds become familiar. Its real subject is transformation through listening. Birds become warnings, fanfares become wreckage, night becomes enclosure, memory becomes low-frequency pressure, and two distinct artists become one unstable environment. The music does not ask the listener to conquer that environment or emerge purified. It offers something stranger: the possibility of becoming temporarily comfortable without a map. Anyone who has heard the original double CD at room-filling volume, seen the duo perform during this period, or uncovered the sources of its displaced voices and ceremonial fragments is invited to send another echo back from the edge.

Winquist Virtanen - 2001 - All Hope is Gone CDr

 

Soulworm Editions – Worm XIV  131.20MB FLAC

All Hope Is Gone presents despair not as a dramatic event but as a location gradually discovered. The six titles form a route with no convincing exit: “No Escaping Here,” “A Farewell to Light,” “Into the Blind Alleys,” “Seconds Pass Like Hours,” “Opening the Wound,” and finally the title piece. Read together, they resemble directions found after entering an abandoned structure, each sign confirming that the previous corridor led farther inward. Winquist Virtanen do not need screams, violent percussion, or overtly theatrical imagery to establish that atmosphere. Their method is quieter and therefore more invasive. Low electronic currents, distant metallic resonance, blurred environmental traces, and slowly changing drones reduce the listener’s sense of scale until a room can feel immeasurably large and a faint sound can carry the weight of approaching machinery.
The Swedish duo consisted of Thomas Ekelund as M. Winquist and Roland Abrehamsson as V. Virtanen. Formed in the late 1990s as an ambient-noise project, they occupied an especially fertile border between dark ambient, post-industrial sound, drone, and the style sometimes described as isolationism. That last term is useful here as long as it is understood as more than music suitable for being alone. Isolationist sound removes the usual emotional guideposts. It does not present a clear monster, narrative, sacred ritual, ruined city, or science-fiction landscape. It pushes the listener away while simultaneously making withdrawal impossible. The environment remains impersonal, but prolonged exposure begins producing extremely personal reactions. All Hope Is Gone is bleak without telling us exactly what has been lost, and that absence of explanation allows the music to attach itself to whatever private emptiness the listener carries into it.
“No Escaping Here” begins with the title already closing the door. The track does not need to demonstrate captivity through obvious walls or chains. Its sounds imply a system that continues independently of anyone trapped inside it. Drones accumulate gradually, while dull reverberations and unstable frequencies seem to occupy spaces beyond the visible foreground. The piece gives the impression that an enormous mechanism is operating elsewhere in the building, too distant to identify but too persistent to ignore. This is one of the duo’s most effective strategies. They rarely place the threatening object directly in front of the listener. Instead, they let acoustics suggest that something exists behind a wall, beneath a floor, or outside the range of ordinary sight.
“A Farewell to Light” deepens that removal. Darkness in ambient music can easily become a decorative mood, a black curtain placed around otherwise beautiful synthesizer chords. Winquist Virtanen make the loss of light feel structural. Upper frequencies appear worn down rather than luminous, while the lower field seems to absorb detail faster than it can emerge. The track does not portray a sunset. It resembles the moment when sight has already failed and the remaining world must be reconstructed through uncertain sound. Faint shifts become possible movement; a distant vibration becomes evidence of another room; a nearly melodic tone suggests memory rather than immediate presence. The farewell is not ceremonious because the light may have disappeared before anyone understood that it was leaving.
“Into the Blind Alleys” turns the album’s spatial imagination into a maze. A blind alley is not simply dark. It is a route whose uselessness becomes apparent only after time and movement have been spent entering it. The music repeatedly creates the possibility of development, then lets that possibility dissolve into another closed surface. A drone brightens without opening. A texture approaches rhythm without producing forward motion. A new frequency appears to offer depth but instead reveals another layer of enclosure. Winquist Virtanen understand that hopelessness is most convincing when it includes unsuccessful attempts at orientation. If the music were completely static, the listener could accept stillness as the destination. Instead, it keeps suggesting that a way through may exist, then quietly removes it.
This resistance to arrival places the duo near the most compelling forms of late-1990s and early-2000s isolationist ambient. The music is too eroded and psychologically unfriendly to function as conventional relaxation, yet it does not depend upon the continuous aggression of harsh noise. It occupies the middle distance where sounds are recognizable enough to provoke imagination but indistinct enough to prevent certainty. Field recordings may be present, or electronics may simply imitate environmental decay. Mechanical tones can resemble ventilation, distant traffic, industrial infrastructure, or failing domestic appliances. The source becomes less important than the state of listening it produces. The ear begins scanning the darkness, converting every irregularity into possible information.
“Seconds Pass Like Hours” is the album’s central statement about duration. Dark ambient often uses length to create immersion, but Winquist Virtanen make duration itself feel damaged. Time does not simply slow down; it loses proportion. A few seconds of nearly fixed sound can seem intolerably extended, while a larger transition may pass so gradually that its exact moment cannot be located. The title describes insomnia, confinement, depression, waiting for medical news, watching a relationship fail, or any other condition in which clocks continue operating while subjective time becomes unrecognizable. Yet the track never narrows itself to one of those experiences. Its emotional precision comes from remaining abstract enough to hold them all.
