Pitchfork

Over their combined 20-plus years of making abstract music, Chicago's Kevin Drumm and Portland's Daniel Menche have probably heard every noise imaginable. So it's hard to fault their first-ever collaboration for rehashing sounds. Given the high level of Drumm's bracing guitar-scapes and Menche's dense aural sculptures, both have earned the right to explore well-worn techniques.

That said, the one-track, 28-minute Gauntlet still stuffers from a rather deadening predictability. Drumm and Menche's main tools here-- fuzzed-out distortion, insect-like drone, and chopping pulse-- rank among noise's oldest clichés. On the one hand, it's admirable that these two would even try to find any remaining drops of pigment in those faded colors. And to their credit, Drumm and Menche get pretty far-- there's much more interesting stuff happening here than almost anyone else could muster with this material.

But taken on its own, Gauntlet never quite crosses the line that divides deep drone from staid noise. That's not for lack of trying. With Drumm generating sandy textures with "guitar and noise," and Menche adding low end through "organ and noise," Gauntlet is busy and never boring. At times the pair reach some nice peaks: around six minutes in, their humming noise sounds like a march of cartoon bumblebees, and later they hit on a dense cacophony akin to a cicada symphony. But more often than not, the pair's sounds level off instead of escalating, and the incessant helicopter-like rhythms are always hackneyed, sometimes even grating.

One of the most interesting things about powerful noise and drone pieces is the deceptive way they slowly and organically progress. Listen to a great work by Phil Niblock or Tony Conrad in real time and it barely seems to change, but skip around and the actual sonic variety can be shocking. Gauntlet reverses that effect: it often sounds like it's headed somewhere, moving forward at an industrious clip. But jump to random sections and it's clear how narrow the piece is. Drumm and Menche put a lot of effort into their journey, and to say they tread water would be unfair. But wherever it is that they end up, you can still see the starting line pretty clearly.