ACL 2023 - Top Ten Drone

A Closer Listen

Of the ten album covers below; four are nearly black, two black and grey.  This year’s drone list is dark and foreboding, a reflection of uncertain times.  Even the brightest cover portrays NASA data from a warming earth.  The titles follow suit:  Before We Lie Down in Darknesse, Setting Fire to These Dark Times, Of Shadow and Substance, Whilst We Fall.  In recent years, we’ve been amused by the number of sites who sell drones and link back to our site, oblivious that there is a difference between drone music and aerial drones; but perhaps there is a connection after all.  As war continues to ravage multiple territories, the sound of an aerial drone can produce a Pavlovian feeling of dread.  Our drones, on the other hand, are meant to warn, to relate, even to soothe.  Darkness multiplied by darkness sometimes equals light.

Chaz Knapp & Mariel Roberts ~ Setting Fire to These Dark Times (figureight) The arresting cover art, suggestive of an imaginary Leigh Bowery/Alejandro Jodorowsky mash-up, might lead one to think that organist Chaz Knapp and cellist Mariel Roberts’ album Setting Fire to These Dark Times would be heaving with heavy ritualistic percussion and glum, sonorous choirs. While the music they offer is certainly intense, it’s instead gorgeous, heart-rending, and unexpectedly exhilarating, a cri de cœur aimed at our increasingly attenuated existence in these anthropocenic times. Across nine intriguingly textured tracks, Roberts and Knapp gracefully balance melody with emotion while deftly avoiding sentimentality or knee-jerk rage. As its title suggests, Setting Fire to These Dark Times is a vivid, passionate account of where we are now, how much time we might have left, and what comes after you lose everything. (Damian Van Denburgh)

Original Review

Dronal ~ Whilst We Fall (Supple9) The cover art descends from cool to hot, the music from thin to thick.  Each trajectory conveys a warning; we are headed for climate catastrophe.  There is only a thin slice of time in which to act.  Every once in a while, the artist offers a respite; the tide rolls back to reveal field recordings of children and birds, flickers of hope, reminders of why we rage against the machine.  Last week, Dronal received honors for the album’s cover art; this week we honor the music.  Together, they form a complete package: gorgeous surfaces obscuring a decaying center.  (Richard Allen)

Original Review

Galya Bisengalieva ~ Polygon (One Little Independent) Bisengalieva has always been attentive to the social consequences of the effects of Soviet Policy on the natural landscape of her native country. From the shrinking of the Aral Sea in Aralkum Aralas (2021) she has now turned her attention to the Polygon, the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site located in northeast Kazakhstan, south of the valley of the Irtysh River. Polygon was shut down in 1991, the same year the country gained independence with the government seeking to help families who were exposed to the nuclear tests with 1,323,000 people officially recognized as being negatively affected. With her latest work, Bisengalieva maps out the different locations dotted around the site from plutonium mountains to atomic lakes creating an ominous score that gradually mutates into more sinister territory with electronic beats intersecting plaintive strings. (Gianmarco Del Re)

Original Review

The Inward Circles ~ Before We Lie Down in Darknesse (Corbel Stone Press) We might have expected the first Inward Circles album for six years to continue to delve into the ground, to explore what has remained buried for centuries – and the titles suggest this. But Before We Lie Down In Darknesse feels different: there is an airiness in the source material, an ethereal nature to the pieces. That’s not to say you can’t feel the weight of millennia bearing down upon the earth in the slow-moving drone that dominates at times. But this feels like a more optimistic view of death and decay than before: keep your feet in a peat bog and keep reaching for the stars. (Jeremy Bye)

Original Review

KMRU ~ glim On glim KMRU deploys austere melody and the richness of texture playing with everything from strings to piano, comfortable with both scraping dissonance, and gentle hum. There’s a lot to feel with on glim as the artist experiments with a wider dynamic range and a more diverse array of sonic textures than on earlier solo albums such as last year’s Epoch. There is delicate beauty here but it is often threatened, whether by timbral effects such as a drone’s warbling or wavering, by piercing volume, or by the multiplication of sonic layering and crushing volume.  A sense of place too, a real sense of place, is threatened by technology on this album, its ability to manipulate and fabricate, to overlay and overlap. The limited play with field recording across a quite noisy and sonically dense album might perhaps be interpreted then as an acknowledgment of the perennial threat that someday we ourselves may not be able to locate the natural. (Jennifer Smart)