Small changes carry enormous consequences in this environment. When a new tone enters, it does not feel like an additional musical part. It alters the entire temperature of the surrounding space. A slight increase in distortion can transform distant calm into immediate threat. A reduction in density may feel less like relief than abandonment. The duo compose by adjusting conditions rather than arranging events. Their drones behave like pressure systems, and the listener becomes increasingly sensitive to fluctuations that would seem negligible in more crowded music. This is why the album rewards volume that is substantial but not crushing. At moderate levels, its quieter details remain uncertain, sometimes merging with the sounds of the listener’s own room. The border between recording and environment becomes porous, allowing the record’s hopeless architecture to extend beyond the speakers.
“Opening the Wound” introduces the album’s most bodily title. The earlier pieces suggest corridors, darkness, and distorted time; this one turns inward. Opening a wound can mean renewed injury, but it can also mean investigation, surgery, or the refusal to allow damaged tissue to close over something still contaminated beneath it. The music carries that ambiguity. Its abrasion feels more exposed, but the exposure is also a form of examination. Winquist Virtanen do not cover despair with beauty or convert it into an easily consumed melancholy. They keep returning to the damaged area and listening for what remains active inside it.
The title also anticipates directions Thomas Ekelund would pursue through later projects. Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words would explore deeply personal absence, memory, psychological fragility, and spectral environmental sound, while Trepaneringsritualen would bring bodily ritual, industrial force, and religious dread into a far more physical vocabulary. All Hope Is Gone is quieter than much of that later work, but several underlying concerns are already present: sound as a method of entering damaged mental spaces, repetition as both imprisonment and ceremony, and atmosphere as something capable of carrying autobiographical weight without explaining its source. Heard retrospectively, Winquist Virtanen feels less like a discarded early experiment than one chamber in a larger structure Ekelund continued exploring under different names.
Roland Abrehamsson’s presence prevents that structure from being read solely as an early Thomas Ekelund document. The name Winquist Virtanen presents the two artists almost as invented bureaucratic identities, stripped of full biography and joined into a severe Scandinavian institution. Their collaboration produces a balance between private emotion and impersonal design. The titles are devastatingly human, but the sounds often seem indifferent to humanity. That tension gives the album its durability. It does not simply express sadness. It places sadness inside systems that continue humming whether or not anyone survives them.
The closing “All Hope Is Gone” does not behave like a grand conclusion. A title this absolute could invite exaggerated finality, but the album has already taught us that hopelessness is not necessarily explosive. It may be the condition remaining after every dramatic gesture has exhausted itself. The final piece feels less like the moment hope dies than the recognition that it disappeared some time ago. What remains is atmosphere, memory, low electrical life, and the stubborn consciousness still listening. In this sense, the album’s title contains a hidden contradiction. If absolutely all hope were gone, there would be no reason to make the recording, release it, send it across borders, preserve it, or listen twenty-five years later. The work itself becomes evidence that expression can survive the emotional state it describes.
Soulworm Editions was an appropriate home for the album. The Polish DIY label operated from 1998 to 2004, releasing obscure electronic music across dark ambient, industrial, noise, experimental electronics, and related underground forms. Its catalogue belonged to the pre-social-media culture of CDrs, mailed catalogues, specialist distributors, email correspondence, and international trades. All Hope Is Gone appeared as Worm XIV in October 2001, when a limited record from a small Swedish project could travel through a Polish label into collections scattered around the world without ever becoming broadly visible. That obscurity now adds another layer to the music. The CDr feels like an object transmitted from a closed room, carrying six reports from a place most listeners never knew existed.
The early CDr format also suits the album’s atmosphere. Recordable discs were inexpensive enough to allow deeply marginal work to circulate, yet physically vulnerable, sometimes developing errors, discoloration, or complete unreadability with age. An album concerned with fading light, blind passages, prolonged time, and disappearing hope was originally entrusted to a format whose own future could never be guaranteed. The surviving digital transfer therefore does more than make an old rarity convenient. It preserves a small artifact from an era when the underground was held together by personal initiative, fragile media, and the faith that someone elsewhere might understand a sound made in near-total obscurity.
All Hope Is Gone remains powerful because it refuses to transform despair into spectacle. Its darkness is not a costume and its isolation is not an invitation to admire the artists’ suffering. The six tracks patiently establish a world in which orientation, time, light, and emotional certainty have all become unreliable. Yet listeners are permitted to enter together, compare what they hear, and leave evidence that the record did not vanish unheard. Anyone who received the original Soulworm CDr, corresponded with the duo or label, or knows more about how these recordings were assembled is warmly invited to illuminate one of these blind alleys without dispelling its darkness.

