![]() ![]() Others have operated in such drone-related micro-genres as new Kosmische (Expo ’70, Emeralds, Daniel Lopatin), experimental metal (Earth, Corrupted, Birchville Cat Motel) and new folk (Pelt, Charalambides, Six Organs of Admittance). In the new century, drone morphed into a more specific label for the work of artists including Dick Serries (Vidna Obmana and Fear Falls Burning), Rachel Evans (Motion Sickness of Time Travel), Richard Skelton, Marcia Bassett, Nicholas Szczepanik and Snow Beard. The sounds of Arecibo (a side project of British electronic musician Lustmord, named for the Puerto Rican town which houses the world’s largest radio telescope), Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree’s SETI (short for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and the impossibly obscure but brilliant German dark ambient progenitor Thorn Hoedh all seemed to lock in on the hums and murmurs beaming earthwards from faraway galaxies. Others from the period who were, intentionally or otherwise, responsible for infusing drone into the disintegrating rock sphere included Swans, Coil, Bristol’s Flying Saucer Attack, Texas duo Stars of the Lid, and a host of New Zealanders from the Clean to Roy Montgomery and the Dead C.Īt around the same time, a space-drone sub-genre was also gaining a foothold. Among the significant artists featured on Isolationism were Labradford (US), Lull (UK) and Thomas Koner (Germany). The liner notes of composer-compiler Kevin Martin describe a music that ‘sounds as paranoiac as it does panoramic’, neatly capturing the dichotomy at the core of the nineties ‘post-rock’ movement being championed. ![]() ![]() Lou Reed’s much maligned Metal Machine Music (1975) and the unique sound design to David Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead stand out, too, as forerunners of the type.Ī crucial moment in the development of modern drone was the 1994 release of the Virgin Records compilation CD Isolationism: Ambient 4. Simultaneously, the Krautrock/Kosmische styles of German groups like Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh were important precursors to what would later come to be understood as drone. As alluded to by the infinite mirror room seen on the record cover, the side-long tracks on No Pussyfooting created what Eno biographer David Sheppard aptly calls a ‘self-reflecting and boundless’ musical domain. Here, King Crimson leader Fripp and ex-Roxy Music ‘non-musician’ Eno collaborated in the construction of two beguiling guitar manipulations with underlying tape-loop-driven drones. At around the same time, liaisons between the Beatles, Timothy Leary and Ravi Shankar helped inspire the former’s initial foray into modal-based drone, via the drifting, reverberating Revolver track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.Ī key release of the following decade was the 1973 album No Pussyfooting by ostensible rock performers Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. In the 1960s, the early minimalism of Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Charlemagne Palestine, and the associated evolution of New York band the Velvet Underground, were harbingers of drone’s movement into rock. Historically, drone connects back to ethnically specific instrumentation such as the tanpura (India), the bagpipes (Scotland/Eastern Europe) and the didgeridoo (Indigenous Australian), and to sound worlds as diverse as Tibetan Buddhist liturgies and Moroccan Jajouka music. Like most genres, however, by the time drone began to be formally identified it had already broken off into innumerable tributaries. ![]() It has only more recently come to describe a specific class of rock-inflected sound based around notions of sustain and repetition. Lately, it has taken on a more nefarious meaning as a type of unpiloted aircraft often used for objectionable military purposes.Īs a form of music, drone is no less indefinite it serves as a rough classification primarily because there is no better term to use. The word ‘drone’ commonly evokes the pejorative idea of extended monotony – for instance, we complain when politicians drone on and on. To begin with, there are various complications of meaning. To extol drone, one must be prepared to embrace contradiction, because as a concept it is riddled with them. Ambiguous and multifaceted, criss-crossing a host of styles from classical to ambient to metal, drone or ‘dronology’ is a prime example of a contemporary, globalised musical category which connects to a culturally omnivorous, politically broad-minded audience. Recent sociological research has supported the idea that cultural tolerance is closely associated with political tolerance, while cultural homogeneity links to parochialism and, at the extreme, symbolic racism. ![]()
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