And so Imperial Distortion continues on to the Imperial Horizon: this new release by Kevin Drumm feels less liek a standalone work and more like an absolutely necessary coda to last year’s scarred beauty of a double album. His black metal and evil noise roots seem ever more distant as he heads further out into this ambient sea, with this latest voyage being a one-track one-hour epic. Patient explorers will find this to be one of the most rewarding journeys they will take this year.

My first listen to Imperial Horizon was a blissful experience, I found myself wallowing in its soft, oscillating tones, which rose imperceptibly until I was completely submerged, with no idea of how to escape (should I have wished to do so). This wasn’t to last. Repeat listening engendered a strange and unsettling sense of absence: I began to notice what wasn’t there. Everything on Imperial Horizon sounded like harmonics, overtones, echoes, but with the original sound source removed. It felt like a fading memory, an afterlife, a ghostly imprint. A heavy black void was at the centre of the record, stretching and distorting time.

Only then, and gradually, did I start to notice what was in fact there, for Imperial Horizon is actually a fastidiously composed piece of work. The level of detail is astonishing, the slow shifts in texture, the gentle layers overlapping and coalescing. Fragments of static poke through the vast fluid surface, like tiny peaks of impossibly large icebergs. Dark rumbles of bass form black shadows on the surface of the second half. I began to hear – or at least think I did – distant traces of melody, shadowy snatches which vanished into the air when I navigated my conscious thought towards them.

So impressive on so many levels, Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Horizon is available now from Hospital Productions.