Drum Major Instinct is an experimental music duo from Asheville, North Carolina. Jeff Arnal plays (mostly) percussion and Curt Cloninger plays (mostly) modular synthesizer. The Wire describes Jeff’s drumming as a “highly original concept" having "a balletic sense of time and imaginative deployment of colour;” and Byron Coley says Curt's modular synthesis “moves like blocks of radioactive adobe being shifted around by architects in space suits.” But, of course, nothing is ever that straightforward. The resultant music is about waves of energy, patterns within patterns (within patterns), sounds from the natural world, and running the voodoo down.

Liner notes by Byron Coley:

There aren't many duos who utilize the drums and synth as their weapons of choice. Of those, the only ones I can admit to digging are Silver Apples and Tom Surgal's White Out. But that was before I laid ears on Asheville NC's Drum Major Instinct (DMI), whose debut release is in your deserving hands this very moment.

Drummer Jeff Arnal, now based in Asheville NC, has been on the scene for a while. He began getting underground note soon after finishing his masters degree at Bennington College, under the tutelage of the legendary Milford Graves. Moving to NYC in the '90s, Jeff co-founded the Improvised & Otherwise Festival, as well as the Generate Records label, and played in a wide variety of improvised situations. Like Graves, Arnal's playing has a multi-dimensional aspect, dictating a sort of floating/fluxing time signature with light side strokes and cymbal work, interspersed with segments of grounded power. Jeff played and recorded regularly for the first dozen years of the century, before family and work required more of his attention. Drum Major Instinct is his first new release in a decade.

Synthesizer player Curt Cloninger, also based in Asheville, is a new media artist, who works in a variety of fields. He is probably better known for his writings, videos, installations and performances than for his synth work. At least right now. Because his playing here is quite amazing. It has a linear, but disassociated approach to event-generation that's striking and unusual. The only player it really reminds me of is the early work by Pere Ubu's Allen Ravenstine, whose efforts have rarely had any parallels.

The idea for Drum Major Instinct (the name comes from a Martin Luther King speech about re-directing the universal urge to lead) was born of the COVID era. Jeff and Curt had known each other for a while, but it was only while holed-up that they began swapping sound files back and forth. Curt would send material he'd been working up on synth, Jeff added drums, and both mixed in elements of their own field recordings.

All three pieces on Drum Major Instinct were recorded in Asheville at various points in the Lockdown of 2021.

“Walking in Rotterdam” is a track resulting from the duo's early file swapping days. It mixes field recordings of birds with Jeff's lightly dancing drums, while Curt layers circular patterns of key-triggered synth tones, some extended and glowing, others functioning more like balaphonic note insertions. This gives the synth a fully bifurcated quality, while the drums maintain a brakeless bustle that only comes to a stop when we hear footsteps at the very end of the piece. It has a rather weightless and slightly drunken feel. Which suits the title.

“Modulating Bodies (i-vii)” moves into heavier turf, and is from one the first sessions DMI did in person. Jeff's drumming is more weighted down, though not un-fleet. The dancing quality is still present, but pulses are more defined and the splashes of cymbal smooth transitions. Curt's synth, meanwhile, has developed a fuzzily menacing tone. Its sounds move like blocks of radioactive adobe being shifted around by architects in space suits. Nominally broken into seven parts, the piece remains hard to map. Both the drums and synth shift into different modes as things develop, but they don't evolve in tandem, so if there are indeed seven parts to the piece, I'm not sure these parts are of the same length for both instruments. Whatever the case may be, “Modulating Bodies” is a complex and great piece of work. The synth and drums both run through amazing patterns in ways that overlap enough to make you hungry to hear more of certain sequences. Some of which have a bit of a Silver Apples feel.

“Live at Citizen Vinyl” is a document of the duo's first actual show, presented at a local record plant/store/studio/bar complex. Opening with a curtain of synth-huzz, the drums enter with jazzy emphasis, then the keys break down into something akin to the zonkiest tones Mike Ratledge ever pushed with the Soft Machine. What follows is a most excellent blast into a noisy small format free-prog blow-out that is satisfying in more ways than I can easily name.

The three tracks on Drum Major Instinct are quite different, but all of a piece. Let us hope this the but the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

--Byron Coley