The last disc that Kevin Drumm released through Hospital Productions, Imperial Distortion, certainly surprised me with it's turn to minimal, frozen dronescapes that were completely unlike the brutal distorted noise constructs of his classic albums Sheer Hellish Miasma and Land of Lurches. That was an amazing album though, and I gushed over it when it was listed a few months ago in the Crucial Blast catalog. With the new album Imperial Horizon, Drumm follows up the exquisitely crafted, icy ambient drone of the previous disc with a new descent into sublime isolationism that falls somewhere in between Lull, Thomas Koner, and Troum.

There's a different feel to this new disc, though; where the previous album was a series of tracks moving through deep, minimal ambience, this album features a single epic track called �Just Lay Down and Forget It� that allows some brighter sounds to break through across it's sixty-four minute running time. The piece starts off with shimmering layered tones that shift and hum and blur, eventually breaking apart into an exultant, melodic drone, a simple two note melody taking shape as shadowy sheets of what almost sounds like a muted Rhodes electric piano drift through space. As it progresses, the gentle flowing stream of ephemeral tone and drift is gradually joined by deeper, slightly darker drones, different octaves mingling together into sustained delicate strains of unearthly ambient hum, and deeper listening reveals subtle oscillations in tone and glacial shifts in coloration. It evokes still air and softly shifting bands of autumnal light, evoking the feeling of silence and austerity captured in the cover photo of a graveyard seen in late afternoon light in the middle of a city. It's not nearly as bleak and doom-laden as his work on Imperial Horizon, this is nevertheless an excellent, highly recommended album for fans of Drumm's cold minimal aesthetic that feels as if it's actually stretching far beyond the album's hour long length. Comes in a gorgeous full color digipack.