10 Albums to Get You Into Drone Music

10 Albums to Get You Into Drone Music Bazaart 1. Henry Flynt - You Are My Everlovin' / Celestial Power (1986) One of the early seminal drone releases, Henry Flynt was something of a revolutionary and a genius. A philosopher, Fluxus provocateur, and Appalachian fiddle player who originally coined the term "concept art" (for music), Henry Flynt spent the better part of his life insisting that European high culture had no legitimate claim on the avant-garde, and he was right. This regard is that argument come to fruition. Two pieces that shouldn't theoretically coexist in the same frame play off of each other perfectly. One of them drawing from vernacular American folk tradition, the other veering into pure drone abstraction. The fiddle bowing cycles accumulate into something hypnotic, psychedelic, transfixing, and unhinged, all seguing to support the centerpiece assertion of this album: that the merits of the avant-garde belong to no ruling class, only to the ones bold enough to imagine where those limits can be tested. Bazaart 2. Boris - Flood (2000) One of my all-time favorite albums from one of my all-time favorite groups. Boris are no stranger to experimentation, and they have reinvented themselves numerous times, exploring everything from stoner metal and psychedelic rock, to experimental noise and drone abstractions. Though there are other records of theirs which explore drone music in more challenging ways, there is no better introduction to Boris' genius drone works than "Flood". Simultaneously a commentary on climate change, the apocalypse, cycles of tension and release through rebirth, and the inevitability of natural forces, "Flood" divorces metal's aggression whilst retaining its heaviness. Here, texture replaces structure almost entirely: waves of guitar and bass ripple through the register and gradually build only to deepen in the murk. Bazaart 3. Natural Snow Buildings - The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006) With a duo who are as multi-faceted and prolific as Natural Snow Buildings, it's hard to say where to begin. So many of their best works are challenging and impenetrable for beginners, but "The Dance of the Moon and the Sun" is as good of an entry point as possible, one that also demonstrates their remarkable talents and what makes them one of the best drone artists of all time. Built across an inconceivable span of material and time, tDotMas meticulously melds the best of drone, ritual ambient, and psychedelic folk to create a kaleidoscopic occult-influenced statement on nature, the cycle of all things, and how the macro reflects the micro and vice versa. The drones carry folk melody inside them the way wood carries grain: structurally, invisibly. Bazaart 4. Éliâne Radigue - Trilogie de la mort (1998) Another massively prolific and important artist in the field of drone music. Éliâne Radigue's composed this three-part work on the ARP 2500 synthesizer in response to deep loss and her deepening engagement with Tibetan Buddhist philosophy on death and transition. Each section moves at the pace of sheer contemplation rather than composition - texture as composition, atmosphere as convention. Time operates under different rules within the runtime of this album. The drone here is not repetition but sustained attention on the ideas that Radigue is getting at. Radigue found in her synthesizer a precision tool for deciphering and dissecting mortality itself in ways language simply couldn't reach. Reaching the unreachable through sound and space - isn't that what music is all about? Bazaart 5. Roland Kayn - Tektra (1984) Roland Kayn worked within a cybernetic framework, building electronic systems that operated semi-autonomously to create generative music, and then he recorded the results. "Tektra", originally issued across four LPs, is what those systems produced: vast metallic textures, industrial in feeling, stemming from somewhere beyond the realm of deliberate human intention. But much in the way, Richard D. James gave machines humanity in the nineties with the birth of IDM music, Roland Kayn did the same with "Tektra". The work was largely forgotten for years, circulating only among devoted specialists, before rediscovery brought it the attention it so deserved. Drone itself as scientific process, as machine logic, as something that echoes the ideas of its composer only partially. Kayn's willingness to cede control is the most radical thing about it. Bazaart 6. Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code (2019) A figurehead statement for the "holy minimalism" movement, Kali Malone's "The Sacrificial Code" occupies the intersection of early sacred music and minimalist drone, sharing space with trailblazers like La Monte Young along with early medieval polyphony. Recorded on pipe organ using just intonation tuning, which means the harmonics interact in ways equal temperament was specifically designed to prevent. This tuning results in interference patterns, beating frequencies, and overtones that seem to materialize from nowhere. Even though its bones are rooted in the drone trailblazers of old, it is a musical experience unlike any other. The organ sustains notes until they become soundscaped environments. The discovery of what exists within this environments, the shimmer and slow collision of perfectly tuned harmonics, is the entire argument of the album itself. Bazaart 7. Time Machines [Coil] - Time Machines Music for astral projecting. Music for stargazing in 4D. Music for transcending into the immaterial into something unknowable, deep, and dark. Coil have long been one of my all-time favorite groups, and this side