Original Review

Lawrence English & Lea Bertucci ~ Chthonic (American Dreams) Chthonic opens with a sense of foreboding: growling, pounding drones and scraping strings are in dialogue before fading into silence on album opener “Amorphic Foothills.” The sonic palette changes on “dust storm,” the scraping and growling traded for the delicate hissing of wind and squiggling of frequencies, the volume growing as the track progresses into a fury of hazy, grating timbres that coalesce into a wall of sound that is as loud as it is quiet. And so goes the album, each track exploring a different environmental event and introducing new sounds— twitchy, suggestive synths in one place, nothing more than the sound of the air at others. The album explores “the movement of the earth” and its title comes from the Greek word for the underworld. It is certainly a dark album, one that takes listener’s on a journey through environmental wonder and collapse. It’s also thought a fascinating study in sonic contrast, as Bertucci’s acoustic instruments are transformed by their duet with English’s field recordings and tape manipulations. The resulting album is an exciting listen to two of the experimental music world’s most fascinating artists one in which their collaboration brings out another dimension to each other’s sound. (Jennifer Smart)

Original Review

Lea Bertucci ~ Of Shadow and Substance (Cibachrome Editions) Even our earliest reviews of Bertucci’s work emphasized that she could not be pinned down; not to any one instrument (bass clarinet, saxophone, portable tape player) nor even to anyone medium (photography, video and sound installation). [Nor to one record, as this very list demonstrates!] She is also a composer, of course, a fact which has never been so apparent as on these two side-long compositions, “Vapours,” commissioned by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice, and “Of Shadow and Substance,” commissioned by Philadelphia’s ARS Nova Workshop. While the latter transmutes the dual meanings of the title through an airy exploration of just intonation and extended bowing techniques, the title track’s clamorous percussion and thunderous bowed strings find the composer in more familiar dynamic territory. So many of our favorites from Bertucci’s catalogue have been duos [again, see above], but it is a joy to hear her write for such talented ensembles. (Joseph Sannicandro)

Original Review

Pauline Hogstrand ~ Áhkká (Warm Winters Ltd.) Submission, resignation, acquiescence. The culturally undesirable associations these acts have might make some hesitate, but any drone listener will immediately understand what Hogstrand is attempting to enforce through a deluge of both analog and digital processes: an illuminated form of exertion. To give in to the relentless mass of sounds is not to lose agency, but to reinforce and deepen a dynamic of freely given control, the sublimity of the Áhkká mountain a perfect motif of a relation in which we are but a cosmic speck of dust, yet can overcome its peaks not by means of domination but its exact, exhilarating opposite.  (David Murrieta Flores)

Original Review

Richard Skelton ~ selenodesy (Phantom Limb) Contemplating, as he has for years now, nature’s relentless cycles of life and death, notions of decay and corruption both physical and musical, and the poignant impermanence of existence, Richard Skelton’s Selenodesy, the first of two 2023 releases, finds him exploring worlds beyond the merely human. Throbbing with arcs of sound that glint and moan and teeter on the brink of erupting into squalls of feedback, the tracks have a decidedly otherworldly, electronic texture to them while retaining an analog warmth that’s not far removed from some of the gentler work of the late great Mika Vainio. In his liner notes, Skelton speaks of a case of insomnia sending him out stargazing and how the resulting album, one of his best, is his attempt to transcribe what he’d seen. Insomnia never seemed or sounded so  enviable. (Damian Van Denburgh)

Original Review

Siavash Amini ~ eremos (American Dreams) Moving from strength to strength, Siavash Amini concluded a trio of releases produced this year with eremos, one of his most challenging works yet. Churning, haunted, unpredictable but never impulsive, eremos finds Amini exploring uninhabited terrains both psychological and emotional, using passages from 12th century Iranian philosopher-poet IbnSina’s allegory, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan(The Improvement of Human Reason) as a starting point and map. As we undertake the journey with him, we’re treated to blistering squeals, lush, densely braided microtonal chords, plaintive drones, and sudden, breathtaking silences that are radiant in their purity while teeming with potential menace. History has shown that there’s little reason to hope for improvement in human reason. But there’s redemption in creation, both for Amini and anyone willing to listen and expand their musical horizons. (Damian Van Denburgh)

Original Review