originally written by Craig Hayes
I understand that plenty of folk think a lengthy tune that sheds its hook gets real boring, real fast. That’s fair enough. Metal’s already drowning in the briny depths of plenty of ego-stroking ejaculate, but there’s infinitely worse than a long-winded song that strays off the path; there’s drone.
A lot of people hate drone.
I mean, they really fucking hate drone.
They see drone as the worst example or structureless and tedious overindulgence, or the low-point of beard-stroking pretentiousness, somehow disguised as art. They abhor drone’s fathomless depths, they detest its supposed formlessness, and, you know, that’s all understandable too.
Drone presents a uniquely challenging environment to negotiate, with songs travelling from A to B through vast chasms of minimalist sound – if they reach any destination at all. Earth’s groundbreaking 1993 album, Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version, might well have inspired plenty of drone metal artists to set off on fascinating hikes to infinity, but it’s fair to say the avalanche of epic tracks issued since its release haven’t always meet with wild applause.
However, although there’s no point denying that drone’s critics are legion, or that it does have limited appeal, its fans are a steadfast bunch – and I’m one of those.
To my mind, every drone is an opportunity to soak in mind-melting magnificence, and sure, I’d agree, not every drone grants the gift at all. Still, as Nietzsche once said, “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you”, and that philosophic snippet defines the core appeal of drone – at least, it does for me. I’ve always found it extremely odd that drone is mocked by those who’ll happily listen to equally challenging styles of music, but perhaps that’s just because they don’t really understand what the allure of drone is in the first place. Allow me to explain.
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“In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was oooooommmmmmm.”
That quote above is plucked from a review for an early drone release from The Theatre of Eternal Music collective, recorded back in 1965. However, as that quote points out, drone has a history that goes back to before any recorded sound.
Drone’s vibrations have been buzzing through our nervous systems since we crawled from the primordial soup. It’s heard in the wailing upon death, the cries of birth, and drone was with us as we hid in caves, chanting away our fears. Indigenous music the world over uses drone’s mantric intonations for mystical and transcendental meditations, and spiritual practices from Christianity to Paganism, Sufism to Satanism, all feature the deep sound of devotional drones in their many forms of worship.
If you want to know why drone is alluring to some folks, there’s a few of reasons right there. Drone exists at the ur-cellular/circulatory and metaphysical levels. It rests, infinitely deep, in the DNA, and it embodies many of the age-old practices we use to search for meaning in life.
There’s a purity in drone’s minimalism, and it doesn’t matter if it features a vicious accent (like Khanate’s chaos), a mantric stomp (like OM), a sludgy sinisterness (like Thou), or it rides on glistening glaze (à la Jesu). Regardless of drone’s stylistic presentation, it taps into the same set of age-old universal principles, where the physicality of sound encourages journeys into the hinterlands of consciousness.
A drone is, at its heart, a voyage set on changing perceptions of reality; cracking open the cosmic egg, for a glimpse of the eternal. Mystics, gurus, and scientists have all spoken of the underlying frequencies of everyday life, and those are under-tones that drones both heavy and light explore.
In essence, drone is the sound of a search for life’s a priori resonance, and for much of its history its varying manifestations – from organ recitals to didgeridoo blasts, amplifier-meltdowns to electronic blizzards – have all sought to get in touch with something more ethereal or primal.
However, although drone was born from sacred practice, you don’t need to be a person of any faith whatsoever to enjoy it these days. Drone is often incorporated into metal, noise, and experimental rock to offer visions of godlessness and decay, where its dissonant and distorting minimalism brings images of entropy and collapse. Drone’s surges of feedback tear technicality down to reveal the degradation of modernity, and it can be used as a tool to express sacrilegiousness and disgust with the modern world just as much as any other form of music, metal or otherwise.
It’s at the point of decay where much of drone metal’s artists reside, and their take on drone’s supposed formlessness comes with a creative depth that their critics frequently overlook. Drone metal shifts huge monoliths of sound over glacial landscapes, and it’s the overall dimensions of the picture that count, not any frenetic mixing of colors. In drone metal, gigantic soundscapes are formed, and I’ll never understand why anyone can listen to drone and see nothing, when its so vastly panoramic. Sure, drone metal lacks the incessant hyperactivity of other sub-genres of metal, but that doesn’t mean its message is any less powerfully conveyed, or that it wields a less weighty sledgehammer.
In fact, those who accuse drone metal of being monotonous are looking at it from the entirely wrong angle. Drone is supposed to be repetitive, and its supposed to be slow, because in working a note of riff over and over again time slows – and that opens the door to stepping outside the manic time-stream of the present, to gaze upon the boundless.
I guess the easiest way to explain the attraction to drone metal is this. If black metal spits hellfire directly into the face of God, then drone metal goes searching for gods to spit at. Or, if progressive metal stacks abundant dexterity on top of virtuosity, then drone metal’s far more interested in the original idea behind the initial strum.
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Rock, And Stroll
Drone entered the Western world’s musical lexicon via the influence of classical Indian music on pop and rock in the ‘60s, along with the work of avant-garde composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Tony Conrad. Drone has wormed its way into every imaginable musical genre since. It’s heard in space rock, shoegaze, art rock, avant-jazz, and it saturates the realm of electronic experimentalism, but as metal is concerned, Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version kicked off an onslaught of droning riff-lords.
Sunn O))) is obviously the most famed these days, born from Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s audio-adventures with Thorr’s Hammer and Burning Witch, and further explored on numerous side-projects, including Ascend, Teeth of the Lions Rule Divine (with Cathedral’s Lee Dorian), Äänipää, and many more. The pulse of drone is still strong in Earth, while it has shifted its focus drawing in acoustic and pastoral folk exploring grander suites. But outside of those two figureheads, drone and metal have gotten down and dirty plenty of times over the years.