Goldenrod - 2009 - Korova Scumhaters

 

Industrial Recollections – IR-STR-SQ  371.70MB FLAC

Korova Scumhaters does not behave like a conventional collaboration in which two established identities politely alternate contributions. Streicher and Smell & Quim are thrown together under the temporary name Goldenrod, and the resulting hour feels less like dialogue than chemical contamination. One body of sound enters another, produces an unstable reaction, and makes it impossible to determine where the Australian project’s heavy analogue pressure ends and the British group’s grotesque electronic theatre begins. Two untitled pieces occupy approximately one cassette side each, removing the usual assistance of song titles, declared themes, or instrumental credits. The listener is left with duration, texture, escalation, collapse, and the accumulating personality of equipment being pushed beyond sensible employment. It is noise made before the laptop became an infinitely renewable factory of distortion, when an hour of hostile sound still carried the fingerprints of mixers, oscillators, pedals, damaged tapes, amplifiers, physical objects, and imperfect international exchange.
Goldenrod was conceived as a short collaboration campaign built around Streicher and source material supplied by other international noise artists. Korova Scumhaters joins Streicher with Smell & Quim, while the other known Goldenrod cassettes involved Macronympha and Odal. That structure makes the project more interesting than an ordinary split release. Instead of giving each participant a private side, the materials are made to coexist inside one identity. Goldenrod therefore becomes a fictional organism assembled differently each time. Streicher provides the recurring nervous system, but its muscles, abrasions, bodily fluids, and behavioral defects change according to the collaborator. On Korova Scumhaters, the organism acquires the diseased humor and unruly physicality of Smell & Quim without surrendering Streicher’s preference for primitive, direct, low-end analogue force.
The title appears to open a corridor toward A Clockwork Orange. Korova is the milk bar where Alex and his droogs consume drugged milk before setting out on their night’s activities, a place where childish nourishment, stylized language, consumer décor, and organized violence are fused into one pop-cultural environment. “Scumhaters” adds another contradiction. The word might describe moral crusaders purging social filth, violent scum who hate everyone outside their group, or people whose hatred has become a form of contamination indistinguishable from the thing they claim to oppose. Noise culture has always been attracted to this instability of position. The record does not hand the listener a safe moral platform from which to observe ugliness. It presents aggression as atmosphere and leaves the source of that aggression unresolved.
The first half develops through crude accumulation rather than elegant composition. Heavy electronic rumble establishes a floor that never feels entirely secure, while sharper abrasions, broken signals, and unstable pulses scrape against it. The sound has enormous weight without becoming a perfectly sealed wall. Gaps remain in the structure, and through those gaps come irregular fragments that suggest voices, malfunctioning machinery, damaged recordings, or objects being handled too close to a microphone. The uncertainty is important. A clean modern harsh-noise production can create a magnificent uninterrupted surface, but Goldenrod’s materials retain awkward joints. Components grind against one another without fitting. Distortion does not erase the machinery producing it. The listener can sense cables, levels, magnetic saturation, loose connections, and the unavoidable room surrounding the equipment.
Streicher’s work has been described as “Oi Noise,” a meeting of power electronics, industrial sound, harsh noise, and the confrontational directness associated with skinhead subculture. The description fits Korova Scumhaters less as a genre label than as an account of posture. There is no interest in technological elegance. The electronics advance with the blunt insistence of a chant whose words have been burned away, leaving rhythm, pressure, and collective hostility. Low frequencies repeatedly threaten to become a march, but the music refuses the discipline necessary to maintain one. Patterns deform, surfaces collapse, and every possibility of order is dragged through Smell & Quim’s more chaotic imagination.
Smell & Quim contribute a very different history of provocation. Their best work has always combined brutal noise with British grotesquerie, performance art, pub humor, sexual absurdity, theatrical disgust, and a refusal to separate the ridiculous from the genuinely dangerous. They have spoken of wanting noise to retain song-like development, including beginnings, middles, endings, themes, and variation even when no conventional song is present. That instinct can be heard throughout this recording. The long sides do not simply switch on and remain at one level. They lurch through episodes, allowing one texture to rot before introducing another, occasionally exposing a fragment of near-rhythm or recognizable human activity before burying it again. The humor is not delivered through punchlines. It exists in disproportion, ugly timing, sudden deflation, and the suspicion that the performers may be enjoying the equipment’s indignity as much as its violence.
This makes Korova Scumhaters physically oppressive but not humorless. Certain sounds possess the shambling gait of machinery assembled by people who distrust instructions. Repetition becomes increasingly absurd as a damaged pattern continues far beyond usefulness. An abrasive electronic scream may be followed not by an even greater climax but by something flabby, mechanical, or strangely domestic. Noise often becomes unintentionally comic when treated with excessive seriousness, and Smell & Quim understood how to make that comedy intentional without reducing the force of the work. Their contribution prevents Goldenrod from becoming a perfectly controlled ideological monument. The structure keeps slipping in mud, exposing its backside, and continuing the attack from the ground.
