Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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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. This is a book about the very human fascination with sound, the drone and the shamanic other. The whole weighty volume works like a drone – pulling you into its own ecstatic journey – perhaps a groundbreaking in itself – perhaps the world’s first book of drone writing! Sword is a deeply knowledgeable and perceptive advocate for a vast range of often esoteric, sometimes challenging, always extraordinary music A shorter chapter that follows on from the avant-garde exploration. Sword charts the origins and development of The Velvet Underground and the drones influence on the band. Lou Reed’s solo career post Velvet is briefly covered as well. TVU are a great band, I don’t need to tell you that but an underrated aspect of their sound is the drone and Sword highlights that brilliantly.

Starts off strong with the author in an ancient Maltese mausoleum with strange amplifying acoustics. The early chapters have the tone and sprawl of an enthusiastic stoner relating a recent dive down a wikipedia rabbit hole. He establishes the premise that drone is the basis for all music and is key to the way we connect with the world and space and time, and begins to elaborate on the role of drone in so many different musics.

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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).

Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion (2020) is not a run of the mill music book. Harry Sword explores how the drone, or drone music, has a long and rich history. From early primitive instruments through sacred chants and onward into modern music, he finds evidence everywhere. This exploration embraces The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Sun 0))), the Stooges, Sonic Youth, the Master Musicians of Joujouka, amongst many more. I get the impression that the author had an idea and tried to put bands and albums that he loves into a rather tight framework— whether these albums actually fit or not does not seem to matter. I mean, just because The Beatles use the sitar on some songs does not make them a drone band. Not even the Beatles songs the author talks about have a strong drone vibe - meaning that there is a sense / feel of sustain to get lost in. With many of the bands the author writes about, there really is no eponymous “monolith undertow”. For a while I thought I might use this book as a reference. So Harry and I disagree on a few things. Who cares? I can just ignore his wittering and explore the numerous musicians he mentions myself, right? But then I realised - if he's making such mistakes and such dumbfounding assertions about stuff I am familiar with, then who knows what sort of boneheaded things he's saying about stuff I'm not so familiar with? 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. An inspired and intuitive navigation of the drone continuum, MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW maps the heavy underground with a compass firmly set to new and enlightening psychedelic truthsThe journey continues through religious inanition from the holy OM to the haunting Gregorian chants of the Byzantine courts and continues, as it has done for centuries, to the centre of the drone as a sonic enabler of meditative transcendence. A look at the more avant-garde end of things relating to the drone in the 60s and onwards. Really interesting to read about John Cale in the 60s pre velvet underground. La Monte Young is a charlatan and reading about him and how he treated his collaborators just made me angry. I mean lets be honest if you're making music and Yoko Ono is around you're doing it wrong. Respect to Terry Riley and Conrad and others who while making weird music at least didn't disappear up their own asses like Young always has. Genuinely this is the worst chapter along with the final one. This chapter is bad due to La Monte Young being a pretentious ass, albeit an influential pretentious ass. Still interesting to read about but frustrating at the same time. 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. The drone hooks you in and takes you on the trip. It’s the fundamental of music’s ancient and modern because it is a direct connection with the vibration of nature, the universe and god. It is the core of all old musics and an increasingly key part of modern music. Unfortunately, the book later devolves into a more traditional capsule history of a music journo's favorite bands. He mentions early on that he started off writing a history of doom metal and much of this reads like he barely altered that content to fit the new thesis. His genre interests are wide ranging, but past 1990 primarily focused on the UK. Several musicians and bands, particularly in the punk and EDM chapters, have a very tenuous connection to drone, while more relevant ones go unmentioned--no Yellow Swans, Thomas Koner, Kali Malone, GRM, et al. Noise music in general is barely examined.

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. 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. I recently read this and it definitely changed what I was doing. For the last few years I've had two modes of operation: monolithic ( ), wall of sound pieces with hardly any movement at all -- and then semi-endurance performances, such as this piece Neptune I've been working on that's performed over the 4 hours and change it takes to get there at light speed. Strangely enough this book got me thinking in much shorter terms, as in how short can I get and still be classified as drone, and has shaken a lot of other stuff loose. Excellent read. No hit or miss on this one. Diving from it into The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Klause has been really interesting. In 2021 drone is everywhere framing the dystopia and releasing to the euphoria and its journey is a strong reflection of the times. Harry Sword connects with the music that can be reflective and transcending. He looks at why the drone works – the enticing trip that creates a sense of the other, the ecstatic embrace of the one note, the endless cosmic slip and slide of sound that draws you into something deeper and mediative and into something so deep and eternal that you are hypnotised by its beauty. He signposts the key player and explains the fundamental brilliance of the drone.

This is what happens when you draw clear battle lines around ancient and universal languages like music. You hurt yourself in your confusion! This was a great trip through all things drone, with some minor hang-ups I'll discuss later in this review. I discovered some great music that I hadn't listened to and read some spirited descriptions of some of my favourite musicians. Monolithic Undertow is quite linear in structure but extremely wide in its focus. There is a definite chronology in music. Everyone owes a debt to someone else. If I was trapped in a room Oldboy style for most of my life with no view of culture I wouldn't be asking for a guitar when I was released. Every artist decides to make art based off the art of another and Sword does a great job tracing the lineage of drone throughout this book. Every artist has to be inspired. For example Sunn O))) and Earth would never have made drone metal if the Melvins did not release the album Lysol. Much of this book is Sword describing someone's art, the scene around them and then how those inspired by the music would go on to create their own music. This is much more than a history of the drone and I want to give you an idea of the books layout and if it might interest you. I'll do this with a brief look at each chapter, my thoughts on each chapter and my closing thoughts. Monolithic Undertow undertow takes you on this journey with an eminently readable and fascinating trip. Harry Sword’s writing style is super informed and explains the complex with clarity and the strange with familiarity creating a well-informed and captivating account as he embraces the whole journey deep into the heart of pop culture. 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. This chapter is an odd one as it’s not as focused on a scene or genre as the other chapters are. I loved the Brian Eno bit. You have Aphex Twin, Godflesh and other stuff in this chapter. It’s great albeit not as focused as other chapters. It kind of felt like a “what have I left out?” kind of chapter to me.