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““When I play my songs for the rest of the band, I start to hear them with other people’s ears.” —Jeff Tweedy

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“This is the tool of the storyteller. This is the tool of the songwriter. You want an acoustic guitar—you hit the J-45 button.” —Ted Wulfers, J-45 documentarian

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“I know what to do with my hands and with my body on guitar. It also is such an act of love to play.” —Carrie Brownstein

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Blake Fleming has long been the most inspiring drummer I’ve known. I assimilated into his galaxy of percussive performance as a college student back in 2009, when I began studying drums with him in private lessons. I stuck with it for four semesters, but ultimately bowed out as I was pulled away into more guitar-centric, singer-songwriter pursuits. Yet, his instruction has informed my approach to drums in the production of my own music ever since.

You may perceive that as a bias as I write this review of The Beat Fantastic, but not every teacher makes it into the pantheon of favorites. Blake, however, left an impression early on that he was more than just a drummer—he’s a musician not only on the cutting edge of percussion, but experimental music on the whole.

Blake plays like an electrified arachnid, where each limb acts in deceptive independence while, put more accurately, constituting and puppeted by his singular hive mind. He has a way of taking a regular kit and making it sound like an organic assembly of buckets and trash cans and lids on the street, in a way that’s friendliest to your ears as possible. And when he’s playing a groove, the loops are never fully repetitive—a trained listener will spy the nuances in his carefully rotating mixture of accents, and an untrained one will physically absorb them. I could only imagine this as a requirement for a compelling drum record after I’d listened to The Beat Fantastic.

Of course, the record features more than just the kit. It’s fleshed out with ambient synthesizers and transistor-radio sounds that paint an abstract terrain, where drums speak as the last man on Earth à la an episode of The Twilight Zone. Bernard Herrmann? Perhaps not—the composer wasn’t one to write a soundtrack that somehow fits a description of both raucous and meditative. But Blake strings those poles together as if it’s silly to have ever kept them apart.

My biggest takeaway is—wow, this is the kind of music that keeps me going, that sustains my own artistic hopes. We need people like Blake to continue producing their vision. The Beat Fantastic fulfills that order. If you’ll dare to be moved, listen for yourself.

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