Drone On, You Crazy Diamond

sunn o)))
Album: Monoliths and Dimensions
Song: Big Church

If the Stonehenge-building druids were alive today, this is the song they'd party to.

God I love a good drone.  Didgeridoo, bagpipe, guitar, voice, you name it; if it drones, I dig it.  I think my fascination with this sort of music goes back to the earliest polyphonic music in the Western tradition.  For a two month period as a grad student I became fascinated with the music of Perotin, who's considered by some the father of all of Western music.  A lot of what he composed is what's known as organum, in which one or more voices sing florid, rhythmic lines over a drone.  Here's a famous example:



I dare you not to dig it.  Crazy good.

Anyway, my point is that I have always felt an affinity to music that plays against, or emerges from, a drone.  Examples abound in the classical canon.  My single favorite art song is Schubert's "Der Leiermann" in which the piano drone is evocative of death itself.***   But the drone only became a particularly viable means of expression in the mid-60s in the music of the New York avant-garde.  Process music, which also became fashionable in the 60s, also incorporates drones, but usually in much different ways.  One way of thinking of the "process" itself is -- perhaps paradoxically? -- as a continuously evolving drone.

Which brings us to the lovely sunn o))).  It takes a bit of getting used to their heavy-as-hell meets choir-of-angels concept, but once you let the sound wash over you, once you let that drone ooze its way into your beating heart, once you feel the music as much as listen to it, the experience can be pretty damn intense.  Like, in a good way.  Late at night, the house asleep, just me and my iPod in the dark, the covers pulled up to my ears, sunn o))) chiseling its way into my psyche.  I always have good dreams.

And more bands should incorporate punctuation into their names.  Just sayin'.



*** My god.  I've just heard the most stunning recording of this song.  I'd never heard of this guy until today -- how he managed to creep under my cultural radar is a mystery.  Like many musicians, I considered Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's rendition beyond reproach.  But Thomas Quastoff gives him a run for the money.  Achingly beautiful.