That instability matters when considering Streicher’s imagery and chosen identity. Ulex Xane has stated directly that the project name derives from Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist and publisher of Der Stürmer, and that the name was chosen to engage questions involving ideology, history, morality, censorship, perception, and freedom of speech. The reference cannot be treated as harmless decoration. It deliberately imports the contamination of propaganda and historical atrocity into the listening experience. The difficulty is that invoking such material does not automatically explain what the invocation accomplishes. Is the imagery being examined, exploited, inhabited, parodied, or used as a weapon against the audience? Power electronics often refuses to answer because uncertainty itself produces the desired tension. That refusal can generate serious confrontation, but it can also become camouflage behind which conviction and provocation are allowed to trade masks.
Korova Scumhaters does not solve that problem, and a review should not solve it on the artists’ behalf. The music can be heard independently as an exceptional document of mid-1990s analogue noise, but the surrounding language affects its temperature. Hostility is not merely sonic once a project consciously summons fascist history, subcultural aggression, and fantasies of purification. The listener must decide how much ambiguity remains productive and when ambiguity begins protecting the artist from accountability. What keeps this particular release interesting is the presence of Smell & Quim, whose absurdity corrodes the possibility of receiving Goldenrod as a coherent authoritarian statement. The collaboration does not become ethically innocent, but it becomes internally unstable. Grotesque comedy, physical wreckage, ideological ugliness, and genuine sonic invention occupy the same contaminated enclosure.
The second untitled half feels less like a sequel than another entrance into the same wrecked complex. Low-end movement remains central, but the balance between sustained pressure and fragmented interruption changes continually. Sections of near-stasis allow hum, tape grain, and residual vibration to become audible before heavier material returns. This alternation gives the recording a bodily rhythm. Contraction is followed by temporary release, which only makes the next contraction feel more severe. The cassette-side duration is essential because thirty minutes provides enough time for crude sounds to acquire psychological depth. An abrasive loop initially heard as a mechanical event gradually becomes a mood, then an architectural feature, and finally something so familiar that its disappearance is disturbing.
The original cassette medium contributes to this effect. A C60 imposes two approximately thirty-minute territories and a compulsory interruption between them. The listener must turn the object over, briefly handle the plastic shell, and restart the mechanism. That division is preserved on the CD as two untitled tracks, but the 2009 transfer also reveals the cassette’s continuous material presence. Tape compression binds separate frequencies into a congested mass. Hiss occupies the quieter passages. Overload smears impacts and helps unrelated sources adhere. Small fluctuations in level or stability prevent repetition from becoming digitally perfect. The cassette is not merely the container in which this music first happened. It participates in the sound as a slow, magnetic adhesive.
Zero Cabal originally released the tape in 1995, during an extraordinarily fertile period for international mail-based noise. Collaborations could be assembled from cassettes sent across oceans, each generation adding degradation, misunderstanding, and new intervention. The distance between Australia and Britain was not eliminated by instant file transfer. It became part of the work. Packages traveled slowly, source tapes arrived carrying their own noise, and the finished edition reached only a small number of listeners before the label ceased activity. Such projects were built from faith in strangers and the possibility that a padded envelope might open a new creative territory. The network was inefficient, but its inefficiency produced artifacts with histories embedded in their sound.
Industrial Recollections recovered the Goldenrod cassettes in 2009 without cutting or reorganizing the material, transferring the original sides into a digital format while retaining their full duration. This was not the glamorous resurrection of a universally acknowledged classic. It was a rescue operation aimed at material that had barely circulated in the first place. That distinction is important. Reissue culture often confirms an existing canon, but Industrial Recollections also preserved recordings whose disappearance would have left almost no public absence. Korova Scumhaters survives because someone considered an obscure, ugly cassette worth carrying forward.
The result remains crude, nasty, unresolved, and remarkably alive. It documents a period when noise collaboration could function as international correspondence, identity experiment, ideological contamination, and physical audio destruction at once. There is no polished synthesis between Streicher and Smell & Quim. Their differences continue grinding throughout the hour, producing a work stronger because it never becomes comfortable inside its temporary name. Goldenrod sounds less like a band than a parcel opened after thirty years, its contents still leaking, humming, and arguing with one another. Anyone who owned the original Zero Cabal cassette, participated in the source-tape exchange, or knows how the three Goldenrod collaborations were assembled is warmly invited to add the missing history.

