Let's Get You Started with... Drone

the second in a series

In the same spirit as my explainer for sludge, I’m here today to introduce you to some more far-out music, this type falling under the heading of drone - broadly defined, music that operates via repetition in a different way than the common verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus variety. Drone tends to be (but is not necessarily) light on vocals and traditional rhythm sections. To borrow the annoying lean in/lean out metaphor of television, drone tends to be more of a lean out affair, or perhaps better, sink in, as in sinking into your chair. Many drone fans enjoy taking in their music with a little herbal enhancement, though that’s certainly not required. The fundamental insight of drone music is that certain sounds take on a different tenor when they’re slowed down, and sometimes the 300th time you hear a chord it’s fundamentally different than the first.

I have to say right off the bat: this intro can’t possibly be extensive, nor will it please everyone. (I can’t wait for all the cries of “that isn’t drone!”) Droning is as old as music and there’s an immense amount of things you could listen to. There’s no Shoegaze and no Glenn Branca and many more omissions on this list. So just think of this as stuff that you might like. These are also only drone according to me and to nobody else; if you disagree, fine, go complain about it on Reddit. Much respect to OG drone pioneers in traditional Indian music, who I fail to include only because of my ignorance.

If you like any of this music and find yourself returning to it, find a way to pay the artist for the privilege!

Melvins, Lysol/Lice All/Melvins

Melvins, the kings of riffing and chug-chug-chug, are also progenitors in the field of drone, sometimes specifically said to be in doom drone. (We’ll do doom metal someday.) Here they’re at their headiest and slowest, which is really saying something. This album (renamed twice for copyright reasons) is a study in atmospherics, long slow pulls of distortion and dissonance that lull you to sleep even as the effect is so harsh. A good place to start from a band that has a hand in just about every subgenre of heavy music.

Swans, “Power for Power”

Most will think immediately of the seminal album Soundtracks for the Blind when they think of Swans and drone, but I choose the earlier stuff here because it’s more kvlt and also because I like this tune for showcasing how drone can still include something like traditional song structure. Also this is brutal and goes hard. You might consider “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L'Ouverture,” off of To Be Kind, and its solid two and a half minutes of the same chord to observe how the same sound over and over again can morph in your ears and mind thanks to the power of sheer repetition, which is core to drone.

Eliane Radigue, Kyema

An inspirational figure in electronic music, Radigue has been a pioneer in every sense, getting her start in ancient tape-based synthesizers and frequently working with a bewildering array of equipment. This one’s a blissed-out hour of gentle grooves for you to get high to, perhaps reminiscent of the lowercase genre.

Grouper, Grouper

Playing around in the overlapping worlds of drone, ambient, and collage, Liz Harris employs fuzz, slow builds, and a delay pedal to remarkable effect, drowning the listener in slowly unwinding oscillations. Grouper is no stranger to traditional song structure when it suits her, but her oeuvre is as spacey and blissed out as any on this list. I include her first album, reportedly pressed directly to CD-R, because it shows her music at its most elemental and because I’m a hipster.

Sonic Youth, “The Diamond Sea”

No band commonly lumped in with alternative music did more with repetition than Sonic Youth, their songs often building guitar line over guitar line in repetitive musical steps that nevertheless became crescendos. This particular track is a masterwork in taking a (lovely and delicate) traditional song, then pulling its sounds apart like taffy into endless ringing droning guitars.

Neu, “Fur Immer”

Bless those krauts. This is excellent driving music, uptempo but groovy, and your favorite bit just lasts and lasts. If you like it, you should absolutely dig deeper into Neu, as they made a career out of this kind of jam. Heady but unpretentious and, to me, better than the more hyped (but still good!) Kraftwerk.

Earth, the Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull

Not most people’s choice for Earth’s best contribution to drone, nor my favorite of their albums, I choose The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull because it’s so weird and infectious and because it takes concepts from drone metal and drops the distortion that typically defines it, to eye-opening effect. I often thought this would make a great soundtrack for a post-apocalyptic RPG.

