The Drone Continuum

Charting the power of the drone from the neolithic to the modern day, perception of time, states of consciousness, Genius Loci, foghorns, noise and the soundscape, Eno, R Murray Shafer & Harry Sword

A recent epiphany was a realisation that a drone sound is perhaps the key element that attracts me to a piece of music. I realised that the drone has a magical quality - a unique ability to quash our usual time keeping mechanisms, providing the song with a sonic container which our brains can get lost in, helping us transcend and get closer to a state of flow. 

Some examples of this could come from some of my selections on Ambient Flo radio, which frequently contain drone sounds that challenge the listener to engage with actively and passively, a duality I wrote about below:

Listening or Hearing, you choose! The duality of ambient music

Drones are also evident in the dance tracks I return to most often, and even occur outside of music in the natural and anthropogenic world. I particularly liked this recent dance floor track on Vladimir Ivkovic’s Offen label and reading an entire book detailing the mystical power of the Foghorn by Jennifer Lucy Allen.

My own productions often incorporate a drone (check Shruti Dances built around the Indian Shruti Box drone instrument, and our new release on A State Of Flo, Genius Loci, which uses an accordion as a drone instrument as two examples). 

Earth Drones

There are three types of sounds that make up everything we hear: geophony, the sounds made by the earth (thunder, rain, wind etc), biophony, the sounds made by non-human living things such as animals, birds etc, and anthropony, the sounds made by humans covering a whole host of industrial sounds and often dominated by machinery, air planes and traffic noise. These categories can be characterised by a drone sound to greater or lesser degree. The earth also has a fundamental frequency, known as the Schumann Resonance, which is a hum audible at 7.83hz. It is below the spectrum of human hearing but one that is felt and that we are all habituated to. 

As we move deeper into the Anthropocene epoch, human-made sounds have come to dominant the soundscape. This is especially noticable in urban environments where it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’. This is not a new phenomena, and one that was documented by R Murray Shafer’s World Soundscape Project in the 1970s. In his ‘Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of The World’ book, he prophesied we are heading for ‘universal deafness’ due to rising noise levels, and advocated for regular ‘ear cleaning’ as a necessary addition to our global health systems. However, in other places the dissonant drones and noises of the industrial era was cause for celebration, as outlined by the Italian Futurist manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’ back in 1913s. 

Sonic Oblivion and Surrender

Which brings me to Harry Sword’s must-read book, Monolithic Undertow, a book that perfectly sums up the human attraction to the drone, charting a chronological path through the ‘drone continuum’. He begins by introducing the drone as the fundamental feature of the ‘sonic womb’, which is the very first sound we hear before we are even born. He then plots a timeline of the drone starting with the neolithic caves used as sound chambers which were able to produce powerful resonances perhaps binding communities together through to the modern day. 

He quotes Dr Rupert Till with regards to these ancient caves:

“The idea of making sound and painting in caves were seeking something beyond everyday experience of needful survival… it’s akin to spending 20 mins in a sensory deprivation tank, you begin to hear things that aren’t there… which is a fundamentally psychedelic effect… the desire to reach a place where modern life simply doesn’t exist is a universal constant. It’s why we write, paint, dance, take drugs, make love. The drone places us in a zone of mental discombobulation, a state of sonic awe”

He then charts the use of drone in various forms of modern music, all of which can be argued induce a state of ‘mental discombobulation’ and sonic awe too - Gnawa music from Morocco, Indian ragas of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (and how The Beatles transferred  the drone into popular music as a result), Terry Riley, Alice Coltrane, John Cage, La Monte Young’s Dream House (see image below), Pauline Oliveros, John Cale, The Velvet Underground, German Kosmiche, The Stooges, Punk, Metal, culminating in Sunn 0))), Earth and all manner of electronic music, from Brian Eno and Eliane Radigue to the vast arrange of contemporary artists incorporating drone into their work. 

The transcendental, ritualistic power of the drone is a quality that seems fundamental to the exploration of an alternative reality, made accessible through music. This is fundamentally at odds with most popular music, which is easily understood due to its clear timing and structure. The brain is a pattern recognition system and we get a dopamine rush of satisfaction if the pattern we predict within a song completes itself. The drone works in the opposite way, defined by its eternal quality which rewards us in a potentially deeper way. It is less about finding patterns and more about, as Brian Eno says, ‘surrender’: 

“the idea that in any situation there is a spectrum of possibilities available in how we react and that sometimes surrender can be the way to go… what hippies used to call ‘going with the flow’ - just becoming part of something rather than trying to drive it”

The idea of surrender has obvious religious undertones - in religious worship, we surrender to the all powerful force of God to allow us to understand our place in the world. We surrender our sense of self to become better connected to the world around us. Could the drone be a key element of how we, as secular societies, become better connected with others around us, unlocking a door into a deeper spiritual world? Or could it be that slightly paradoxically in a world of ever increasing noise, the drone is the best way for us to actually experience an inner ‘silence’?

Genius Loci will be released on A State Of Flo on 19/7/24. Pre-order NOW. Upgrade to a paid subscription and get it delivered immediately for free.