Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

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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! I think the problem of this book lies in what is presented and what it was marketed to be and what it actually is. So if you are interested in the drone genre, this book will most likely be a disappointment because you know most of the things in here already and will probably shake your head while reading about all the bands that - according to Sword - produce monolithic undertows. 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.

This is not the book it claims to be. This is not an exploration of the drone in music. It starts out as such, yes. But the author loses his way almost immediately, and what we get instead is a turgid trudge through a select history of various disparate forms of music throughout the latter half of the 20th century. And by the end, the only drone is the sound of a Sword grinding his axe in impotent rage at the perceived evils of the modern world. 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. 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. Harry also has a habit of inserting himself into the narrative. He seems to think he's Hunter S. Thompson - our fearless gonzo reporter issuing harrowing dispatches from the frontline of his chemical misadventures. So it's a pity he comes across as more like Alan Partridge out of his depth on a Manchester drug bust. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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? Great introduction chapter. The drone in: doom metal, household appliances, the womb, drones flying over warzones, industrial music, actual industry and the universe itself. This chapter is great as it really shows Sword setting out his stand and what he’s going to offer you in this book. It is never single minded, he’s great at looking at the drone from the countless angles you can examine it from. This is what happens when you draw clear battle lines around ancient and universal languages like music. You hurt yourself in your confusion! 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 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. As for the writing, it often reads as if the author had found a Thesaurus for the first time in his life and could not put it down — it’s simply too much at times. Sometimes entertaining but other times his language repertoire is characterized by shaky images and crooked similes that are repeated in slightly different forms throughout the text. 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.

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It was nice to get so much affirmation that there's a wider world of drones. Too often I have thought of "drone" as simply Eliane Radigue near-stasis, and categorizing so much else as "sort of drone," including my own work.... like my music has drones but is not drone. I'm glad to discard that distinction. Drones can replace traditional chords and harmony as an axis for other parts to rotate around, or can underpin rhythm while still managing to bend the perception of time and progression. 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! 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.

The book itself It has a particularly drone-like feel in that middle section: like the same story is repeated with different players, facing different emotional challenges, in different cities, on different drugs, each one influencing the next. So. many. drugs...

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”. 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.