Read Ocean of Sound by David Toop.
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Nice use of Waldorf gear!
Nice musician!
Nice picture of Eric Satie!
Nice 3x!
A formidable tome, and pretty radical too (in the truest sense of the word.)
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You’ve just reminded me I’ve got had it sitting on my kindle, still unread and completely forgotten! Funnily enough, picked it up after someone else on the forum mentioned it when posting an ambient track.
Curiouser & curiouser. Looks like the local bookshop has it in stock, might be time for a quick drive shortly.
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I find that some eastern european orthodox chant (usually romanian I think?) can really hit the spot in the same way. Something about the drone like baritone voicings - gonna have to try and dig some up.
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Maybe you can even go back even further. As it has already been said, drones and chanting are probably as old as man. This is a nice exemple of drone music that comes from shamanic traditions for example.
One of the key takeways from me about drone was, after seeing Sunn O))) performing live, the slownesss of sound. Really, the guys play in slow motion, almost like a zen/tai chi style of playing.
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Yeah, that makes me think of singing bowls, which I hadn’t really thought of as “drone” music before, but it totally is. I have a nice set of four bowls, and would love to add a really big one, for those ultra deep tones, but those aren’t cheap.
The thing with the bowls is that it’s not just the droning tone you are getting but the vibrations, especially with the bigger bowls. For me at least, it’s hard to really appreciate it fully just listening to recordings because of that.
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They were active for at least 20 years. Seen them multiple times live. It’s good that they got world-wide recognition.
Just putting this one here since I think it bridges a wealth of gaps between ambient, drone, and other meditative genres. I think it falls well under Eno’s initial meaning when defining the concepts behind ambient, and is a true masterpiece both musically and as an ambient work…
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I got to know the music scene after I moved here, became a fan of local drone musos, then heard about Eliane Radigue from them. The locals take after her in that there’s no overt promotion of any particular religion or spiritual movement. They just set up for the gig, play the gig, and tear down like other musos.
I started to study what they do as well as Radigue for better ideas for building an interesting musical structure with drone.
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Speaking of singing bowls, I went to a “sound bath” a couple of weeks ago.
We lay on mats/blankets/sleeping bags while the sound person made awesome drones on a gong and also walked around us playing singing bowls and various percussive stuff for a surround sound effect.
Later, I tried to reproduce some drones on the gong and got some useful instruction on rubbing a rubber mallet on various parts of the gong to emphasize certain overtones.
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I am a big fan of drone music and also produce it myself. I have found that certain frequencies put me in a special state of mind because they are very relaxing or have the opposite effect. Here are some of my favourite drone records:
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My personal impression was that it’s about as explicitly close as Christianity gets to equivocating God with the notion of Infinite Consciousness / Unbound Awareness that is found in some Eastern traditions (Advaita Vedanta / Tibetan Dzogchen / Chan Buddhism for example). It is still obviously religiously grounded in Christianity, but one obviously has to take into account the context of the anonymous author as well as his potential audience. I think it was a pretty radical and incendiary publication for the day though, and might well have landed the author in the hot-waters of heresy at the time (had he not remained anonymous).
Rachmaninov’s Vespers sung by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir has got some quality Russian male-voice deep drones going on.
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Not to go too far off topic and turn this into a thread on theology, but many Eastern Orthodox figures do view God in that way (infinite consciousness, being itself). Examples would include Gregory of Nyssa and Sergei Bulgakov. I think the ‘Christianity’ that you are referring to stems mostly from Protestant, and some Catholic theology. In which God is not being itself, but a being among beings.
@ARVE I recently got into drone music because I discovered Eliane Radigue. Thanks for all the links! Definitely helpful for a newbie like me.
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Lifts and airport lounges are great schools of education on this matter.
A few ‘points of departure’ (you said we could be wanky…) on the topic:
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I really like one of Eno’s definitions (he gave a few):
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
And I should note that I probably differ with him in some other definitions, because he’s still interested in stuff that has some kind of musical value - he didn’t like a lot of ‘canned music’/muzak of the time, and bemoans a lot of what ‘ambient’ has come to mean. I’m less picky 
I like this definition for a lot of reasons, especially the (fairly novel in the west) idea that one could intentionally make music that one felt was important but also that was designed to be (able to be) ignored). More below on aspects of that, but I think it’s a really interesting and important idea.
I also particularly like a kind of inherent commercialism, or at least commercialism-agnosticism, to this idea. Eno’s first ambient album is ‘Music for Airports’ ffs! Background music in a transit building!
While a lot ambient gets ‘serious’, all about cleansing chakras and finding deep spaces, there’s something really pleasant about this mundanity, this worldliness that ambient can be about. Stuff for airports, lifts, something to drown out the motorway noise in the car, stuff for adverts…
One reallllly nice ambient album is Music for Nine Postcards Hiroshi Yoshimura ââ Music For Nine Post Cards (Wave Notation 1) â [1982, full album] - YouTube which was background noise for an art gallery (ok, art, but still…)
I’m fairly left, so don’t see this as an embrace of capitalism per-se, but, like Eno made the Win 95 startup tone. And Cianni made the Coca Cola noise!
This aspect of being a part of the world as we find it, offering some interest and improvement to that world perhaps. Being in all spaces, rather than the usual serious demands that ‘proper’ music have its proper space rather than just being background noise…
It’s like it cuts out the middleman in some ways - the big transcendental on one side and the lowly purposive on the other. Music to become one with the universe to, or to drown out the noise of your officemate typing and huffing angrily at his screen.