Karen Power - 2024 - ...We Return To Ground 2xCD

Other Minds – OM 1034-2  481.35MB FLAC

 The ellipses surrounding …we return to ground… are essential. They suggest that the album begins before we arrive and continues after the recording ends, placing human music inside a much longer activity already underway. Water moves beneath surfaces, insects vibrate the air, ice fractures under pressure, mud releases trapped gases, and animals communicate across frequencies human hearing may overlook. Karen Power does not approach these sounds as picturesque material waiting to be arranged by a composer. She treats them as active participants possessing durations, densities, rhythms, and forms of organization that do not require musical improvement. Quiet Music Ensemble enters cautiously, not to translate the environment into a familiar language but to discover how human instruments might coexist with events that were never produced for an audience.

The double album gathers three large-scale works composed across eight years: “…we return to ground…,” “sonic pollinators,” and “instruments of ice.” Together they document a changing relationship between Power’s field recordings and the ensemble. The environmental sounds are not static tape accompaniments over which musicians perform completed parts. They function as what Power calls an aural score, simultaneously heard by the audience and used by the players as information, provocation, structure, and invitation. A cracking sheet of ice can suggest articulation, a swarm can establish density, and underwater popping can determine the patience with which an instrumental sound enters. The performers are not simply following notation. They are listening to another world and deciding how little they need to add.
Quiet Music Ensemble is ideally suited to this work because its name describes a discipline rather than a volume level. John Godfrey’s electric guitar, Seán Mac Erlaine’s saxophones and clarinets, Roddy O’Keefe’s trombone, Ilse De Ziah’s cello, and Dan Bodwell’s double bass can produce immense physical presence, but the musicians repeatedly resist occupying the foreground. Their playing grows from close attention to texture, breath, friction, resonance, and silence. A bowed string may initially be indistinguishable from an insect wing or ice under tension. A wind tone can resemble air passing through a cave. Electric guitar becomes a faint electrical climate rather than a declaration of identity. The ensemble’s restraint is not passivity. It is an active refusal to dominate.
The title piece begins with minute popping and clicking sounds recorded beneath the surfaces of different bodies of water, from bogs to sea caves. The microphone enters environments most listeners would never think to hear, revealing tiny populations and physical processes hidden within apparently quiet water. These sounds carry an intimate physicality through headphones. They arrive close to the ear, yet their causes remain difficult to picture. A pop might be a bubble, a small creature, water moving through stone, or pressure releasing from decaying plant matter. Power allows that uncertainty to remain productive. Scientific identification may deepen the experience, but mystery is not a deficiency requiring correction.
For several minutes, the ensemble barely appears. When the instruments begin to surface, they do so as another layer of habitat. Scratched strings and low bow pressure enter around the recordings rather than above them. The cello and bass test the edges of audibility, while Godfrey’s guitar adds electronic shadows that seem to come from inside the water rather than from a separate performance space. Mac Erlaine and O’Keefe contribute breath, muted resonance, and distant calls without converting the piece into a conventional dialogue between “nature” and “culture.” That opposition gradually loses meaning. Air travels through lungs and brass tubes; bows create friction against strings; underwater animals pulse and scrape; microphones convert physical vibration into electrical energy. Everything heard is a body acting upon another body.
The title “…we return to ground…” can be heard ecologically, spiritually, and literally. Every organism eventually becomes soil, mineral, food, pressure, or memory. Yet the piece is not a funeral march for the planet. Power has resisted imposing a predetermined environmental message upon listeners, preferring to direct attention toward sounds and let each person draw conclusions. This restraint makes the ecological implications stronger. The work does not need to announce that tiny aquatic environments deserve care. Once those environments have been heard as complex, inhabited spaces, indifference becomes more difficult. Listening creates relation before ideology arrives.
“sonic pollinators” moves from submerged life into the vibrating air of Irish insects. Its field recordings emerged from a project connected to Ireland’s pollinator habitats, but the composition avoids the soft pastoral image of bees floating through a sunny meadow. The opening can feel alarmingly close, with buzzing magnified until an insect seems to occupy the interior of the listener’s skull. Individual bodies pass near the microphones, recede, gather into clouds, and produce changing bands of frequency. The sounds are beautiful, comic, irritating, and threatening at once. Power preserves all of those possibilities rather than reducing insects to symbols of natural harmony.
The ensemble’s relationship with the swarm is remarkably subtle. Sustained cello and bass tones do not simply imitate buzzing; they create another density against which the insects can be heard differently. Clarinet, saxophone, and trombone enter as respiratory systems among winged systems, extending breath into the air already activated by countless smaller movements. At moments, it becomes impossible to know whether a high frequency belongs to a live instrument, an insect, or electronic treatment. That confusion feels less like a studio trick than a temporary loosening of species boundaries. Human performers are not pretending to become bees. They are recognizing that instrumental music and insect communication both organize air through vibration.
