It’s October, around the time when the brain starts, on some distant back burner, to ponder what’ll make the year-end best-music list. It’s quite likely that Grist by Drumcorps (aka Aaron Spectre) will be up there, certainly in the running if not among the final cut. Drumcorps mixes analog and digital rock noise, the slashing guitars of deathmetal and the broken beats of digital hardcore, into an event-packed, pulse-quickening, imagination-challenging, synapse-pummeling mash of maddeningly cross-hatched cadences. The album is due out next week.
Grist builds on the legacy of metal-tronic hybrids like the old Earache act Godflesh; it switches gears expertly, locating choice samples amid the riffage of Slayer and the splattered beats of drum’n’bass, and sewing them into a Frankenstein instrumental pop. (Following the model of Warp artist Battles, the album, Drumcorps’ first full-length, collects some material from previous releases, including the excellent EPs Rmx or Die and Live and Regret.)
There’s a concert-length performance by Drumcorps available courtesy of Resonance FM (c), recorded toward the end of March 2006 for a party in Kingston (the London suburb, not Jamaica, though it does have its dubby moments). Also, MP3 snippets of Grist are up at Drumcorps’ site, drumcorps.cc, and at that of the album’s co-releasing labels, Cock Rock Disco, cockrockdisco.com, and Ad Noiseam, adnoiseam.net.