Beck, “Blackhole”

This song, found on an album that should have made it clear from the beginning that Beck was no one-hit wonder, has a central motif made up of the incessant drumming of one giant spacious chord that fills the sonic space and operates via repetition in a classic drone way. The resonant, overwhelming chimes of the guitar reminds me of some big Buddhist temple in the Himalayas. The song is one of my favorites, immense and lovely and capacious. When I was a teenager in an unhappy home I would sometimes listen to this track over and over again on my Discman, holed up in my room alone, dreaming of floating in the cosmos.

Sunn 0))), “Troubled Air”

There’s no way I could fail to include everyone’s favorite soul-crushing masters of stretching distorted notes along the length of a track like the Spanish Inquisition pulling a heretic apart on the rack. They also deserve inclusion thanks to their homespun label Southern Lord, which has become home for all manner of heady metal projects. For an album recommendation, I too must suggest Monoliths and Dimensions, which perhaps exemplifies their sound. Here, I’m giving you something a little newer, because I like its jagged edges and the abstract art. (It’s pronounced “sun,” by the way. The glyph is silent.)

Pauline Oliveros, “A Love Song”

A giant equal to her contemporary Radigue, Oliveros produced a lot of mournful, pensive dirges like this lovely piece. She stretched the accordion as far as the instrument could go, letting it fill the sonic space with minor notes that haunt your brain. I like to listen to her and imagine I’m hiking on a Scottish moor or something.

Boris, Flood

I have already recommended Boris’s Dronevil as the best entranceway to my favorite band, and I don’t want to double up here. I’m also happy to showcase Boris’s lighter side, and even though it isn’t in my personal top five, this album showcases Boris’s total dedication to exploring particular musical ideas and bending them to their uses until they no longer have any use for them. Another good weed-smoking album.

The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows

A song both celebrated and derided for containing just on chord, “Tomorrow Never Knows” took Revolver’s obsession with pushing the edge to its natural extremes, fully signifying the band’s shift away from conventional pop pleasers and into the realm of drug-induced reveries. Used brilliantly in Mad Men to demonstrate that Don Draper couldn’t move forward with the culture, this tune is a world music-inspired masterpiece.

Godflesh, self-titled

Godflesh has to go on any list of drone metal. A little industrial for my tastes, I nevertheless find myself happily nodding along to the relentless, ugly passages they craft. As much as anyone, they realized that the brilliance of metal lay in its worshippers finding just the right rhythm to bang their heads to, the experience of metal as fundamentally the experience of the grind of the music, and so the thing to do is to hit that rhythm over and over again. Warning: serious tolerance for drum machines required.

Velvet Underground, “The Black Angel’s Death Song”

Rather than pretending I like anything on Metal Machine Music, let’s include a hat tip to Lou Reed, though he's not really the one instrumentally droning here. Rather we get some of John Cale’s atonal and droning viola, played over something that could otherwise resemble an ordinary song. I like this addition because the point of drone is not to forsake all notions of conventional song structure, but to expand the space in which music can happen. Lots of songs that you might groove along to have some drone elements, particularly in various forms of electronica and metal.

Sleep, Dopesmoker

ARISE ARISE ARISE ARISE

Boredoms, Super Root Five

The glories of feedback and distortion have been explored by bands at least as far back as the Beatles, and yet there still seems to always be new frontiers to explore in that space. Here we have an hour-long such exploration from Boredoms, a band that’s simultaneously dedicated to raucous cacophony and yet one of the more approachable acts in the “Japanoise” scene. Give it time! Don’t recoil from the harshness of the sound. Lean back. Turn down the volume at first if you need to. Then bathe in it. Let it flow over you. Stop waiting for the beat to drop. What can you make out of the noise? Notice as it becomes more and more pleasant as you spend more time with it. This is what drone is all about, to me - being given the time to find the beautiful in the ugly, or at least in the atonal, cacophonous, or repetitious. You need the constant layering and drowned-out sounds and epic track lengths to have the mental space necessary to really pull out everything the music has to offer.