The forty-minute duration allows “sonic pollinators” to move beyond novelty. A short recording of bees might be charming or unsettling, but prolonged exposure changes the scale of perception. The swarm ceases to be an effect and becomes an environment with its own internal weather. Periods of relative calm are interrupted by thick surges in which buzzing rises into a near-electronic mass. The musicians respond without competing for intensity, often reinforcing the lower edges or introducing thin lines that make the swarm seem even larger. When the field recordings suddenly reveal crickets or less aggressive insect activity, the shift can feel almost humorous, as though the enormous airborne machine has completed its performance and ordinary evening life resumes.
“Instruments of Ice,” the earliest of the three works, pairs Quiet Music Ensemble with quadraphonic recordings of Arctic ice. The title reverses the usual hierarchy. Ice is not the setting in which human instruments play. Ice itself is instrumental: cracking, rubbing, separating, collapsing, resonating, and releasing pressure across enormous distances. The recorded sounds can resemble gunfire, tearing fabric, bowed metal, thunder beneath a floor, or the slow destruction of architecture. Their scale is unstable. A tiny fracture heard closely may sound catastrophic, while an event involving a massive field of ice can arrive as a distant groan.
Power’s recordings make the material nature of ice impossible to ignore. It is commonly imagined as visual emptiness, a white surface associated with stillness and silence. Here it is continuously active. Ice contains trapped air, shifting water, internal strain, friction, temperature change, and the memory of its own formation. The musicians respond by extending those energies. Low strings provide long tensile pressure; trombone and reeds generate breath-heavy tones that resemble large animals calling through the frozen environment; guitar electronics occupy the border between acoustic vibration and geological rumble. The piece does not ask the ensemble to represent the Arctic. It gives the players a recorded Arctic presence strong enough to change how they use their instruments.
The final section grows gradually into the album’s most imposing convergence. Sustained brass, reeds, cello, and bass gather around intensifying ice sounds until human and environmental forces form one thick body. This is not an orchestral climax imposed upon field recordings. The ice has already demonstrated its own capacity for drama. The ensemble enters that drama, amplifying certain tensions while remaining vulnerable to the enormous sonic scale around it. Distortion begins to affect the boundaries between sources. Eventually the density evaporates, leaving gurgling, breath, residual vibration, and the sense that the largest event has moved elsewhere rather than truly ended.
Across all three works, Power avoids one of the central traps of environmentally themed composition: using field recordings as evidence of moral seriousness while allowing traditional musical structures to retain complete authority. Her environments do not appear for a few seconds so that instruments can interpret them more beautifully. They are given enough time to resist interpretation. Their rhythms are irregular, their frequency ranges may be uncomfortable, and their changes do not correspond to human expectations of development. Quiet Music Ensemble’s achievement lies in accepting those terms without disappearing entirely. The musicians bring human breath, training, memory, and touch into the habitat, but they do not demand that the habitat become a concert hall.
The recording process extends that ethic. Alexis Nealon’s engineering retains minute details without sterilizing them, while John Godfrey’s mixes preserve depth and uncertainty between the ensemble and Power’s environmental materials. Seán Mac Erlaine’s mastering allows quiet events to remain quiet while still giving the larger swells physical force. The double-CD format is particularly appropriate. At nearly one hundred and ten minutes, the album asks for sustained presence rather than casual sampling. Each piece is long enough to change the listener’s hearing before the next environment begins.
Other Minds is also a fitting home for the project. The label’s history has repeatedly connected experimental composition with expanded listening practices, sound environments, technology, improvisation, and forms that sit outside ordinary genre boundaries. …we return to ground… belongs to contemporary classical music, field recording, electroacoustic composition, improvisation, and sound art without becoming fully owned by any of them. Its deeper category may simply be attention.
The album’s achievement is not that it makes nature musical. Nature was already sounding. Nor does it claim that human beings can erase themselves and hear the world without interpretation. Microphones are placed, recordings selected, durations shaped, and musicians invited into carefully constructed situations. Power’s composition lies in making those decisions without closing the materials around a single meaning. She creates conditions in which sounds can meet while retaining their difference.
By the end of “instruments of ice,” returning to ground no longer sounds like defeat. It suggests returning to material reality after centuries of imagining humanity as something separate from water, insects, weather, animals, and geological change. The album does not ask listeners to admire nature from a safe distance. It places us inside its pops, wings, groans, pressures, and hidden communications, where listening becomes participation. Anyone who has heard these works in their original quadraphonic settings, worked with Power’s aural scores, or recognizes particular species and environments within the field recordings is warmly invited to expand the habitat surrounding this extraordinary release.

