For most noise musicians, there’s an enemy always lurking in the shadows, a real and present threat. Not that there aren’t recordings of people making a godawfully good racket with digital processes, it’s just that, for the vast majority, you’re cheating when you pull out a computer.
Most people within the finer limits of noise prefer to build their own contact mics, circuit bend their garage bought toys, and construct their own synths with their own hands. It’s almost like a badge of honor within the scene. Yet, I can’t help to think it’s somehow odd that one of the biggest and brashest statements to come out of the harsh scene was made by punching 0s and 1s.
A typhoonic nightmare of granulated sine waves that seem to last for days, Sheer Hellish Miasma (#35 on our Favorite 100 Albums of 2000-2009 list) is one of Kevin Drumm’s finer moments — even though most of his output is either “great” or “brilliant.” The record displays a kind of maximal minimalism that isn’t far from the work of Glenn Branca or Sunn O))) in terms of impact, yet it’s a sound all it’s own, something that can’t be said about your average noise record. There are moments of sample degradation that collide with microphone feedback where you’re not really sure if he’s making it all with a module or a guitar (although it seems he employed the latter for SHM) yet most of the time, Drumm doesn’t bring out harsh frequencies to submit your auditory sense. In fact, most of the album feels like very very heavy drone, a gigantic mass that encloses you instead of an attack of killer bees.
While the sounds are quite impressive and a huge draw for the curious listener looking for a harsh ol’ time, Kevin Drumm’s real talent comes from other, far more elemental places. “The Inferno” — the album’s unquestionable centerpiece — has its elements and repetitions placed in such a way that every second counts, and when the sound changes dramatically to reveal a brighter, midrange mass, its monstrous in its impact.
Arrangement-wise, Sheer Hellish Miasma sounds like The Rite of Spring — all insistence, force and beauty — made with traditional instruments or notes. And, like Stravinsky’s grand opus, what carries this amazing composition is the emotion projected by it which also propels its pace. Such a display of emotion has been, historically, hard to achieve with electronic music — let alone noise — but Drumm made an album that sounds like cyborgs having angry tantric sex, enclosing feelings of ecstasy like little else out there.