KEVIN DRUMM

If Tomorrow Gets Here (10 CD Box)

Heavyweight CD Boxset

Boomkat Product Review:

Kevin Drumm's last decade of self-released activity compiled on this gargantuan 10-disc, 10+ hour anthology, spanning the range of Drumm's output with 'Imperial Distortion'-style durational drone melters, 'Sheer Hellish Miasma'-angled sheet noise experiments and patient electro-acoustic vacillations, including exclusive tracks and alternate takes, all housed in a deluxe, limited edition box-set via iDEAL.

Drumm is prolific with a capital P, so you’d be forgiven for not quite keeping up with his relentless output. Berlin's Vaknar imprint did us a solid earlier in the year with the 'Neither Here Nor There' set, sorting some of the Chicago mainstay's most meditative self-released excursions, but there's a load more where that came from. Leave it to iDEAL then to jettison the motherlode, a 10+ hour sprawl of outerzone mayhem that fully represents Drumm's versatility as an artist, gathering material recorded between 2014 and last year to build an authoritative contemporary portrait of one of the US experimental scene's most infallible operatives. There's so much in here it's almost hard to know where to start, but the earliest material is plucked from 2014's Chondritic Sound-released 'Horror of Birth', here in its proper form to preserve the sound of tracks he admitted were "poorly dubbed" on the OG tape. Both tracks catch Drumm at his most acerbic, stabilising sub-rupturing bass with seared dentists' drill feedback and eldritch distortions, and the disc is rounded off with a more recent long-form production, 'Motif', a hissing head-melter from 2020 that's made from eerie generator drones, contact mic'ed sound objects, mangled tape loops and cellphone interruptions.

In between, 2016's 'The Whole House' is a space study Drumm recorded with just a broken Radio Shack CTR-112 cassette recorder, a Walkman-style device that's used to track and obfuscate the ambiance of Drumm's homestead. According to Drumm himself, his CTR-112 is tough to control, playing back and recording at random speeds, so his relatively straightforward environmental sounds are naturally skewed and processed, subtly at first on the 20-minute opener and more manifestly on the second cut-up, when Drumm magicks an ear-bleed tape collage from kitchenette sploshes and unsettling household mechanical growls. Lurching forward a year, there's the whole of 2017's indispensable double CD 'Recline', almost two hours of lysergic tone-bending in the mode of the legendary 'Imperial Horizon', that emerged on Hospital just a year earlier. But it's the more recent selections that have us properly reeling. 2022's 'Bodega Blur', that kicks off the entire anthology, is a swirling daydream of scrappily recorded bell chimes and fluttered, warbling resonances that unfolds like a DMT trip on a busy street, while '23's '1340' is peak grindhouse sound design; one of the set's most satisfying tracks, it welds reverberating basement scrapes to retching downpitched accordion moans, accenting the top-end with almost inaudible baby stirs just to seal the deal. It's the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' re-score we never knew we needed.

Elsewhere, there's the album-length 'PCM3', a set of glacial, monastic extensions that'll speak to anyone who's rinsed Thomas Köner's earliest, most crucial gear, and 'Shadowless Goons', an eerie microtonal fanfare that reaches back to the dusty darkness of the early electronic canon. But Drumm keeps his very best gear for CD10, as if he's testing our resolve; on 'DB3', it sounds as if he's straddling two poles, submerging its grizzled isolationist doom underneath textured chimes, ebowed guitar hums and prepared piano rattles.

Basically, if you've spent any time at all investigating the US noise underground, 'If Tomorrow Gets Here' should be required reading - and even if you've already glanced the material before, it's been freshly remastered by Lasse Marhaug. So, so good.

Heavyweight CD Boxset (33)