Objection Sustained

So, I just finished reading the book Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion by one Harry Sword.  I was given this book because it concerns and explores the drone and how it's manifested in myriad forms throughout the history of music.  A compelling topic, eh?  I myself have spent quite a lot of time in recent years trying to figure out exactly how to write about drone; compared to other musics, which are notoriously hard enough to write about as it is ('dancing about architecture', etc), drone is particularly challenging to put into words, lacking many of the distinctive features (viz. lyrics, rhythm, tempo, melody, harmonic progression, structure) other music tends to have, and as a result my descriptions of drone pieces tend to be kind of synaesthetic and circumlocutive or fall back on relating exactly how they make me feel, because otherwise I'm forced to try and detail what sort of permutation of the overtone series the piece in question uses, or whatever.  And as for writing about the history of drone, that's also a very interesting task, because the drone has kind of always been present in music for as long as it's existed.  Drone has never been a 'scene' per se and it's not an artform with much pop-culture import or commercial viability, so while for a book about e.g. punk rock, there is a surfeit of legendary musicians one could interview with long-documented histories one could consult, a book about drone would have to veer into more historical and ethnomusicological territory.  Plus, think of all the neat features this book could have about contemporary, obscure experimental artists who don't tend to get featured in music-nonfiction like this!  Needless to say, I got very excited about reading this book.  But, I don't think Mr. Sword fully rose to the challenge and this ended up kind of a disappointing read.

I do think the first couple chapters actually do a lovely job at exploring many of the countless different and interesting forms in which drone exists in the world.  The prologue itself is one of the most substantive chapters in the whole of the book, briefly covering various topics from Tim Hecker's pipe-organ pieces to Matthew Herbert's conceptual musique concrète works to Cosmic Background Radiation, the acoustics of panopticon prisons, Merzbow's description of 'ecstasy of sound', noise pollution and 'The Hum'.  Using many incidental examples of background drones, of society and of the universe, is a great choice for an introduction.  It's enticing and seems like a wonderful topic to be explored in further detail in later chapters; how does drone-music relate to and come from these (many non- or extra-musical) examples?  Is a drone music in the first place?  Is there something universal about it?  The first chapter is informative and fascinating as well, delving into the rather arcane subject of archaeoacoustics, and the second discusses various traditions of drone-based musics around the world, as well as contemporary musicians taking influence from them.  These are the strongest chapters in the book, never sitting still for long but nevertheless introducing innumerable interesting ideas and living up to the back cover's promise of 'a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers'.  But still, as a whole, the book is deeply flawed.

For one thing, Monolithic Undertow seems to have been either edited in a hurry or not at all.  Typographical errors are minor but frequent.  Occasionally paragraphs begin un-indented.  There are a handful of grammatical mistakes, but also a few funny malapropisms (Éliane Radigue is described as having synthesized 'shimmering aquiline movements' in her music).  Sometimes the same conspicuous word (e.g. 'thrum') will appear twice in a sentence.  Worse, for whatever reason it seems Mr. Sword at various points will cleave to a particular word and begin using it just about every page for pages on end.  'Cleave' is actually one of these, and 'hash', and 'by dint', the latter of which appears twice in the book's second-to-last paragraph.

Actually, on the subject of 'hash', this book has a serious drug problem.  Sword averages at least one reference to controlled substances for every page, which quickly becomes sort of maddening, not merely due to its unerring predictability, but also because I kind of take umbrage with the omnipresence of drugs in this book in the first place.  This is to say, while drugs are certainly an influence on drone and drone-influenced music, I think it's a mistake to characterize them as important to the drone experience itself.  What I've always liked about drone is that it is a consciousness-expanding, perception-altering experience in and of itself.  I'm sure drugs enhance this, or make it easier to submit to such uncompromising and stationary music, but you don't by any means need them.  I've always been a bit irritated by other descriptions of the importance of drugs in music (unavoidable in hack rock journalism) for this reason; it seems to devalue the music on its own terms, or disingenuously implies that drugs were necessary to its creation.¹  I love drone for reshaping the way I think about music and exponentially increasing my patience for it.  It's sort of a spiritual experience, being able to find within oneself that ability to get lost in a drone.  Taking drugs while listening to it is practically cheating; it does the work for you.  I'm not saying that to specifically condemn drugs or whatever, I just get the sense that Sword clearly values them as a mythological source of inspiration whereas I don't.  That's why I also find Sword's frequent references to extreme (i.e. on the 'loud' end of things) volume kind of frustrating too; the system is rigged to be unavoidably immersive, and I tend to enjoy the process of adapting to appreciate such potentially boring or ignorable music.  It's deceptively powerful, and it has the capacity to fundamentally alter the way you think about music, and in my case it makes me perceive just about everything a little differently.  I learned patience from listening to multiple-day-long pieces of music.  To me, that's half the fun of drone, that it changes you.  

