Month: August 2011

Drone skepticism is understandable. Drones sound similar to each other, like clouds look similar to each other. To discern one drone from another drone is an exercise to some extent. Perhaps that exercise is as meaningful or as meaningless as is the act of distinguishing clouds, or architectural columns, or hemlines, or glasses of a favorite beverage, or anything else that attracts one’s attention. What distinguishes a drone from those other things — for there is, to anyone who focuses on any one of those other things, or any other such things, something that distinguishes them — is that it is unlikely to draw attention. It doesn’t attract attention, the drone. It rewards attention, perhaps even requires attention.

A drone isn’t a song, not in the traditional sense. Perhaps the drone’s title, along with the brief liner note that occasionally accompanies a drone, is its lyric. Is a sad song about a dead friend the same song without the lyric? Is a drone any less meaningful if it gains meaning from the context the drone’s maker provides for it? Is a drone a song without a lyric, or is it a piece of program music, following a narrative that its audience agrees upon, even though it goes unspoken, unsung.

The Hairy Giant recorded this following drone (MP3):

The Hairy Giant’s drone is titled “Awake Room,” which appears to relate to the Giant’s impetus, which is described, in part, as follows:

This rather short piece of ambience creates the atmosphere of just waking up early one morning and catching a burst of orange light pouring through your window from the rising sun. Deep in the distance, the familiar sounds of lawnmowers and yard maintenance lull you back to sleep as you ponder the pleasant day that lay ahead.

This drone, indeed, follows that course. It suggests the sun slowly gaining power. It suggests the buzz of domestic labor. It perhaps even employs sonic artifacts of chores in its raw material — sounds recorded in one’s yard and transformed into art back inside one’s house. “Awake Room” is a thick burr of noise, but a slow one, neither uniform nor momentous. It may tell a story. It may encapsulte memories. It may aspire to describe a state of mind. But it is, first and foremost, a drone.

Track originally posted at archive.org. Discography for the Hairy Giant, reportedly based in New Jersey, at discogs.com.

Over at his soundcloud.com/saffronslumber page, the musician who goes by Saffron Slumber put up a track titled “Blind Sower, Reaper.” Slumber is Kevin Stephens of Portland, Oregon, and he traffics in a spare brand of ambient music, one that often has more grit than that of his peers.

One of his Soundcloud listeners, a Boston-based musician named John Ryan, who goes by Would-be Messiahs, made an astute observation about “Blind Sower, Reaper,” and by extension about Stephens’ music in general. On the “Blind Sower, Reaper” track’s page, Ryan posted this comment: “despite the underlying intensity, there’s a wonderful tranquility in the music that is completely at odds with my sounds, which may be why I love your compositions so much… as always, beautiful.” And he’s right. While much ambient music celebrates the ethereal, there’s a tension in Stephens’ — in Saffron Slumber’s — that finds a willfully uneasy truce between placid presentation and rough textures.

An additional thing makes the track tick: the way it regularly changes modes, the way it plays out like a piece of footage spliced together from found pieces. The work may be comprised of softness, but it’s shards of softness, and those shards have hard edges. Each element may be lovely, but the flicker from one to the next lends it a sense of, for lack of a better word, disquiet.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/saffronslumber. More on Slumber/Stephens at embermusic.com and at twitter.com/saffronslumber.