Not Heaven
On Sheer Hellish Miasma and Sheer Hellish Miasma II by Kevin Drumm
Fifteen or so years ago, when I was first getting seriously interested in music, what I wanted to know about more than anything were the limit cases. With the same peculiar neuroticism that had already led me, in my pre-teen years, to develop a kind of juvenile obsession with both the dry, ironic intellectualism of ‘70s conceptual art and the visceral physicality of ‘60s Aktionism, I tried to seek out, as best I could, documents of the known limits of recorded sound – the most complex, the most simplistic, the longest, the shortest, the quietest, the loudest, and so on and so forth. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and this was a time before there existed “iceberg memes” with 2-hour long breakdown videos for every topic imaginable, so I pulled whatever leads I could from whatever sources I could in a more or less undiscerning way, in the way children tend to do. This was the waning years of the “Blogspot era,” which is to say the heyday of weird Central European guys eager to tell you in slightly clunky English that this or that muddy Industrial tape or inscrutable Serialist platter was actually a radical and groundbreaking forgotten masterpiece, and so at first I got myself lost down a lot of blind alleys, sitting through a lot of disappointing albums, but as I began to find my footing on the terrain, I began to notice that there were certain artists and certain releases which were referenced with such consistency and across so many disparate sources that the presence of a genuine point of consensus became unmistakable. On the question of “harshest album ever,” there was no one answer everyone agreed on, of course – the question, past a certain point, is entirely subjective and in any case certainly pointless. But, with that said, there was one album which seemed like it was always in the conversation, wherever I looked: Sheer Hellish Miasma, by Kevin Drumm. That album was released in 2002. Earlier this year, almost a quarter century later, Drumm released Sheer Hellish Miasma II.
SHM, as I’m going to refer to it from here on, did not have the profile of a typical harsh noise album, in 2002 or in any other year. Then, as now, the vast majority of harsh releases came out on specialty microlabels, which put out extremely limited editions in economical, often hand-assembled, intentionally-crude packaging for a marginal audience of committed enthusiasts – SHM, though, was a sleek, professional CD (not a CD-R, a CD) published by the Austrian label Mego, a leftfield electronic label with a significantly higher profile and broader customer base than even the most prominent noise labels of the day. As such, SHM functioned as something like a diplomatic emissary for harsh noise, a demonstration of its seriousness as an artform to those who might otherwise be skeptical – no poorly Xeroxed bondage art or autopsy photos on the cover, no misanthropic track titles, no shock tactics at all, really, just an austere black rectangle, with Drumm’s initials emblazoned, in lowercase, on the front; the sounds within, the implication seemed to be, could speak for themselves.
And they did, is the thing. I have never been someone who needs art to look “respectable” to take it seriously; I am not put off by shock tactics, by gore or pornography or references to historical atrocities – honestly, I find that stuff kind of charming, most of the time; I consider it part of the “experience.” I am exactly the sort of guy who would have been buying Mother Savage and RRRecords tapes by mail-order in the ‘90s, if I had been born 20 years earlier, is what I’m saying. But if you are the sort of person that’s bothered by that sort of stuff, it’s no obstacle to loving SHM, because its presentation is entirely anodyne and inoffensive, and that presentation frames what is quite simply a phenomenal harsh noise album, entirely deserving of its canonical status. It is not, for the record, the “harshest album ever” (jut for starters, there are any number of Hijokaidan or Incapacitants releases that I would argue surpass it on that front), but it is very harsh, and, more importantly, very calculated. For a form often (mis)perceived as centering raw intensity and provocation over all else, SHM is a necessary corrective, an unmistakably deliberate, controlled, composed album, with a dynamic structure and clear progression across its track listing, four pieces ranging from three minutes to almost half an hour, each distinct from but in conversation with the others, together probing at a set of aesthetic concerns which are grounded entirely within the sound field, rather than simply grafted onto it via cover art, track titles, etc. – in this sense it is very abstract, strangely distant, even refined; it is as intense, as infernal as any great harsh album but it has no aggression, it is not trying to intimidate you, it is not trying to do anything to you, it is at work on more important matters, it does not care that you exist. Harsh noise has always been about much more than just making the loudest, most obnoxious racket possible, but before SHM, one could be forgiven for believing otherwise. After SHM, there was no longer any excuse.
Of course, no one needs to be told this today. The internet has made it trivially easy for the even passingly curious to get a crash course in noise history and for the initiated to keep up with all the most exciting work being put out today. Anyone who cares to hear it already knows noise is a serious artform – and if not, well, you can go listen to SHM and find out right now. It’s certainly worth your time. My point is, noise is in a very different place now than it was in 2002. More importantly, the world is in a very different place now than it was in 2002. SHM is a special album because it was exactly what its particular historical moment called for – and now, in the very different historical moment on 2025, there is a sequel, there is Sheer Hellish Miasma II. Let’s take for granted that Drumm is not an idiot, and understands the significance of that first album, and the level of expectations it creates for any legacy sequel. On this basis, what can SHM II, by its form and its context, tell us about noise today?