project, Time Machines, is a deliberately crafted, perfectly honed statement on the art of sound's capacity to alter the way we perceive the world around us. Each of the four tracks is named after a specific psychedelic compound, and the record is explicitly designed to alter the listener's temporal perception through sound rather than chemistry. John Balance, Peter Christopherson, and Drew McDowall built slowly evolving synthesizer drones that barely announce their own movement. This is Coil at their most pharmacologically serious: not music about drugs but music engineered to do what drugs do. Music that will hack your pineal gland if you surrender to its flow and pay attention. Bazaart 8. Paul Jebanasam - Continuum (2016) While not as accessible as some records on this list, it simply must be mentioned because "Continuum" one of the most consistently slept-on drone releases of all time, it is also one of the greatest. Jebanasam works here where electroacoustic composition and drone converge, blending the lines between drone, post-industrial music, and glitch, to create a hard-hitting, noisy fever dream, whose dense production and complexity is staggering and mind blowing. Granular synthesis and deep bass textures build something that feels sacred without referencing any specific tradition of the sacred. This is a record concerned with presence - with the way sustained sound reshapes a listener's relationship to time and to their own body. It is a record that is as much meditation as it is exorcism. Bazaart 9. Jim O'Rourke - Live at Japan 2002.9.16 Jim O'Rourke is, without hyperbole, one of the most multi-faceted and hyper talented artists alive today. An artistic and musical polymath, who defies convention at every turn. A decorated session musician, a seasoned solo artist with an extensive and evolving career of records, and a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with everyone from Sonic Youth to Keiji Haino, so it's only fitting that his best work ever is a bootleg live performance for a Japanese audience. Here, O'Rourke meticulously and patiently builds atmosphere and texture, blending the lines between drone, chamber folk, indie folk, and ambient music, to create a centerpiece performance that captures the unrepeatable, unimaginable essence of improvised genius. O'Rourke builds slow, spacious, purely electronic drones which unfold in real time, before coalescing into indie folk guitars, all of which culminate to what is perhaps the greatest cover performance of all time: a 10-minute drone interpolation of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car". This track alone, is a masterclass in how to honorably recreate the emotional core of another's work through a decidedly different lens. This live performance is as much of an emotional statement as it is a masterclass on why drone music is remarkable. Bazaart 10. Theatre of Eternal Music - Theatre of Eternal Music 1960-64 La Monte Yong's collective, Theatre of Eternal Music, comprised of legendary musicians like John Cale, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise, and Tony Conrad, pefromed extended drone works in early 1960s New York that essentially laid the groundwork for the genre and founded a tradition. The recordings were legendary and suppressed for decades, now circulating through booting releases and YouTube uploads. To hear them now is to encounter an origin point: the moment before minimalism hardened into a movement, before drone had established conventions of its own, when a group of musicians held notes for as long as possible and discovered what lived inside the sustain. This is the benchmark moment that led to the genre's true fruition. Everything explored in this release comprises the essence of everything that came after. And while it is challenging, its psychedelic textures and trance-inducing soundscapes are infinitely rewarding. Bazaart Some Other Picks: Roland Kayn - Infra Tim Hecker - Radio Amor Eliane Radigue - Adnos I-III Eliane Radigue - Kyema, Intermediate States Natural Snow Buildings - Daughter of Darkness Ground-Zero - Consume Red Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love Is a Stream The Caretaker - Everywhere at the End of Time: Stage 6 Bull of Heaven - 105: I'm Not Here Anymore Tony Conrad with Faust - Outside the Dream Syndicate Yellow Swans - Going Places David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir - Hearing Solar Winds Stars of the Lid - Music for Nitrous Oxide Stars of the Lid - The Ballasted Orchestra Tim Hecker - Ravedearth, 1972 Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht Hans-Peter Schulz - Fremde Zeit Addendum 4 Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline Birchville Cat Motel - Beautiful Speck Triumph Bazaart Some Other Picks Pt. 2 Jason Lescalleet - The Pilgrim James Ferraro - Jarvid 9: Gecko Troum & All Sides - Shōtūn Birdfeeder - Jurassic Park Theme (1000% Slower) Sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions Natural Snow Buildings - Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches Pom Pom - Pom Pom (DJ Mix) Sunn O))) & Boris - Altar Mount Eerie - Sauna This Heat - Health and Efficiency Eliane Radigue - Lile re-sonante La Monte Young - The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25, 6:17:50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC Earth - Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version SleepResearchFacility - Deep Frieze Maeror Tri - Mycin Boris - Dronevil -Final- Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panalotis - Deep Listening Windy & Carl - A Dream of Blue Boredoms - Seadrum / House of Sun SleepResearchFacility - Dead Weather Machine Bazaart