Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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Starts off strong with the author in an ancient Maltese mausoleum with strange amplifying acoustics. The early chapters have the tone and sprawl of an enthusiastic stoner relating a recent dive down a wikipedia rabbit hole. He establishes the premise that drone is the basis for all music and is key to the way we connect with the world and space and time, and begins to elaborate on the role of drone in so many different musics. A shorter chapter that follows on from the avant-garde exploration. Sword charts the origins and development of The Velvet Underground and the drones influence on the band. Lou Reed’s solo career post Velvet is briefly covered as well. TVU are a great band, I don’t need to

In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration. The drone requires neither chord nor band, representing - via its infinite pliability and accessibility - the ultimate folk music: a potent audio tool of personal liberation. Immersion in hypnotic and repetitive sounds allows us to step outside of ourselves, be it chant, a 120dB beasting from Sunn O))), standing front of the system as Jah Shaka drops a fresh dub or going full headphone immersion with Hawkwind. These experiences are akin to an audio portal - a sound Tardis to silence the hum and fizz of the unceasing inner voice. The drone exists outside of us, but also - paradoxically - within us all; an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel... For example, Sword makes a big point of the of the religious and/or spiritual roots of droning sounds, but the idea is never really explored beyond the immediate manifestation of the drone in music. It's never really explored why the drone has had such a deep religious meaning for millennia. Nor is it explored what it means to the drone once it leaves the spiritual realm and settles in the secular. The book itself It has a particularly drone-like feel in that middle section: like the same story is repeated with different players, facing different emotional challenges, in different cities, on different drugs, each one influencing the next. So. many. drugs... I found the book inspiring overall, which was the point, and wound up recording a half-hour drone set for an upcoming internet radio show -- I'm pleased at how it turned out and I might just continue in the same vein from now on, instead of shorter pieces.You can still find many interesting bands and album recommendations in this book, but, to be honest, I would have preferred a simple list format for that. Getting familiar with droning sounds fra Indian raga to British dubstep is neat, but it leaves me wanting for a more in-depth exploration of the drone as a concept. This is what happens when you draw clear battle lines around ancient and universal languages like music. You hurt yourself in your confusion! The beginning and end of this book are quite good. In the beginning, he writes about the role of the drone in spiritual ritual, ancient rites, attempts to reach some sort of transcendence in different cultures (although one could argue that he should have noted the difference in the acoustic qualities of a Maltese underground burial chamber when it was used as such and hence full of dead bodies and its empty state today). The last part includes bands such as (early) Earth and Sunn O))) who have the drone at the very center of their general sound; he ventures into ambient (Eno, Radique, Davachi) and hives readers a solid list of music to experience. However, everything in between is quite random. That is mostly the case because Sword tries very hard to find any form of drone or “undertow” in the music/ bands that he likes and he often finds it even though it’s not really there or at least doesn’t play an important role in the sound of a particular artist / band. He often conflates repetition or noise with drone even though in the beginning, he explains that “drone” basically means “sustain” just to ignore this definition in the chapters that follow.

In some ways this feels intuitive, “like you’ve heard something you’ve never heard before, but you’ve always known,” Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth tells Sword. Perhaps it is. Hearing begins in the womb at around twenty weeks; those first oceanic, immersive aural experiences are surprisingly loud – around 88 decibels, the level of a food processor, Sword says. White noise is demonstrably comforting for babies and young children, in particular. It’s not hard to understand why. In 2021 drone is everywhere framing the dystopia and releasing to the euphoria and its journey is a strong reflection of the times. Harry Sword connects with the music that can be reflective and transcending. He looks at why the drone works – the enticing trip that creates a sense of the other, the ecstatic embrace of the one note, the endless cosmic slip and slide of sound that draws you into something deeper and mediative and into something so deep and eternal that you are hypnotised by its beauty. He signposts the key player and explains the fundamental brilliance of the drone. This chapter is an odd one as it’s not as focused on a scene or genre as the other chapters are. I loved the Brian Eno bit. You have Aphex Twin, Godflesh and other stuff in this chapter. It’s great albeit not as focused as other chapters. It kind of felt like a “what have I left out?” kind of chapter to me. Beginning in 1963, performances of his Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble – which at one point included John Cale, soon to be in the Velvet Underground, and Tony Conrad, who would work with Faust in the 1970s – were long explorations of single, sine-wave tones. Young and his wife, light artist Marian Zazeela, hummed; Conrad played violin; Cale played a viola with a flattened bridge that he’d strung with electric guitar strings. It wasn’t just the nakedness of the drone that was transformative. It was also the volume. Every element was heavily amplified. The sound, by all accounts, was overwhelming – wild, raw, and elemental – an embodiment of the romantic idea of the sublime as beauty plus terror. The drone, Young said, is “an attempt to harness eternity”; the primal is neither nice nor pretty. Earth are ground zero for drone metal. Fusing the tortoise-slow crawlspace of La Monte Young-era minimalism with metallic textures, their debut album Earth 2 (1993) was released on Sub Pop during the heyday of grunge but, focusing as it did on slowly unfurling, percussion-less drones, was a million miles from the frenetic angst of labelmates Nirvana and Mudhoney.This is a book about the very human fascination with sound, the drone and the shamanic other. The whole weighty volume works like a drone – pulling you into its own ecstatic journey – perhaps a groundbreaking in itself – perhaps the world’s first book of drone writing! One part sociological study of the drone and two-thirds of history of a variety of musical artists across multiple genres ranging from religious chants to "tribal", to jazz, heavy metal, pop, and electronic; the drone is regarded as the very essence, the beginning and end of music and how it underlays throughout much of popular culture. Much of the sociological writing is very reminiscent of Mark Fisher's work on rave culture and music.

From ancient beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, North Mississippi bluesmen to cone-shattering South London dub reggae sound systems, Hawkwind's Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust, Ash Ra Temple and sonic architects like La Monte Young, Brian Eno, and John Cale, the opium-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the caveman doom of Saint Vitus, the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Swans to the seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow probes the power of the drone: something capable of affording womb-like warmth or evoking cavernous dread alike. What then does the drone speak to? I was going to write that the drone is sacred and profane at the same time, but really, that’s a category error. It is neither of those things; it predates them. The drone is one way in which humanity has learned to connect to, commune with, corral the Other – to balance our own vulnerability and transience against the immanent and eternal. “A lot of the aspects we find so graceful in ancient cultures are to do with their ability to interweave their own lives with the bigger processes they were part of,” Brian Eno tells Sword. “They had to build their lives around surrendering.” The drone has a role in ritual music that delivers repetitive rhythms and sensory excess just as it does in music of spiritual discipline and devotional austerity. Which is to say, the drone sometimes demands surrender, and sometimes merely enables it. A shorter chapter that follows on from the avant-garde exploration. Sword charts the origins and development of The Velvet Underground and the drones influence on the band. Lou Reed’s solo career post Velvet is briefly covered as well. TVU are a great band, I don’t need to tell you that but an underrated aspect of their sound is the drone and Sword highlights that brilliantly. In the book the author is talking to Brian Eno who makes the point that in the past a drone was produced by a person and it was limited by their endurance, now you can hit a switch and the drone can last months or years.These are the very foundations of seeking the face of god music and humanity and run through classical and jazz and into post-war pop culture and its esoteric and mainstream fringes from the Beatles and George Harrison’s fascination with Ravi Shankar or his equivalent in the Stones Brian Jones and his recordings of the Moroccan The Master Musicians of Joujouka . What I love about this book is that it turns you onto many of the game mainstream changers underground geniuses like Lamonte Young with zero snobbery. It thrills to the Stooges and the Doors slower drones to the genius of jazz goddess Alice Coltrane and on and on into post-punk and Swans and Sonic Youth and into fringe modern metal and the dark cellos of…. Unfortunately, the book later devolves into a more traditional capsule history of a music journo's favorite bands. He mentions early on that he started off writing a history of doom metal and much of this reads like he barely altered that content to fit the new thesis. His genre interests are wide ranging, but past 1990 primarily focused on the UK. Several musicians and bands, particularly in the punk and EDM chapters, have a very tenuous connection to drone, while more relevant ones go unmentioned--no Yellow Swans, Thomas Koner, Kali Malone, GRM, et al. Noise music in general is barely examined. I recently read this and it definitely changed what I was doing. For the last few years I've had two modes of operation: monolithic ( ), wall of sound pieces with hardly any movement at all -- and then semi-endurance performances, such as this piece Neptune I've been working on that's performed over the 4 hours and change it takes to get there at light speed. Strangely enough this book got me thinking in much shorter terms, as in how short can I get and still be classified as drone, and has shaken a lot of other stuff loose. Excellent read. No hit or miss on this one. Diving from it into The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Klause has been really interesting.

I'm interested but I'm also curious if the book caused you to change the style of drone music you make where the old style is lost forever. My only problem with this book is that I knew a lot of what it talked about already. Being pretty well informed about metal music already and having read Alex Ross' Listen to This and JR Moores Electric Wizards, Monolithic Undertow came in a LITTLE redundant.It would be easy to view these investigations as the height of pretentiousness, however I must confess I lapped it all up. Monolithic Undertow takes you on a wonderful journey and is very readable and often quite amusing. An unusual but provocative book and one which sent me away with a host of new sounds and artists to investigate.