Kevin Drumm’s "Sheer Hellish Miasma" doesn’t so much “play” as it erupts - a volcanic exhalation of Chicago’s harshest ghosts, funnelled through a man who has spent decades treating feedback as both sparring partner and spiritual adviser. When it first appeared in 2002, the album felt like a dare: "how much unfiltered sonic intensity can a human withstand before they either ascend or combust?". More than twenty years later, the world has become infinitely noisier, but Drumm’s monolith still stands there, arms crossed, unimpressed. And with this new 2LP reissue, it returns not as nostalgia but as a reminder that extremity, when shaped with intelligence and stubborn intention, ages better than most polite “future music”.

Drumm is often caricatured as the hermit-surgeon of the noise community: the guy who can turn a guitar into a plague wind, a contact mic into a moral dilemma, a pedal chain into a devotional rite. But what this album reveals - and what many who skim the surface never catch - is how deliberate his chaos is. "Sheer Hellish Miasma" is less an explosion than a controlled demolition, a building imploding in slow motion while someone inside calmly rearranges the furniture.

“Hitting the Pavement”, nearly twenty minutes long, feels like an attempt to sandblast the edges off reality. It’s dense, yes, but not thoughtless - textures coil and uncoil like industrial serpents, sometimes thrashing, sometimes simply shivering at high voltage. Survive that, and “Inferno” sprawls over two sides of wax, its inner turbulence punctured by Greg Kelley’s trumpet, which slices through the smog like a beacon or a distress signal - you decide which. Drumm has always treated collaboration as a foreign, almost suspicious pleasure, and the intrusion of brass here feels like a hallucination induced by sensory overload.

By the time “Cloudy” arrives, its deceptive title reads almost like a joke Drumm plays on the listener: a moment that seems softer only because your eardrums have been seasoned like cast iron. “Impotent Hummer”, meanwhile, grinds with a kind of apocalyptic humour - one imagines machinery trying to imitate Bach and dying nobly in the attempt. The closing “Turning Point”, surprisingly brief, feels like a cracked afterimage, a last whispered reminder that nothing this intense can end cleanly.

Part of the album’s mythology comes from its creation: those sessions in early-2000s Chicago, a period now romanticised as a golden age of American harshness, before everything was instantly archived, streamed, optimised, softened. Drumm worked with tools that were stubborn, temperamental, and gloriously imperfect - tape, pedals, raw electricity - and yet he sculpted something with an uncanny sense of form. The new cut by Rashad Becker in Berlin brings the details into sharper relief without diminishing the album’s essential hostility. It’s still a beast, only now its teeth gleam a little brighter.

Listening to "Sheer Hellish Miasma" today is a peculiar experience. It’s not “timeless” in the way critics usually mean - elegant, pristine, gently transcendent. No. It’s timeless in the sense that standing inside a hurricane is timeless. This is music that suspends linear thinking, that insists you surrender your expectations at the door. It’s a work that refuses polish, refuses comprehension, refuses mercy, yet paradoxically feels deeply crafted, even - dare one say it - "expressive".

In a world drowning in algorithmic smoothness, Drumm’s masterpiece returns like a ritual cleansing: abrasive, confrontational, unreasonably alive. It reminds us that extremes matter. That artistic conviction, when taken to its limits, can still shake the dust off our spirits. And perhaps most importantly, that sometimes the only way out is straight through the noise.