An Ocean of Samples
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Mastoon’s uncle gave him a drum set for his third birthday, but by age six, infatuated with “heavy metal rock stars” on MTV, he’d picked up guitar, and spent most of the next decade taking private lessons and jamming with friends from school. By 12, inspired by the likes of King Crimson and Primus, he’d started his first band, Transmission, with reedist Stuart Bogie–now a member of the Brooklyn Afrobeat band Antibalas–and bassist Eric Perney, who plays on Tom Waits’s new album Alice. Mastoon continued with the group until his junior year of high school, when the other members all left for college. He hooked up with another group of schoolmates, a funk-rock band called Shag, which for the next five years gigged during holes in the members’ college schedules. In 1997 they became the de facto backing band for Evanston rapper Diverse (aka Kenny Jenkins), whose forthcoming single for the local Chocolate Industries label is a collaboration with Brooklyn rapper-actor Mos Def, but never released a recording of their own.
The two records he’s released on Chocolate Industries over the past year–2001’s four-song EP Paint and the recent album Stars on My Ceiling–find him coming into his own. He’s a regular presence at the Evanston and Wilmette public libraries, where he frequently checks out ten randomly selected CDs at a time and spends the day listening for potential raw material. He also draws from the years of home recordings made with his various bands–in fact “Inbetween Thoughts,” the first song on Paint, is a radical remix of an early Shag tune. Elsewhere, the instrumental music meticulously layers loose, funky breakbeats, alternately tight and spacious bass lines, and a kaleidoscopic array of melodic and coloristic details, including jazzy keyboards, assorted guitar licks, hand claps, vinyl surface noise, dramatic timpani rolls, plucked piano strings, and spacey synthesizer. His approach might sound similar to DJ Shadow’s, but the results aren’t. Where Shadow crafts cinematic, slow-building sample-symphonies, Caural goes for tighter constructions that can almost qualify as pop songs.
Between the decidedly overwrought title and the gilded Gothic lettering in which it’s set on the cover, Kevin Drumm’s new Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego) could easily be mistaken for a heavy metal record. It is in fact heavy, but not that way: Drumm, a brilliant Chicago-based improviser whose arsenal includes analog synthesizer, tabletop guitar, and computer, consistently finds ways of making noise interesting–richly detailed, with unexpected shifts in density and color, and often presented with a distinctly cranky sense of humor. But his take on noise has never been this, well, noisy. Sheer Hellish Miasma is brutal, in a league with anything by Japan’s Merzbow or England’s Whitehouse. But from within the massive, violent din emerge the same sort of microscopic details that’ve distinguished Drumm’s previous work. It can be tough listening, but for those with the patience (and the cast-iron ears) for this sort of work it’s a treat.