Also frustrating is that this book doesn't have a clear sense of identity.  The first few chapters suggest it to be a comprehensive historical and musicological look at the drone, but the rest of the book flipflops between trying to be more like a rock-history type of book, and just a glorified list of music Harry Sword likes.  That is to say, Sword quickly stops rising to the task of writing about throat-singing, raga or what have you and derails the book to start talking about music that's at-best tenuously related to drone.  John Cale's and Angus MacLise's involvement in the Theatre of Eternal Music allow the La Monte Young-centric fourth chapter to segue into a chapter entirely focused on the Velvet Underground² ³ (making sure to note the amount of speed and heroin everyone was on)⁴, and from there the focus pinballs wildly and indiscriminately between more-or-less any vaguely experimental or cutting-edge rock band, including but not limited to Hawkwind, Butthole Surfers, Faust, Big Black, the Stooges, and so on.  There's about half a chapter on No Wave even though most of the artists involved have absolutely nothing to do with drone⁵.  Mr. Sword has the bad habit of taking a genre that's a couple degrees of separation from drone (e.g. sludge metal) and, instead of merely providing a brief list of examples, digressing to provide backstory for every single band mentioned, no matter how irrelevant.  This is how you get the trainwreck of a seventh chapter, 'Reverse Hardcore', that instead of succinctly mentioning the Stooges' one (1) song that includes elements of drone ('We Will Fall'), starts out with a detour about the formation and early history of the band before itself getting derailed to talk about the MC5.  Once the chapter got to a quote from Henry Rollins about how Ted⁶ Nugent really 'understood the power of sustain and drone' I started to ask myself what the hell I was even reading.

Even artists that make perfect sense in a book about drone end up being really poorly wedged in.  Swans, a key force in adapting drone to the rock idiom, whose studio catalogue alone is full of half-hour-long humming slow-build post-rock tracks, are given two paragraphs⁷ that focus almost entirely on their debut album Filth rather than any of their later, more apposite work.  Autechre, masters of the hypnotic side of experimental electronic music, are similarly mentioned only for their early work as an ambient-techno act rather than their later excursions into pure digital drone on elseq 1-5 or NTS Sessions 1-4 or Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae.  They're already in the book, why not focus on their albums that actually pertain to the topic?  

Then there're also the many artists and movements that don't get included.  Central, relatively well-known figures in the genre such as Kali Malone, Natural Snow Buildings, Stars of the Lid, Alvin Lucier and Keiji Haino go without so much as a mention.  Boris, probably the defining drone metal band besides Sunn O))) and perhaps Earth, appears only once, in an aside about their name coming from a Melvins song.  Early examples of drone influence in classical music (e.g. Penderecki) are ignored.  Even going into more obscure examples, there are really interesting things you could cover writing about drone!  The Onkyo movement of experimental music, for example, spawned among other things Sachiko M's Bar Sachiko, an hour-long album consisting of naught but two unaltered sine-wave drones.  That's fascinating!  It brings new dimension to the world of drone.  It's not like Sunn O))) at all, it's trebly and piercing and devoid of any depth or timbral nuance.  What qualities does it still have in common with the other drone musics in the book?  Is it still really music?  These are interesting ideas to explore!⁸  Bull of Heaven sure as fuck doesn't get mentioned, and I tried really hard to not take that as too much of a slight because yes, they are pretty little-known, but they too are an undeniably unique and important force in elevating and conceptualizing drone in the internet age via, among other things, their unfathomably-long pieces of music.  They deserve the recognition!  And even if the book is going to focus more on rock musicians, the choices here feel so arbitrary and confusing.  Why Tad and Hawkwind and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, instead of My Bloody Valentine, or Yo La Tengo, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor?  For all the drone influence the Stooges had, what makes them any more appropriate an inclusion than fucking Wilco?  I guess that's the true issue I have with this book.  It feels incomplete and weirdly incurious.  It reads like a half-baked attempt to string together a bunch of interesting but essentially totally disparate music Mr. Sword already liked, and though the topic of drone-as-audio-carrier-vessel is vague, it clearly isn't vague enough.  I don't know.  As much as I love to see a book all about such an underappreciated form of music, Monolithic Undertow really let me down in a lot of ways, and I hope one day another writer is able to pick up where Sword left off.

¹ Actually, speaking of which, at one point Mr. Sword has the temerity to declare good doom metal by necessity a product of authentic, harrowing life experience, which as far as I'm concerned is unfounded BS.  As if the exalted Tony Iommi's guitar tone can only be recreated by guys who've, like, taken 15 years off their life from drug abuse, and that that's just as important as collecting vintage amp equipment.

² As though this book didn't have far more interesting things to write about than the Velvet Underground, whose history and legacy, we can rest assured, have been thoroughly chronicled elsewhere.  

³ Oh, also Sword goes out of his way to editorialize about their self-titled album being 'middling', which opinion is amusingly both unsolicited and unpopular.  This is what I mean about the book bordering on just a series of unconnected music takes from this guy; there are various other albums called 'criminally underrated' or similar at points, which dilutes both the tone and point of the book.

⁴ History favours the winners, and this is just as true in rock history as in any other kind; no matter how much of a miserable mess your life is, if you happen to create legendary and beloved pieces of music at the time you can bet guys like Harry Sword will romanticize the shit out of your three-day amphetamine benders.  Check for yourself how differently he writes about the drug use of the early Velvets than he does strung-out, past-her-prime, dropped-from-her-label-for-being-openly-racist Nico.

⁵ No rationale could possibly convince me that James Chance and the fucking Contortions belong in this manuscript, and for that matter none is even given.

⁶ (Fucking)

⁷ (the second of which uses the word 'ossify' twice in the span of three sentences)

⁸ The fact that, in the context of electrocardiography, a sustained sine-wave is quite literally the sound of Death, itself unavoidably suggests a compelling and lurid subtext one could very easily apply to the drone.  This chapter practically writes itself.