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. If you are interested in a book that looks at sound in its various forms, the book has some interesting chapters and Sword writes about a wide variety of genres and bands with focus on the 20th century. Only two real areas of omission. The Punk/New Wave era is missed when groups like Wire went from one-minute songs to drone in a few years. And Sword as a complete blind spot on the biggest drone community in the British Isles, bagpipe players. I found the book inspiring overall, which was the point, and wound up recording a half-hour drone set for an upcoming internet radio show -- I'm pleased at how it turned out and I might just continue in the same vein from now on, instead of shorter pieces.

At the same time it feels very strange that a book that purports to be about drone music makes no mention of any of the ambient drone scene: major figures such as Steve Roach, Robert Rich, Natural Snow Buildings, Lustmord, Stars of the Lid etc don't get mentioned at all. In the beginning, he highlights that he doesn’t want to write a history of drone music, but a book that “explores the viscous slipstream - drone, doom and beyond - and claims the sounds uncovered, which hinge on hypnotic power and close physical presence, as no less radical.” He goes on to say that Monolith Undertow “follows an outer stellar orbit of sounds underpinned by the drone.” And I would argue that the book falls short of this goal except for the first and last chapters. The irony is that in early music, the drone wasn’t just mainstream, it was music. “If you put a hole in the side of a mammoth tusk, it produces the most amazingly intense drone,” archaeo-musicologist Barnaby Brown says. While western music elaborated into polyphony and counterpoint, the drone has been a constant in cultures worldwide. Sword mostly passes over its place in folk traditions – to include them would have made for a much bigger book – but, as he attests, the range of the drone’s expressiveness as used by traditions as varied as the Gyoto monks of Tibet, Gnawa music of Morocco, and the Sardinian triple-pipe launeddas – an instrument so closely related to the ancient aulos its survival seems miraculous – speaks to a kind of cultural significance that is deeper than culture. In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration. The drone requires neither chord nor band, representing - via its infinite pliability and accessibility - the ultimate folk music: a potent audio tool of personal liberation. Immersion in hypnotic and repetitive sounds allows us to step outside of ourselves, be it chant, a 120dB beasting from Sunn O))), standing front of the system as Jah Shaka drops a fresh dub or going full headphone immersion with Hawkwind. These experiences are akin to an audio portal - a sound Tardis to silence the hum and fizz of the unceasing inner voice. The drone exists outside of us, but also - paradoxically - within us all; an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel...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. My only problem with this book is that I knew a lot of what it talked about already. Being pretty well informed about metal music already and having read Alex Ross' Listen to This and JR Moores Electric Wizards, Monolithic Undertow came in a LITTLE redundant. And what followed was just dismal. The chapter on techno and industrial music ("real" industrial music, mind you!) was dreary, and the final chapter was just miserable. Rather than concluding his tedious tome with a final hurrah about the transcendent possibilities of music, Harry instead decided to lash out at some of the usual modern boogeymen. Even though Harry and I likely agree on many points, nobody wants to get trapped in the corner by a pub bore after he's had a few. You might nod along at the points they make, but you're still going to leave the pub covered in their stale spittle. So thanks, Harry, you vampire. You drained your subject of all its joy and power. The Quietus awaits! This is what happens when you draw clear battle lines around ancient and universal languages like music. You hurt yourself in your confusion!

A lot of drone pieces are very long and the length encourages perceptual change. “If you know that the drone is absolutely constant… then you know that if you hear changing, it is you that is changing, not it,” Eno tells the author. Inside the drone, perceptions of time change too. I don’t know that Sword would go so far as to say that listening to and performing drone music is a kind of meditative practice, but the temporal pliancy of such experiences is crucial, he argues, because they allow you to take control of time, to forget the self and its sense of human transience and frailty. Reading Monolithic Undertow a phrase from a Louise Bogan poem has been running through my mind: “Music that is not meant for music’s cage”. Just as drone music offers a subversive art unconstrained by melodic, harmonic or rhythmic expectations, so it offers a release, however fleeting, from the small limits of our lives, bookended by greater oblivions as they are. It’s a portal from the body’s cage to whatever lies on the other side of ecstasy. 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….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).