Category: Sound Pick

From Spain to the United States. From total noise and ambiguity to aural ambient. Kevin Drumm is our new “guest” for this “podcast”. 

Chicago + 90’s + The Art Ensemble Of Chicago + Free Improvisation = 20-year-old Kevin Drumm. He is originally from South Holland, Illinois, relocated to Chicago to work in the city’s Board of Trade. His music career began as a prepared guitar player (a guitar with its timbre altered by the placement of different objects on/or between the strings, also called tabletop guitar) by participating in diverse bands: Brise-Glace, an instrumental Avant-rock supergroup, by invitation of Jim O’Rourke, Gastr del Sol, another O’Rourke band and Ken Vandermark, an American jazz composer. But Kevin was more interested in laptop music, electroacoustic and modular-synthesis, so he came out with his debut album in 1997, Perdition Plastic. His work is also remembered by his duo album with Taku Sugimoto, a Japanese guitarist, Sonoris, and many other projects featuring Axel Dörner, Martin Tètreault, Ralf Wehowsky, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, MIMEO, Mats Gustafsson, John Butcher, and Thomas Ankersmit.

The Piece

Kevin has a very diverse work, going from the quieter to the loader. I selected a quieter and entering piece. It belongs to the 2009 single-tracked-album “Imperial Horizon” from Ground Fault Recordings. The name of the track, which differs from its album name, is called Just Lay Down And Forget It, where for me it is one of the best track names I’ve ever seen. It is direct and non-deviant from its content. Kevin is not trying to fool anyone. I indeed did what he asked for – I lay down in my bed and completely forgot where I was after 5 minutes into the track. I immediately was teleported to various emotional memories, that weren’t necessarily morbid, but I was transferred into this calm and soothing body of piece and freedom because of its vast emptiness. I imagined blank colors like tones of white and grey. I also picture some random places and structures. The peaceful faces and voices of beloved ones. The memory of touch. The memory of being young. It felt like the first bath, a baptism, a meditative restart.

Presenting a new section in this blog called “Sound Pick” – self-picked musicians and sound artists for further exploration and analysis.

In the first edition of Sound Pick, I brought you all, sound artist and avant-garde experimental musician (the alternative tag to depict sound artists, just through “experimental” into a wall and it will give you sound-art), Francisco López. He is a Madrilenian born in 1964 and currently holds a big name in the sound art scenario. He is so influential that he produced sound pieces for more than 50 record labels. He is one of the personalities that resonate in the Spanish contemporary art scene. He has been awarded many prizes such as the First Prize for the Sound Art Competition of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, three honorable mentions of the Prix Ars Electronica, and a Qwartz Award for the best sound anthology. I’ve met Francisco on 2 occasions: 1) on the radio program Ars Sonora, presented and directed by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández on Radio Clasica operated by Radio Nacional de España 2) on an exhibition in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, which Francisco curated, called Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020. 

The Piece

Part of the album Absolute Noise Ensemble, released in 2006 by Blossoming Noise, is a 2-side CD: Untitled Sonic Metaorganisms (5 tracks of live staged performances in complete darkness that took place in Barcelona – Sonar 2000; Abaixadors Deu; MACBA – Valencia – Observatori 00 -, and Montreal – Craig Pumping Station) and Untitled Sonic Microorganisms. The piece we are putting our hands in is the second side of the CD: a 57 minute-long track conceived, directed, composed, and recorded by López of digital edits of a vast number of raw sonic materials provided by many artists. For me, it was a journey in different sound atmospheres, where each part goes deeper into the inner sanctum of each one’s brains. I felt immersed in a sea of ambiguous darkness and dead space.

Notes:

28:05 – an amazing crescendo of noise and machinery following a sound drop of organic grotesque noise roaring in different directions.

33:00 – the sound of walking radio static 

36:00 – the unexpected feeling of relief. emptiness. fear.

40:00 – a gunshot of static into your years. you’re left dead in a large room of distant noises. suddenly you wake up and realize it was just a dream, although there is another sound reality that follows a deep revisiting to your own fear.