Drone music, of all the current trends, seems the toughest to critique. It's an offshoot of the difficulty with minimalism in general – to make a visual analogy, what makes one nearly all-black canvas better than another? It all gets pretty subjective pretty quickly.
Which brings me to the subject of this review, a band called Messages, and their three-track album, After Before. It's ethnically-inspired drone, somewhere in between Jon Hassell's Fourth World music and the looser, longform explorations of Bardo Pond.
But where the former has virtuosity and the latter subtlety, Messages has neither. If you're trying to turn someone on to drone, you'll often get the comment that plagues minimalists of all stripes – "Oh, I could do that." And here, they'd probably be right. That person and three friends could indeed build a composition of Friend 4 parking their hands in one position on an organ (apparently the "drone" necessary for inclusion in the genre); Friend 3 absently thwupping away at the same note on their bass; Friend 2 (at about minute 5) deciding on a not-quite interesting pattern on the bongos; while the naysayer (Friend 1, and requisite "shredder") gets to noodle about modally on the guitar for the duration. Maybe he'd need a Friend 5 to press "rec," but I'm imagining not, as that person would hopefully be the one with the balls to tell Friends 1-4 that what they are doing is in fact boring, adding nothing to the canon of drone music, so they should probably stop.
What makes one all-black canvas better than the next? Well, attention to detail, for one: if you're expecting your audience to care, you have to draw them in. This is what the best minimalist art does; when there's so little there, you'd better make sure that what *is* there is compelling, and understand that the littlest thing can upset the delicate balance of the whole composition. For example, when Friend 1 has been parked on chord 'A' for five minutes, maybe he tries adding an 'F' in there somewhere. This is the kind of glacial shifting that makes the best of the genre work; it still follows the basic tenets of other forms of music, it just develops much more slowly. Or it doesn't develop at all. You can tell when comparing all-black canvases – Artist 1 gave a damn, while Friend 1 said "Oh, I could do that."
No comments:
Post a Comment