Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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In a chapter mainly focused on Archaeoacoustics, Sword travels to Malta to experience the mysterious acoustics of the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni. Archaeoacoustics is a fascinating discipline which attempts to figure out why ancient tombs have the acoustic properties they do. From there, Sword discusses Newgrange in Ireland and the peculiar properties of the famous passage tomb. This is one of the best chapters in the entire book. It clearly shows Sword wondered “where does this all come from” in human terms. He found a solid angle from which to examine where our ancestors utilized drones. It’s a beautiful chapter examining our history as a species. I’d recommend the book for this chapter alone.

The weakest chapter of the entire book closes it out. An annoyingly political and unfocused chapter meanders along before ending. I don’t care about Swords half assed political points I bought this to read about the drone, not how someone playing a violin reflects Brexit and how some other album reflects late stage capitalism. I really enjoyed most of this book but to end it on such a bum note is embarrassing. It’s like a flight to Mars where the La Monte Young chapter was an asteroid shower which hammered the ship and this final chapter is the ship crash landing and exploding. My advice to Sword and White Rabbit would be to edit this out of subsequent runs and actually write a decent conclusion, not whatever this ball-less political preening was attempting to be. 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. An entertaining tour through musical history which effectively culminates in the drone/doom of Sunn O))), Sleep, Electric Wizard, etc. The introduction mentions that the book was originally intended to be a history of doom metal and I think it's helpful to still think of it in these terms because otherwise the choices made about what to include/exclude might seem odd. Without that frame in mind, it can feel like the focus on drone has been forgotten at some points so that the author can write about whatever music they particularly like (e.g. the sections about punk).

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In his short author bio Harry proudly boasts of having been published by The Quietus. And yes, his style of writing is a perfect fit for that place. It's all here: the laboured points; the use of five adjectives when one will do; the meandering run-on sentences; the overuse of italics for emphasis; the tendency to namedrop; and tortured metaphors that look good on paper, but which actually make no sense at all.

Earth are ground zero for drone metal. Fusing the tortoise-slow crawlspace of La Monte Young-era minimalism with metallic textures, their debut album Earth 2 (1993) was released on Sub Pop during the heyday of grunge but, focusing as it did on slowly unfurling, percussion-less drones, was a million miles from the frenetic angst of labelmates Nirvana and Mudhoney. From ancient beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, North Mississippi bluesmen to cone-shattering South London dub reggae sound systems, Hawkwind's Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust, Ash Ra Temple and sonic architects like La Monte Young, Brian Eno, and John Cale, the opium-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the caveman doom of Saint Vitus, the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Swans to the seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow probes the power of the drone: something capable of affording womb-like warmth or evoking cavernous dread alike. This is what happens when you draw clear battle lines around ancient and universal languages like music. You hurt yourself in your confusion!I'm interested but I'm also curious if the book caused you to change the style of drone music you make where the old style is lost forever.