Drones, straight outta Tennessee. Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to be exact. That’s where Patrick Singleton and Frank Baugh hail from. Together, they go by the Old Rig, which may or may not refer to their collective interest in older synthesizers. In our current moment of laptop music, in which emulated synths are very much the norm, the simple fact that both Singleton and Baugh would choose to load up their Roland JP-8000 and Juno-6, respectively, is a point of distinction. Combine those tools with what they describe, loosely, as tape loops, effects, and “real instruments,” and you get a heady stew of murky dronescapes. The duo recorded a half-hour set recently for the always excellent Phoning It In podcast, for which musicians literally perform live on the radio (KDVS FM, which later makes the show available as an MP3) via the phone. The result is a dark, clanging journey through a reverberant metallic landscape — as if Richard Serra had designed a haunted house.
More details at phoningitin.net.
Michael Palace likens the sound of his nearly hour-long drone work, Curuá Una, to “the slow loss and decay of the research station to the forest.” Palace, who records under the name Horchata, is referring to the almost reverential solitude of the piece, which was recently released on the Dark Winter netlabel (
According to the publisher (Continuum, which also published the 33 1/3 series of novella-length album-centric books), the artists and musicians focused on in Blink of an Ear include George Brecht, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Valie Export, Luc Ferrari, Jarrod Fowler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Robert Morris, Muddy Waters, John Oswald, Marina Rosenfeld, Pierre Schaeffer, Stephen Vitiello, and La Monte Young. More information at the publisher’s website,