From the viscerally punishing and nerve wrecking, to the wistfully sublime, Kevin Drumm‘s work often yield a ferocious intensity through the timbres of minute details.

On ‘Battering Rams’, sinister forces interlope with glimmers of respite and contemplation, while recurring drones ceaselessly crescendo to near paralysing effect, only for the album's final moments to offer a lofty reprise of boundless oscillation, dispelling all the pent-up tension into a sanguine state of bliss. Once again, underpinning Kevin Drumms’ genius of transforming seemingly trivial sounds into elongated microtonal worlds that stay etched deeply in your conscious, often long after the work's final reverberations have subsided.

Now, throughout this series of archival works dating from 2000 to 2022, his mastery is once again on full display and available via two new remastered formats.

Another serene deployment from Chicago great Kevin Drumm, 'Battering Rams' is a dissociated crackle of damaged percussion and errant feedback that stabilizes into the kind of bleakly sensitive atmosphere you'd usually expect to find on the back of a short-run black metal tape.

'Battering Rams' won't surprise any regular listeners but it's another worthy addition to the noise legend's canon, filling out the cloudier end of his sonic spectrum with more spacious industrial abstraction and the kind of pillowy drones we fell in love with the moment we first clapped our ears on 'Imperial Distortion'. The relative openness of 'Fire' wrong-foots us at first, with studio clatter amplified above an amplified whine that sounds like heavy machinery vibrating into obsoletion, but the mood shifts significantly on the brief 'Glory Only Once', heralded by eerie whistles.

We're led towards the crushing double blow of 'Dreams Now Major Events' and 'Old Shoes'. The former bends what sounds like synth choirs into bleak drones, slowly but perceptibly shifting the pitch and ramping up the tension, while the latter gives us the sweet release we've been waiting for, coaxing us towards the sublime. Here we're reminded of Drumm's most powerful serene material (think "Imperial Horizon"), lulled into a psychedelic slumber by billowing synths and distant keys.