Drone Not Drones

Drone music is a transformation of space, an invitation to channel energy, a backdrop with nothing at its center. It is an emptiness or a launching pad for meditation. It asks you to slow down and suspend the pace of your life. But does not instruct you to do anything. Your thoughts—or your lack of thoughts—are its materials. It is a medicine, but it is also something more than medicine because it requires creative labor and can take the form of art. The labor involved in composing drones is not always placid; it can be impulsive or patient. When listening, this labor transforms magically back into nothingness. By slowing you down, it takes you close to yourself, which is also a way of being outside yourself. Even more than dance music, drone music is a direct path to the unconscious. This record connects drone music to the moon. Among celestial bodies, the moon is arguably the most elusive and complex. It is also the closest to us. Like someone you love, it reveals itself and then goes away, teasing you by always changing its shape. It has been regarded as a source of divinity or energy because it derives its light from the sun. In 1978, Swiss metaphysician Hans Cousto translated the orbit times of celestial bodies to musical frequencies audible to the human ear. The two compositions on this album adopt his conversions of the moon’s periodic motions to musical frequencies. Their common fundamental frequency is 210.42 Hz (a slightly sharp version of G#, which is traditionally tuned to 207.652 Hz when one uses equal temperament). Twenty-nine octaves below this frequency, one arrives at a pitch so low it would be equivalent to the synodic lunar month: 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds. This is the average length of time from one new moon to the next. Like the dynamic phases of the moon, these two drone compositions are interdependent and complementary. They were recorded in two different cities by two different groups of musicians. Side A, entitled “Initiation,” features American Cream Band, the multi-genre collaborative project of Twin Cities-based musician Nate Nelson. Over four years, Nelson followed a schedule in accordance with traditions stretching back to ancient Sumerian civilization that link each day of the week to the seven visible planets. On a series of Mondays (or “moon-days”) Nelson meditated, read about the moon’s mythologies, undertook a divination practice, and composed, recorded, and edited “Initiation.” Side B, entitled “Moon Bed,” is a collaboration between Indianapolis-based musicians Landon Caldwell and Mark Tester. Their composition is in a major mode and filled with light. It floats into angelic spaces. By contrast, Nelson and his collaborators imagined “Initiation” as an exercise that pushes us to difficult, even menacing, spaces that are both forgotten and otherworldly.  —Michael Gallope