The drum solo has an interesting history. It is normally reviled by Year Zero post-punk revisionists while being revered by rock-pig revivalists. Sample based dance music is almost entirely based on the worship of the mechanical drum solo – the one and two bar breaks removed from any other melodic and harmonic context, repeated and amplified to physical consciousness shifting proportions. The avant-garde also throws up surprising and rewarding variants – Chris Corsano making percussion sounds sing or howl, xNoBBQx pushing recording meters beyond red until rhythm becomes a blurred fuzz-drone. Infernal Residue Deportment heads down the latter path, filling side one of this cassette release with primitively recorded drum bangings – though it’s only slightly overdriven, this is not recording-process-as-lead-instrument. The most interesting parts are where the bass sounds resonate so loudly they trail into a distortion buzz, becoming almost electronic. Some interesting jump cuts towards the latter stages also catch the ear. But a lack of extremity in any particular direction – technically, sonically or philosophically – leaves ‘Compactor Bile’ sounding like the middling kind of thing you really could do yourself, but not in any sort of inspirational manner.
‘Herd Not Scene’ is a similar proposition played out in two parts on mini-koto and gunk-gaku. Obviously and purposely outsider, non-virtuoso playing is fetching for a while but, again, relies on some sonic artifacts caused by overdriven bottom end for a few seconds here and there to really do anything that makes you stop and take notice. The final section with some hi-pitched, bowed droning competing with lava pulses from said bottom end create a climax that is exhilarating mostly because it contrasts so markedly from the overall banality of earlier sections. Elsewhere, the lo-fi, distant recording resists any sort of aural immersion on the part of the listener, leaving attention to be gained through what is actually being played. It struggles to quite do that.
Adrian Elmer
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