Julian Sartorius and Matthew Herbert

Drum Solo

Genre: ELECTRONIC

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Boomkat Product Review:

Matthew Herbert pulls apart Swiss drummer Julian Sartorious' improvised percussion blasts with his well-worn electronic processes, firing jazz rhythms into swirling and chattering vortexes of noise and delay.

'Drum Solo' isn't a strictly accurate way of describing Herbert and Sartorious' collaboration, it's a cheeky reference to the fact that there aren't any other instruments present in the recording. But Sartorious isn't playing alone, Herbert's processes are just as important as Sartorious' percussion blasts, driving drums through his setup to create inebriated layers of sound that flesh the music out to sound far deeper than a solo job. A good comparison might be Norwegian genre-twisting outfit Supersilent, particularly on the epic 'One Ten', where Herbert twists samples into tuned blasts of synthesized electronics.

While the backbone of the album is jazz improv - think ECM or the fluttering collapsable work of noise-adjacent drummer Chris Corsano - Herbert's processes distort the timeline just enough to fire the record into an electronic space. There are echoes of Autechre's latter-day on 'Twelve Fifty', as Herbert molds tricky beats into buzzing, arhythmic electrical clouds and stuttering neo-IDM structures. On 'Twelve Fifteen', he freezes cymbal scrapes into haunted drones, before launching a choppy, ping'd rhythm that's complex, head-expanding, and kinda funky. Heavy stuff.

MP3 Release (7)