Starting off as prolific tabletop guitar alchemist, Chicago artist Kevin Drumm made a name for himself among fans of brutal sound with two scorching albums in particular, Sheer Hellish Miasma and Land Of Lurches, which joined Drumm's affinity for massive drones with punishing electronic noise. Imperial Distortion, despite the title, is a completely different course of direction, eschewing the blitzkrieg noise and high-gain distortion of those albums (and the more recent collab album with Prurient) for a more subdued sound that experiments with minimal electronic drones and feedback. The album is minimal and restrained compared to most of his other releases and is closer to the dark droneology of Andrew Chalk and Thomas Koner; the tracks on Imperial Distortion often shift into seriously sinister forms, the sustained drones colored in ominous dark hues.

By taking these fragments of gleaming processed thrum and metallic sound, Drumm creates a series of harrowing trance states. The first disc is especially grim, with the first track "Guillain-Barre" forming out of clusters of reverberating cymbals, the clanging metal echoes then pulled into a portentous drone that stretches for more than seventeen minutes. The remaining three tracks share a similar approach, the ominous whorls of drone sometimes threatening to surge in volume or distortion, but all ultimately remain muted and brooding, each track undergoing minimal shifts imbued with menace.

The second disc sees Drumm sculpting almost velvet-like waves of gently manipulated feedback into slowly looping figures, which spread out and ripple across an endless sheer surface, the drones forming into deceptively simple melodies that shift and warp ever so subtly, tones softly reverberating like muted notes floating from a Rhodes piano; the feeling of dread and unease that lurked in the tracks is more subdued here, but still present, especially in the soft glowing embers of shadow that take form on the final piece, "We All Get It In The End", slowly unfurling like ominous petals until the track explodes into a skull-shearing blast of molten over-modulated noise for the last minute and a half.

Without question, one of the finest albums of dark drone in recent memory.