Organoid - 2016 - 10 Years Of Crime And Perversion CDr

 

Operator Produkzion – OPERPRODUKT125  319.56MB FLAC

Lasse Marhaug - 2007 - Tapes 1990-1999 4xCD

Pica Disk – PICA001  2.06GB FLAC

 

Gelsomina & Squamata - 2007 - Junkyard Behemoth

 

Freak Animal Records – freak-cd-038  403.90MB FLAC

Culver / Seppuku - 2009 - Dedicated To Soledad Miranda

 

At War With False Noise – atwar043  212.00MB FLAC

Cloama - 2005 - Cloama

New Old Sentinel – SENTINEL-CD-01  251.51MB FLAC

 

Dead Body Love - 2009 - Candles CDr

 

Impulsy Stetoskopu – 018  278.48MB FLAC

VA - 2009 - Tension State Of Collapsing 2xCD

 

Industrial Recollections – IR-TSC1/2  762.73MB FLAC

VA - 2009 - Forbidden Planets - Music from the Pioneers of Electronic Sound 2xCD

 

Chrome Dreams – CDCD5033  917.19MB FLAC

 

Christian Clozier - 1992 - Quasars / Markarian 205

 

Le Chant Du Monde – LDC 2781090  350.78MB FLAC

Elliott Sharp, Fred Chalenor, Henry Franzoni - 1995 - Boodlers

Cavity Search – CSR 18  255.96MB FLAC

 

Lap Dancer - 2005 - Night Rituals Of The Gaping Secretion CDr

Troniks – TRO-196  264.36MB FLAC

 

Incapacitants / Grassa Dato - 2013 - Orujo & Sake CDr

Mattoid Records – mr-008  411.38MB FLAC