Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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These are the very foundations of seeking the face of god music and humanity and run through classical and jazz and into post-war pop culture and its esoteric and mainstream fringes from the Beatles and George Harrison’s fascination with Ravi Shankar or his equivalent in the Stones Brian Jones and his recordings of the Moroccan The Master Musicians of Joujouka . What I love about this book is that it turns you onto many of the game mainstream changers underground geniuses like Lamonte Young with zero snobbery. It thrills to the Stooges and the Doors slower drones to the genius of jazz goddess Alice Coltrane and on and on into post-punk and Swans and Sonic Youth and into fringe modern metal and the dark cellos of…. For a while I thought I might use this book as a reference. So Harry and I disagree on a few things. Who cares? I can just ignore his wittering and explore the numerous musicians he mentions myself, right? But then I realised - if he's making such mistakes and such dumbfounding assertions about stuff I am familiar with, then who knows what sort of boneheaded things he's saying about stuff I'm not so familiar with? This story does not start in the twentieth century underground: the monolithic undertow has bewitched us for millennia. The book takes the drone not as codified genre but as an audio carrier vessel deployed for purposes of ritual, personal catharsis, or sensory obliteration, revealing also a naturally occurring auditory phenomenon spanning continents and manifesting in fascinatingly unexpected places. I think the problem of this book lies in what is presented and what it was marketed to be and what it actually is. So if you are interested in the drone genre, this book will most likely be a disappointment because you know most of the things in here already and will probably shake your head while reading about all the bands that - according to Sword - produce monolithic undertows. It was nice to get so much affirmation that there's a wider world of drones. Too often I have thought of "drone" as simply Eliane Radigue near-stasis, and categorizing so much else as "sort of drone," including my own work.... like my music has drones but is not drone. I'm glad to discard that distinction. Drones can replace traditional chords and harmony as an axis for other parts to rotate around, or can underpin rhythm while still managing to bend the perception of time and progression.

As for the writing, it often reads as if the author had found a Thesaurus for the first time in his life and could not put it down — it’s simply too much at times. Sometimes entertaining but other times his language repertoire is characterized by shaky images and crooked similes that are repeated in slightly different forms throughout the text. Beginning in 1963, performances of his Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble – which at one point included John Cale, soon to be in the Velvet Underground, and Tony Conrad, who would work with Faust in the 1970s – were long explorations of single, sine-wave tones. Young and his wife, light artist Marian Zazeela, hummed; Conrad played violin; Cale played a viola with a flattened bridge that he’d strung with electric guitar strings. It wasn’t just the nakedness of the drone that was transformative. It was also the volume. Every element was heavily amplified. The sound, by all accounts, was overwhelming – wild, raw, and elemental – an embodiment of the romantic idea of the sublime as beauty plus terror. The drone, Young said, is “an attempt to harness eternity”; the primal is neither nice nor pretty. Harry Sword has created a very nice, chronological overview of the drone and its place in music. I can almost guarantee that you will hear about bands, artists and projects that you never knew existed. And you will almost certainly discover bands you'll really like. Sword is a deeply knowledgeable and perceptive advocate for a vast range of often esoteric, sometimes challenging, always extraordinary musicBut I'm just left with the feeling that however many bands Sword can list and describe in flowery prose, the book never truly live up to the expectations set by its introductory chapter.

This is not the book it claims to be. This is not an exploration of the drone in music. It starts out as such, yes. But the author loses his way almost immediately, and what we get instead is a turgid trudge through a select history of various disparate forms of music throughout the latter half of the 20th century. And by the end, the only drone is the sound of a Sword grinding his axe in impotent rage at the perceived evils of the modern world. This chapter is an odd one as it’s not as focused on a scene or genre as the other chapters are. I loved the Brian Eno bit. You have Aphex Twin, Godflesh and other stuff in this chapter. It’s great albeit not as focused as other chapters. It kind of felt like a “what have I left out?” kind of chapter to me.The first half of the book is the strongest. I found his discussion of the influence of Moroccan and Indian music (especially Ravi Shankar) on 1960s Western music especially compelling. It is in these earlier chapters where Sword is outside his area of expertise, and at times he lets himself down, but he paints a clear picture of why and how the music evolved the way it did. The original drummer in the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise was a true bohemian who led a life straight out of a Kerouac novel. A poet, publisher, occultist, calligrapher and producer of some of the strangest drone music ever made, he played for a number of years in La Monte Young’s group the Theatre of Eternal Music before joining – and leaving – the Velvets in 1965.