Sleep’s Dopesmoker is rightly cited as a pioneering release in drone metal’s tale, and bands like Thrones, Moss, Buried at Sea, Nadja, Orthodox, Boris, Wolvserpent, Eagle Twin, Monarch, Meth Drinker, and the aforementioned Om, Khanate, Thou, and Jesu have all drawn drone in close.
Post, ambient, and experimental metal has clearly benefited from drone’s presence too. Isis made much of drone’s reduction of sound during its reign, with the band’s members furthering that minimizing with ventures like Mamiffer, Jodis, MGR, and House of Low Culture. Neurosis clearly wields drone as an important part of its armoury. The band has an entire alter ego in Tribes of Neurot dedicated to exploring minimalism (check out the amazing release Adaptation and Survival to see where insect drone can take you), and Harvestman, formed by Neurosis’s Steve Von Till, travels cosmic byways often framed by drone.
Cult of Luna, Godflesh, A Storm of Light, Amenra, Menace Ruine, and Ufomammut have all taken elements of drone to construct multi-tiered megaliths of sound, while the metal-friendly sonics of bands like This Quiet Army, Northumbria, Barn Owl, Across Tundras, or Pyramids all feature drone as the foundational keystone. Drone is there in the lengthy passages of interstellar, synth-based, depressive or eco-centric black metal, from Wheels with Wheels to Yhdarl, or Xasthur to Burzum to Paysage d’Hiver. Drone runs through the veins of long-form funeral doom too, with its ice-cold chills spilling from the marathon mournful passages of Lycus, Esoteric, Loss, Moss, Bell Witch, or Mournful Congregation. It’s not all glacial, of course, drone gets bespattered in sludge on the works of Bong, Hell, or Dark Castle, and where noise meets metal, in bands like Locrian or Sutekh Hexen, drone looms ominously.
The chances are, even if you’re convinced you don’t like drone at all, you probably still enjoy drone’s blending with other metallic styles. It’s all just matter of how drone presents itself, and how strong its manifestation of minimalism really is.
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Breaking The Code
For me, and I’m assuming many other drone metal fans, what it offers most is a distinct departure from metal’s virtuoso riff-storms. It exists as reaction to the increasing complexity of metal; stripping it all down for an ultra-minimalist and uber-loud rendering of metal’s core attribute, the riff.
In one sense, the super slow hypnotism of Black Boned Angel’s massively thick sound is really just Sabbath circa ‘71, on even more tranquillisers – with Ozzy and Bill kaleidoscopically dreaming off to the side. Drone metal takes Sabbath’s use of the devil’s interval, elongates that to the nth degree, wraps unconventional structure around low-end amplification, and ejects a crushingly heavy long-form composition. With that comes a firmly meditative stance – see Echtra, Fauna, or Fell Voices’s reveries – and even where works feature more expensive use of instrumentation, such as on Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions, it’s all still bound to an aesthetic that uses incremental units of repetitiveness to paint a progressively larger canvas.
Of course, those that find drone metal dull would point to those canvases and say they’re just plain boring, and there’s really nothing to be done about that if you don’t enjoy music that situates sustained tones and reflection at the forefront of its sound. Like all great works of art, the best mammoth drones are built from layers adding the features and depth. Sounds drag with gravity strength, and that materiality changes us physically and psychologically. Tuning into those transmission you can feel those micro-shifts in texture, hear the rise and fall of timbre, and in doing so, you become submerged in the drone.
Obviously that’s a big difference to being assaulted by grindcore, dazzled by some six-string power metal maestro, or having your head kicked in by filthy death metal. Those are all vastly enjoyable experiences too, but they don’t come close to the fundamentally primeval attraction of drone.
Its one thing to talk about music that evokes the feel of mountains, forests and fjords, but drone is the sound of the earth. Where waves of delay and distortion feature strongly, crystalline splinters in sound appear, with vibration after vibration drilling down to the earth’s core. Drone’s the mantle creaking and cracking, and shuddering slabs of gargantuan guitar see vast oceans of sound arise, all waiting to be explored. Some of those seas are dark and stormy, some calmer and harmonic, and while drone pushes the idea of what music is supposed to be to the limits of abstraction, in doing so, it also presents us with the opportunity to experience all that music can be.
In the early ‘90’s, UK author, Simon Reynolds, wrote a fantastic book called, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. Contained within was a dissection of the noise scene that is readily adaptable to metal, where Reynolds’ argued that if music is a language, if it communicates some kind of message, then noise was best defined as interference, something that, “jams the code”.
You can hear that code condensed in a rapid-fire burst in grindcore, blasted from cannons in power metal, strapped to the mallet in death metal, or more mournfully delivered in doom. However, in drone, that code is reduced to a few key syllables, which are then stretched to the limits of form and meaning. That obliterates the hierarchy of many of the recognisable facets of communication, and that redefinition requires patience and can be difficult and even alien – just like learning an entirely new language.
I appreciate plenty of folks just want their ADD fix right this second, and they’d dismiss the idea that music can open pathways to even further dimensions of perception as hippie bullshit. However, whatever difficulties drone might present at first are worth it in the end. It offers the prospect of forming an entirely new relationship with sound because drone is the root language. It’s the voice of ancestors, angels, and demons, and it is, unquestionably, the rawest fucking celebration of elemental forces at work on the mind, body, and soul.
Fair enough if you don’t like it, but you’re missing out.
