Gauntlet

Album review

Another one of those sonic meetings that just had to happen: noisicians Kevin Drumm and Daniel Menche, together in a small studio in Chicago in the fall of 2006, to record what became a short but very intense album. Intense, but not overly noisy. Unlike Merzbow and his followers, Drumm and Menche are not particularly into screeching, painful noise. Their music is fatter in the low end, more carefully chiseled in the high end. There is nothing truly ear-piercing in Gauntlet, but there are enough low frequencies to make your eardrums throb. Despite Drumm's name taking the top spot on the CD spine (alphabetical order must have ruled), this album falls closer to Menche's usual sound and m.o. The single half-hour-long piece develops slowly, accreting layers of noise, getting thicker and louder as the listener becomes gently accustomed to its power, the only abrupt change happening toward the end -- call it a surprise finale. Drumm uses a guitar and Menche plays an organ, but these instruments are merely signal sources to feed effects pedals. Most of the time, their individual contributions are impossible to distinguish, although Drumm's organ seems to rumble in the lower register and tends to be shaped into a choppy helicopter-like mass of sound. Yet, every sound is treated and approached with clarity and a sense of purpose. Fans of this kind of music are in for a treat and the album's shortness does not become a weakness: what you don't get in duration, you get back in intensity.
© François Couture /TiVo