Disquiet

No doubt Mystified and Random Coil weren’t the only individuals this past week to appreciate the splendid sonic properties of plastic bottles. But they were certainly among the smaller subset of people who beyond merely appreciating the slurry and echo-friendly wonder of those plastic containers took the subsequent steps of (1) turning those sounds into something more broadly understood as music and (2) uploading recordings of their experiments to Soundcloud.com.

Mystified’s track, “Soda Bottle Drone” (at soundcloud.com/mystifiedthomas), is a high-pitched drone with a horror-movie aura, like the plaintive utterance of an especially anemic ghost:

Random Coil’s entry, “Fill It” (at soundcloud.com/random-coil), is more rhythmic and song-like, using the saliva-enhanced sibilance of the plastic bottle for both its texture and its propensity to provide percussive nuance:

It’s interesting how different the two tracks are from each other. The Mystified one uses the bottle as a source of hazy ambience, like an especially lo-fi analog synthesizer, while for Random Coil that bottle provides something along the lines of what hip-hop producers make from the surface noise of vinyl LPs.

More on Random Coil (of Berlin, Germany) at soundcloud.com/random-coil, and on Mystified, aka Thomas Park (of Saint Louis, Missouri) at mystifiedmusic.com.

Those who argue against the art of the drone as music might take issue with the drone being in some way considered inhuman, because the drone is closely associated with synthesis, with the hum of the industrial machine, with the whir of the computer hard drive. But, as such forces as the cicada and the river have shown us, the drone is arguably as natural a sound as we have, a sound inherent in nature.

The drone in film sound may have come to represent what the title of a cut to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score to The Social Network aptly termed “The Gentle Hum of Anxiety.” And true enough it is a sonic emblem of human discomfort. But it is also a depiction of the wider natural world in which human existence occurs.

Not all natural occurring drones are as monotonous, as monolithic — as droning — as that of the gathering cicada or the roiling river. The irregularities of naturally occurring drones, for example, are the focus of “Wasp!” This is the latest release from the great Touch Radio podcast series. It goes uncredited as to who recorded it (the photo is by one Mike Harding), but what it is is a twenty-plus minute recording of wasps, building in force, slowing, circling, dispersing, communing (MP3).

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk.