I think that I shall never hear a drone album as beautiful as the HVAC ambient environmental sound of a hotel room in the morning before the world has woken.
The beauty isn’t merely the drone, isn’t merely the combination of foundational hum, its origin untraceable, and more device-specific sounds, like the rumbling churn of the air vent.
It isn’t merely how the passing traffic, both air and street, adds drones to the drone, in turn creating moiré patterns of drone variations: rich, seemingly uniform, yet endlessly shifting and changing.
It isn’t merely how the drone changes as you move through the hotel room, how slight shifts in the micro-geography of the space alter the balance of tonal elements, sometimes subtly, often evidencing sharp contrasts.
It’s how the drone is still, for all its components, a single drone, one that is thick yet ether-thin, transparent yet utterly blanketing.