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Deep Listening - the art of opening yourself and listening to all music/sound/noise as if at a classical concert (my, wrong, definition) - is connected to all this. Eno talks of there being rain falling outside while a record was played too quietly, and the combined sounds giving a new form of music - it’s all there, you just need to listen.
Or turn your favourite album down and put a field recording on at the same time?
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Drone and noise and field recordings… a kind of chaotic space occupied by the sounds of forests and the sea, that nonspecific sound that seems to serve to quieten the conceptual mind, or the part of us that grabs at defined sense.
It’s interesting to note that drone in the modern western context is often heavy, designed to overpower this mind rather than perhaps to allow it to merge with the sound (I’ve a Sunn O))) heavy experience of the genre, so perspective is somewhat skewed).
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Try chanting/humming practices. There are probably a million assisted ones you can do. I like an Osho one with ‘tones to match the chakras’ but I’m an old hippy.
Just humming, letting yourself find a tone that fits, and ummmmm-ing your way into it. Doesn’t have to be dead loud or anything. Be comfy and do that for 10, 20, 30 minutes or whatever. Feel the resonance through your body.
It’s nice to feel one’s embodiment, the connection between mind and body. Or for other feelings too.
Great late night/early morning when the world is quiet, if you live somewhere/with someone that would allow that 
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Others have already pointed to historical examples of drone. We might also look at traditional folk music in Scotland and Ireland (and elsewhere) where the drone of eg bagpipes is integral to the sound, albeit often accompanied by melody or even drums.
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If we’re going on the mystics-religious bent, then we might point out that the dominant tradition in western theology is, essentially, intellectual/conceptual (‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’). This means we highly value that which holds intellectual weight, which is of the mind more than the body, that which follows ‘reason’ (yes, the reason bit is a slightly later development), and so on, along with an understanding of these things giving us an insight into the underlying transcendent Order to the world.
This means that what is given ‘cultural approval’ is what meets that leaning - the incredible melodic works of Bach and that lot, the clear and orderly choral works of the church, and so on.
We still carry these biases as a culture - see, for instance, the backlashes against abstract art movements that continue today. ‘It doesn’t make any sense!’ ‘What does it mean?!’
While approbation and condemnation might be offered to ‘immoral’ works (lewd literature, or rock n roll when it emerged), these works are still taking place within the expected framework (the literature is intelligible, the rock n roll follows time structures and harmonic standards), they are just ‘doing bad things with it’, corrupting it and leading people astray etc.
On the other hand, drone, ambient, not to mention more ‘abstract’ forms of music sidestep that. They don’t fit into the ‘good vs evil’ paradigm that relies entirely on the intellectualised conceptual space that bounds ‘what music is’ - a mental space a great many of us inhabit.
It’s a bit like that ‘not even wrong’ concept in science, where some theories are untestable and therefore unable to be definted as true/false within the scientific paradigm. Our cultural heritage leads us (those of us who play these silly intellectual games) to consider things like drone as ‘not even music’.
We, in this present where we’ve been exposed, to greater or lesser degree, to the mystical and religious practices and ideas outside of the dominant Christianities* can appreciate the benefit of arts and tools that deliver some kind of transcendence in a more immanent non-conceptual way - so much art is accepted these days for its effect and impact rather than just its conceptual value, but I suspect we’re still mentally divided between worlds, so to speak, and still quite addicted to the need to make sense of things.
Or maybe a lot of people just like music they can dance and sing along too 
*We often deride the new age lot - I do too! - but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that without their existence, most of us wouldn’t have heard about these ideas. We can talk all we want about the Christian renegades and mystics, but they’re even less well known than the zen monks, and the reconsideration of their input (that is, the reframing of the mystical tradition within Christianity) has largely taken place since the ‘new age dawn’ and within context of the eastern practices. I’m willing to bet that the most of us (the white western ‘us’) first found interest in ‘the proper stuff’ by first being exposed to some of the more ‘woo’ stuff.
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This blends back in the ‘low art/high art’ consideration. We find ourselves, often, talking about drone, noise, ambient etc in relation to their conceptual value. We might spiritualise stuff for its transcendent value. We might go on about how it doesn’t fit the dominant Christian paradigm… We try to valorise it, try to say it’s high art, or it’s properly valuable.
The challenge, or the tease, within something like Eno’s definition is that we can say ‘yeah, it’s noise.’ ‘yeah it’s forgettable’ ‘yeah nothing happens’ ‘yes this is just algorithmically generated sound from an app, totally ephemeral’ and ‘yes it could be background music to a commercial video about using a new kind of sofa’, and that’s fine, it is what it is. During the lockdown I listened to god-knows-how-many hours of ambient mixes and I couldn’t tell you the names of more than ten of the artists or their tracks and that’s fine.
There’s a bit in Byrne’s ‘How music works’ where he contrasts the expected style of listening to music at a concert as it takes place at a classical concert in the west and during a (iirc) concert in Indonesia. Both concerts are playing pieces with rich cultural and religious signification, but while in the west we’re expected to sit stock-still, not even cough, etc, the eastern concert was full of people coming and going, having a chat, just getting on. The music there was important and valuable, but the relationship to it took a different shape.
I don’t know where I’m going with that, but I like stuff where this high/low, sacred/profane boundary gets blurred or eroded, where you can say ‘it’s music but also yeah it’s just noise’, or ‘yeah this stuff can take me away to different planes, but mostly I just have it on in the background while I work’.
That something can be ‘serious stuff’ and quite frivolous at the same time is nice. Seems more honest, lifelike, in a way.
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Can you tell I’m trying to avoid filling in a job app? 
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Stop procrastinating, get back to work.
Next: my thoughts on the concept of ‘work’ as it relates to merzbow.
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