“Imperial Horizon,” the follow-up to 2008’s amazing “Imperial Distortion”, is a single, hour-long piece of music during which Drumm succeeds in transplanting his listeners from the space and time they are currently residing in, thrusting them into an eerily comforting blanket of sound. Beneath those teasingly gorgeous pad sounds, however, is a sinister dark heart that keeps you returning again and again. Unmissable.

Last year, extreme noise pioneer Kevin Drumm threw something of a curveball at his baying fan-base. Moving into the Hospital Records stable, he issued Imperial Distortion, an album which spat out the harsh, glassy, overdriven sounds of his past and swallowed a (dare I say it) more ambient mixture. Clearly influenced by Aphex Twin's game-changing Selected Ambient Works II and synthesizer drone maestro Eliane Radigue, this double-disc collection of work showed a new side to the producer and in my opinion was his best work to date. The bleak, harrowing atmospheres were impossible to ignore yet they were restrained, patient compositions and Drumm showed he was not afraid to take his time. Imperial Horizon is the follow-up to this album and, in contrast to its predecessor (which was a collection of varied tracks), is a single, hour-long piece of music. In this hour, Drumm takes the ideas he approached on Distortion even further, using the time to gradually erode the oscillating layers of cloudy synthesized tones. Like current scene-darling Eleh, the magic of Drumm's music is in the small changes, and these shifts are brought to life on headphones, creating an almost disorienting listening experience. Drumm succeeds in transplanting his listeners from the space and time they are currently residing in, thrusting them into an eerily comforting blanket of sound. Beneath those teasingly gorgeous pad sounds, however, is a sinister dark heart which keeps you returning again and again. Unmissable.

-John Twells (November 2, 2009)