Droning on ...

The way I approach music tends to be a bit of a fixation thing. I get a little bit obsessed with a particular type of music and so I make music in that style until I've exorcised it from my system. A while back it was modern classical music so I buggered around with a few pieces and finally came up with the album Quatre pièces modernes which will be released at some point possibly in the Autumn.

Sometimes this obsession lasts a while - in the early days just about everything I did was dark ambient in style. It took about a year to get through that obsession. Then there was Berlin School. Then general ambient, and so on. Sometimes these little obsessions last only long enough to do a few random tracks and one album.

Every so often I'll return to a particular genre because I just feel like doing it but at that point it's not part of the obsession anymore. It's just a whim. It's nice dipping back into other genres from time to time.

At the moment it's drone music. I've always liked it but haven't really done too much with it, just bits here and there. The problem is it's got to be interesting enough for me to want to do it. Using a single note that literally drones on for fifty minutes or an hour would bore me senseless to make.

So I take my usual approach which is throwing everything at it including the kitchen sink and then stripping it back until I get something I like.

The temptation to complicate things is, well, tempting. I'll just add this here. Oh, that would sound good there. But the problem is the pieces cease to be drone music. It's a difficult temptation to ignore.

So far I've got three albums completed all of which are one track and all are around forty to forty-five minutes in length. These are:

1) The Tides Erase All Things

2) Beyond the Liminal World

3) Quiet Thoughts at the End of the World

Are they pure drone. No. No they are probably not. But they are more drone than other things I've done. I think. Probably. The first album is made up of nine tracks! Like I said I need it to be interesting for me to do. Purists would say they are not drone at all and perhaps they are right, but I'm putting them out as part of the Droneseries anyway. So there it is.

I haven't set a date for them to be released yet but I'll get around to it at some point.