Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Has anybody ever produced music of such beauty, emotional depth and sheer mesmeric density from such sparse elements?

In 1968, Jones recorded this live album, capturing the sound of the annual Bou Jeloud festivities that celebrate the appearance in the 15th century of a Pan-like half-man, half-goat figure said to bestow fertility, a bountiful harvest and musical secrets. Now in her 80s, Éliane Radigue has been at the forefront of avant-garde electronics since the 50s, when she worked as an engineer with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry at Paris’s Studio d’Essai, the epicentre of musique concrète. Venturing to the very furthest reaches of the drone continuum, Harry uncovers the vibrations uniting a far greater range of sounds and experience than I’d anticipated. In short, the drone has bewitched for millennia, exhorting us to succumb to the joy of hypnotic immersion. The Master Musicians of Joujouka strongly contest the notion that drone-based music is calming: theirs is an energetic, frenetic sound.Inspired by sacred spaces, the minimalist aesthetics of La Monte Young and Éliane Radigue – and her early access to an enviable selection of instruments and synths while working at the National Music Centre in Calgary – Davachi works in the electroacoustic sphere, augmenting rich organ drones with subtle electronic post production. He later employed the Masters as house band in the 1001 Nights restaurant that he ran in Tangier with Hamri. With serious volume tempered by a distinct grace, the record paved the way for early Sunn O))) among many others on the underground, and is widely regarded the vital signpost in the drone metal underground. 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. The original drummer in the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise was a true bohemian who led a life straight out of a Kerouac novel.

Yet her solo electronic works (starting with her hypnotic feedback works of the late 60s) were a world away from the busy field recording collages of her musique concrète apprenticeship.Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. This is a masterpiece, heavy, fun, mad, wild, inspiring, mind-blowing, massively deep though never precious, so many tangents somehow brought together with clarity and vision, love the idea of a left-hand path history, and the connections between the beginnings of the universe, ritual music and modern electronic rock is jaw-dropping.

In Monolithic Undertow, I trace the drone from those ancient beginnings through the 20th century, where it underpinned sounds of many divergent persuasions – not limited to the New York minimalist ley line that linked the Theatre of Eternal Music to the Velvet Underground; the vital influence of Ravi Shankar’s sitar drone on the ecstatic jazz of Alice Coltrane and the Beatles nascent psychedelic experiments; the punk axis that leads from the Stooges to Sonic Youth; and the physical metallic bass weight of Earth and Sunn O))). Many ancient instruments – didgeridoo, bullroarer, carnyx – produced sustained tones, while the ancient Greeks evoked the delirium of Dionysus with the drone of the Aulos pipes.Exclusively produced using the ARP 2500, a notoriously complex modular synthesiser, Radigue focused on pure drone pieces that unfurled at a glacial pace. From Neolithic beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, cone shattering dubwise bass, Hawkwind’s Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust and Ash Ra Temple; the hash-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Melvins, seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow explores the power of the drone – an audio carrier vessel capable of evoking womb like warmth or cavernous dread alike. 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. The soundtrack to Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda features all the beguiling hallmarks of MacLise’s sound: handheld drums, disembodied voices, field recordings of unknown provenance. In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration.