Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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Indeed, religious practice all over the world, from the sacred Buddhist Om to haunting Gregorian chant, continues, as it has done for centuries, to centre the drone as a sonic enabler of meditative transcendence.

Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin. Venturing to the very furthest reaches of the drone continuum, Harry uncovers the vibrations uniting a far greater range of sounds and experience than I’d anticipated. Located in Nashville, Tennessee, Third Man Books is dedicated to publishing the best in poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, SF/F, and non-fiction with the same diversity and award-winning design that are hallmarks of our partner company, Third Man Records. The soundtrack to Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda features all the beguiling hallmarks of MacLise’s sound: handheld drums, disembodied voices, field recordings of unknown provenance.Operating within the underground of the New York underground, MacLise produced obscure soundtracks, narcotised sonic sketches and lo-fi field recording tapestries between the mid-60s and late-70s, the vast majority unreleased until his soundtrack to Ira Cohen’s 1968 underground art film Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda saw the light of day in 1999, followed by a sprawling compilation, The Cloud Doctrine, in 2002.

Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). His discography is by some distance the least travelled of the wider Velvets oeuvre, but seriously magical. Between them, Martin and Broadrick have explored every possible permutation of bass culture, and Moor Mother produced one of the past decade’s most intense and powerful records in the shape of Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.

The original drummer in the Velvet Underground, Angus MacLise was a true bohemian who led a life straight out of a Kerouac novel. In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka strongly contest the notion that drone-based music is calming: theirs is an energetic, frenetic sound. Last year’s double album, Cantus, Descant, was her most ambitious record yet, featuring her vocals for the first time. One of the most idiosyncratic electronic producers of recent years, the Canadian sound artist creates subtle drone pieces that fuse baroque atmospherics with the warm, idiosyncratic and sometimes unpredictable tonality of old analogue synths in combination with live instrumentation. The amplifier worship of bands like Earth and Sunn O))); the eternal hum of cosmic background radiation; the fizzing circuits of electronic pioneers like Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros; the queer moon music of Coil; Hawkwind’s cosmic bedsit squalor; the single-minded devotional states achieved by The Theatre of Eternal Music and Tony Conrad; the transcendent ragas of Alice Coltrane; the radical kosmische explorers of post-war Germany; the desolate Midlands techno of Regis… all of them and so many more capture and are captured by the slow note, the drone, the MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW, and embarking on this journey with Harry as my guide was a true pleasure. Broadrick and Martin’s telepathic studio energy trades on their 30-year creative partnership, intertwining layers of rich, distorted tones, and Moor Mother’s powerful flow ties the whole bleak tableau together.He later employed the Masters as house band in the 1001 Nights restaurant that he ran in Tangier with Hamri. Jones’s sensitive post-production dub effects (mainly echo and reverb) were subtle, but add to the head-twisting psychedelic density of the music. With serious volume tempered by a distinct grace, the record paved the way for early Sunn O))) among many others on the underground, and is widely regarded the vital signpost in the drone metal underground. A master of the process of creative reduction, she carves away any superfluous sound, noting frequency ratios on beautiful hand-drawn charts and arriving at an immersive sound sculpted to perfection.