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Drone music

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Drone Music
Stylistic origins: Experimental music
Cultural origins:
Typical instruments: Electronic musical instruments, Guitars, Electronic postproduction equipment
Mainstream popularity: Low

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Drone music, also known as drone-based music, drone ambient or ambient drone, dronescape or dronology, and sometimes simply as drone, is a musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tones-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics.

Pioneering explorers of drone music in the past 30 years have included La Monte Young and John Cale's Theater of Eternal Music (aka The Dream Syndicate), Charlemagne Palestine, Eliane Radigue, Kraftwerk, mid-to-present Radiohead, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, Autopsia, Coil, Earth, Melt Hair And The Love Rats, Zoviet France, Aphex Twin, Autechre's side-project Gescom, and Biosphere.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Music which contains drones and is rhythmically still or very slow can be found in many parts of the world, including the Japanese gagaku classical tradition; Scottish pibroch piping; didgeridoo music in Australia, Hindustani classical music (which is accompanied almost invariably by the tambura, a four-string instrument which is only capable of playing a drone); and pre-polyphonic organum vocal music of late medieval Europe. Stillness and long tones also occur in classical compositions during adagio movements, including, for instance, the third movement of Anton Webern's Five Small Pieces for Orchestra, as well as in Northern European folk musics in the form of "slow airs."

The modern genre of drone music (differentiated by some as "dronology") is most often applied to artists who have allied themselves closely with underground music and the post-rock or experimental music genres. Drone music also fit into the genres of new age, found sound, minimal music, dark ambient, drone doom/drone metal, and noise music. Most often utilizing electronic instruments or electronic processing of acoustic instruments, they typically create dense and unmoving harmonies and a stilled or "hovering" sense of time. While the hallmarks of drone music are easy to recognize, the backgrounds and goals of the artists vary greatly.

[edit] Examples

Some notable examples include, chronologically:

  • La Monte Young's 1960s drone-based pieces, solo and with John Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings and/or Billy Name in the Theater of Eternal Music (aka The Dream Syndicate). Young has claimed that his 1958 "Trio for Strings" is the first piece to have ever been created using nothing but long, sustained sounds.
  • Giacinto Scelsi's 1959 piece Quattro Pezzi Su Una Nota Sola for one pitch and numerous subsequent pieces by himself and his followers and contemporaries in the realm of spectral composition, including Iannis Xenakis whose earlier 1958 "Concrete Ph" is a tape work comprised of superimposed recordings of smoldering charcoal which form a near-static field of sound, while not a strictly "drone" work operates with a similarly minimal-souce and stilled-time sensibility, as well as Romanian composer Iancu Dumitrescu and many others.
  • Yves Klein's 1961 performance art piece, The Monotone Symphony, which included an unvarying 20-minute drone as its first movement.
  • Late 1960s - 1980s work by minimal composers and gallery artists Yoshimasa Wada (The Rise and Fall of the Elephantine Serpentine), Tony Conrad and Faust (Outside the Dream Sydicate), Terry Fox (Berlino), Harry Bertoia, Jon Gibson (Two Solo Pieces), Charlemagne Palestine (Four Manifestations on Six Elements), David Hykes (Hearing Solar Winds), Pauline Oliveros (Horse Sings From Cloud), Alvin Lucier (Music on a Long, Thin Wire), Harley Gaber (The Wind Rises in the North), Stuart Dempster (In the Great Abbey of Clement VI), and Remko Scha (Machine Guitars), to name only a few. All used long, sustained and timbrally dense harmonic material for the entirety of various of their pieces.
  • Kraftwerk's experimental/drone self-titled first album Kraftwerk (1970): the 4-minute intro to "Stratovarius", the organ drone on most of "Megaherz", the first half of "Vom Himmel Hoch".
  • Klaus Schulze's early "organ drone" albums Irrlicht (1972), and Cyborg (1973).
  • Tangerine Dream's ambient drone album Zeit (1972), and to a lesser degree Phaedra (1974).
  • Fripp and Eno: the 21-minute drone ambient of "The Heavenly Music Corporation" on No Pussyfooting (1973), the 28-minute drone ambient of "An Index of Metals" on Evening Star (1975).
  • Jon Hassell's Vernal Equinox (1977)
  • On Miles Davis' Agharta (1975): the last 6 minutes of the last track, especially the last 2 minutes.
  • Coil's drone music albums such as How to Destroy Angels EP (1984) and LP (1992), Time Machines (1998), or ANS (2003). Plus many tracks on non-drone albums, such as "Tenderness of Wolves" on Scatology (1984), "Wrim Wram Wrom" on Stolen and Contaminated Songs (1992), "Cold Dream Of An Earth Star" and "Die Wolfe Kommen Zuruck" on Black Light District: A Thousand Lights In A Darkened Room (1996), "North" on Moon's Milk (1998). (Plus many semi-drone tracks such as "Her Friends The Wolves...", "Moon's Milk Or Under An Unquiet Skull Part 1", "Bee Stings", "Refusal Of Leave To Land", "Magnetic North", etc.)
  • On Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994): especially "[spots]" and "[tassels]", and to a lesser degree tracks such as "[tree]", "[parallel stripes]", "[grey stripe]", and "[white blur 2]".
  • Gescom (a side-project of Autechre): the experimental album Minidisc (1998) is half drone ambient (tracks "Cranusberg [1-3]", "Fully [1-2]", "Shoegazer", "Polarized Beam Splitter [1-5]", "Dan Dan Dan [1-4]", "A Newer Beginning [1-2]", "Go On", and to a lesser degree "Interchangeable World [1-3]", "Yo! DMX Crew", "New Contact Lense", "1D Shapethrower", "Inter", "Of Our Time", or the drone techno of "Pricks [1-4]").
  • Biosphere : half of his ambient/drone album Shenzhou (2002), and his drone album Autour de la Lune (2004).
  • Boards of Canada : the drone ambient of "Corsair" on Geogaddi (2002).
  • Melthair and the Loverats debut album "Sex Wrangler" contains numerous drones (www.myspace.com/melthairandtheloverats)
  • Wilco's album A Ghost is Born (2004) contains "Less Than You Think", a 15-minute-long track containing ~12 minutes of droning ambience after a brief piano-based melody.
  • contemporary drone composers Phill Niblock, Jliat, Ian Nagoski, Leif Elggren, Eliane Radigue, etc.
  • Other contemporary bands representative of this genre include Maeror Tri, Stars of the Lid, Children of the Drone, Windy & Carl, Troum, House of Low Culture, Growing, Cisfinitum, Klood, Melek-Tha, Raagnagrok, Alp, Controlled Bleeding, and Laminar. Some important hearths for bands in the genre include Soleilmoon or Drone Records.
  • Most of Bethany Curve's songs are drone-based, made only with guitars.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


Ambient
Ambient house - Dark ambient - Dronology - Illbient - Lowercase - New Age - Psybient
Other electronic music genres
Ambient | Breakbeat | Dance | Drum and bass | Electronica | Electronic art music | Hard dance | Hardcore | House | Industrial | Synthpop | Techno | Trance
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