Most recent drone: Drone Of The Week #6, 2013 – a spectral effect created with my synthesizer and a short delay with high feedback
I have a fascination with the complexities of short natural sounds on the milliseconds scale. Looking at the harmonic spectrum of very short snippets of human voice and amazing myself about the complexities and intricacies I found was the first sound work I did on my first computer. Stretching them to make notes and drones was my first use of a computer to make music.
Drone Music is an ancient form of musical minimalism. There is no tune, sometimes there is some minimal rhythm, and structure is usually limited to linear development. The one strong element in all traditional and most modern Drone Music is the complex texture, which can change continuously: it can evolve, oscillate, and introduce those minimal rhythms. Some modern Drone Music even eliminates texture changes and uses pure notes or noise – a perfectly valid way of making statements, but not my way of doing things.
I make drones from the decay – that’s the “ringing out” portion – of the percussion sounds I sample around the City and from “real” instruments. I then compose (improvise, usually) simple pieces of music with these drones… which I can use as elements for more complex projects.
This page accesses my Drone Of The Week archive. There probably won’t be one every week, though, and: if you don’t like Drone Music, this will annoy you. All files are in the iTunes format and open in a new window (right-click to download).
week 46, 2012 – the first music I recorded on my new modular synthesizer
week 46, 2012 – the first music I recorded on my new modular synthesizer
week 43, 2012 – a beat on a wheel bin and a suberball bouncing in a wok, stretched to last two minutes
week 39, 2012 – playing my Whaler Waterphone through digital delay with just enough feedbak to keep it going forever…
week 37, 2012 – electric guitar with digital delay, the starting point for a new version of Fluid Mechanics
week 36, 2012 – from Cork City percussion samples, drones and rattles
week 35, 2012 – from Cork City percussion samples, morphing and frequency shifting
