Drone On (Part 1)
by Ben Lambert, Culture Editor on March 21, 2007 in Culture
This is part one of a two-part article on drone music. I’m serious.
Some people may not be aware of this, but drones are huge these days.
Jets passing overhead, refrigerator hums, TVs on the fritz, neon lights, distant traffic, laptops, hard drives, tape hiss, air-conditioning, someone three apartments over running their sink.
Drones - single tones held for long periods of time - are everywhere. The iconic signal of American readiness - the test of the Emergency Broadcast System - is a drone. Musicians, just as responsive to their natural environment as any other type of artist, have, um, responded.
Drone music has exploded. I kid you not. It hasn’t exactly become a pop culture force, but there is a serious underground movement of people putting out CDs that consist of single tones held for really, really long periods of time.
You may think this is ridiculous. For example, you may recently have purchased, for real money, Birchville Cat Hotel’s Siberian Land Curve, an album that consists of someone holding their guitar close to an amp and recording the resulting feedback for about an hour. You - ok, I - paid like twelve bucks for this. Why didn’t I just hold my ear really close to Printer 1 in the computer lab, which offers pretty much the same sonic experience (I know because I just tried this) for free?
Perhaps I am too avant-guard for my own good and am thus willing to pay money for anything put out by an independent label and bearing cheaply produced cover art. This is not true. I actually have fantastic taste.
So let’s look for an alternative explanation. One might be that while drones tend to be by definition pretty similar, some drones are more interesting than others, and some musical artists have a talent for producing really superlative drones, drones far superior in their texturing, ebb and flow, and meditative power, to the drones produced by your average icebox. For example, I recently purchased a CD bearing a sticker promising “exquisitely composed ethno-drones” (seriously, how could I resist? I’m just a sucker for the hard sell). And, you may not believe this, but the drones were actually fantastic - concrete proof of at least some degree of variation in drone quality.
Comments
Got something to say?
