[DRUM & DRUM] On side A (the "HOT" side) of its new single, Hot Victory stakes its entry into the burgeoning drum & drum genre. Live, it's Portlanders Caitlin Love and Ben Stoller on mirror-image drum kits with a squall of cassette tape noise and broken toy accoutrements. On record, it's often one drum set in a big hall, accompanied by hand drums, buckets, found objects and what sounds a lot like the ambient power-tool smorgasbord of a construction site (most likely found sounds from under the venerable Hawthorne Bridge, near Audiocinema, where this EP was cut). By side B's single long track, "Bungalow," the pair's gone completely prehistoric, with the percussion getting deconstructed even further and the ambient sounds seeming more simian by the moment. But part way through the B-side, things change: The glitchy distortion of processed drums creeps in from silence, only to be doubled by a massive reverbed kit and blissed-out, sub-bass synths. It's a glimpse of just how accessible these skeletons of songs could be—if the artists involved were considering an audience outside of friends and fellow art fags. When making music this purely abstract, and processing it to gorgeous two-tone vinyl, there's no reason to consider anyone else, really.

 PURE COUNTRY GOLD, P.C.G.E.P. (Green Noise)

WWeek 2015