[skip longish introduction]

Ask yourself a question before reading this: Do I want to take a musical travel into my deepest self sometimes? Do I want to fall into sounds and audio-spheres for hours and not travel back. Do I want to search for minute changes in sounds, am I open for new experiences and excursions into music that is deep and resounding and primal and vibrating with energy? If you can answer yes to these questions, please read on. Or are you stuck in a phase were you say, I like the music and the styles I know and I don’t need anything else or new? Do you think this is all new-age-bullshit anyway? Do you think that the style you like most and dedicated your whole musical diet to will always be cool and great and never leave? If so, please hit the back-button about a hundred times and surf back to where you came from. Wait a minute! Maybe you are interested in drones anyway. Maybe reading these next sentences will be good for you. Decide for yourself.

Now, the drone. A drone is a piece of music in any length without all the obvious characteristics of a normal song. There is no definite structure and no refrain, there might not even be a rhythm. Drones are carefully structured tracks that take you on a journey into your own auditive capacities. That means, and that might be the most interesting part, that the perception of such a piece of music is to a very large part dependent on the listener. Sometimes the sound of your own heartbeat will make the whole of the pulsating rhythm of a piece. Now, your daddies might remember something that was called Minimal Music in the Sixties and Seventies and some friend of yours might have heard about ambient and your school teacher knows what music concrete is, and this is truly were the roots of drones are hidden. But Minimal Music still depended on musical instruments and notations and musicians. Ambient is designed to add sound to your living room, as a kind of audio-wallpaper. And music concrete looses all life energy through its academic overhead. Drones, on the other hand, use sounds and noises a lot, take you into a new atmosphere and flow with a lot of energy (the computer and modern recording technologies made it possible, you see) One of the best drones I ever heard, was flying to San Francisco from Munich after a long night and some short sleep– 12 hours of vibrating noises shuffling through my body, while I couldn’t fall asleep because I was too tired but can’t sleep sitting up anyways. Well, actually it was pretty monotonous and boring after some time. A recorded drone can give you so much more, if it is done carefully. It is your own decision if you want to do drugs and what kinds to this or not. I can’t and won’t help you there.

There is another funny thing about this kind of music, which you might like, if you, like me, have a faible for obscure homegrown music and labels. There is a big, wide network of small and even smaller living-room-labels out there who produce this kind of music. Actually, forming a proper label to release this kind of music, is usually a perfect way to chapter 11. I have seen some come and go in the past years, and even though they released some great music, the costs to reach potential customers in a global scale to re-earn your costs are way to high. It never works out. On the other hand, small-time-labels done by one person as a hobby, might not release fifty records per year and might not be available everywhere, but usually these releases are done with more heart and energy, and there is usually such a label somewhere near you and that can be your starting point into a completely new world of music.

Bernd Spring has such a label. If you are coming around here more often, you must have heard about it: Dhyana records releases fine records from all kinds of styles: electronica, low-fi, noise and some that is truly indescribable. It is the home of a bunch of interesting musicians such as Inox Kapell, Troimoucha C., Jean Bach aka littlebrutalravebastards, and quite some others. And Dhyana releases the greatest compilations you can think of (for instance this one, and this one and even this one here.) I knew that Bernd plays in a band project called Deep, which is actually two basses and electronic stuff and they are great. What I hadn’t known until some time ago is, that he is doing solo-stuff as well, that he drones exceptionally well and that there he has already released some stuff - that I want to tell you about after this rather longish introduction:

Such as “Infrastruktur” (released on Gebrauchte Musik, www.gebrauchtemusik.de) which is a 2xCD-pack dealing with the sounds of public places, originally composed for a happening dealing with architecture, literature and sounds. Four pieces of music, all about thirty minutes long that will take you to spaces such as the inside of a computer, the hall of a trainstation, open fields or wherever your fantasy and connotations take you, and explore them with you. See, there are some public spaces, or even private ones, where you go through a lot. You never stop to think about the architecture or the usability of, for instance, a subway station you use every day on your way to work. But it is really worth it, to stop some time and watch people use these public spaces and to think about why and how these places form the people using them. Every subway station has its own pace dictated by the rhythm and length of escalators or the size of the exits and so on. “Infrastruktur” will make you think about things like these. In the course of these two CDs there are sounds of very different varieties. Everyday-like noises and deep dark crashing sounds. The music evolves slowly – but that is clear, if you have thirty minutes to work a dynamic out, you might as well take your time to do it right. Some might call this ambient or music concrete, but the mixture of distorted and disorienting loops and actual sounds makes this unique.

Then there is Bernd Spring’s first proper solo-recording, released on verazität, which is a project connected to Suggestion-Records (www.suggestion-records.de) and comes in a unique packaging, with a beautiful handmade cover, limited to 50 pieces. I hope, the fact that mine carries the number 1 is no bad sign as far as the sales are concerned, but rather an act of friendship on the side of Bernd, whom I ordered this little CD from directly, and he knows I am collector-scum. Or, all fifty copies have the #1 written on them Now that would be cool. Here are 8 tracks in 70 minutes, ranging from two to nearly twenty minutes. It starts off with seven and a half minute of some noises, that change between outside recordings and computer-generated, deep resounding bass-echoes. The whole thing has incredible dynamics, change a lot but never have harsh breaks or cracks in them, though it is really slow after all. Actually, this kind of dynamic flow comes in every track, though they might be quite different after all. There he goes, exploring all different sorts of resonating sounds and echoing interferences, something between a spaceship moving through outer space or icebergs crashing into one another or the sounds you imagine to hear when you are sleeping in a submarine that travels beneath the ice of the arctic. You might even get to hear some estranged melodies, some alien folk for the troubled youth of a different planet. Hm, have you ever stood in your room, e-guitar or bass in hand and just listened to the spheric noises your amplifier makes if you turn it up full. You’ll hear a lot of cklickings, swishings, hummings and summings and you’re afraid to touch the strings of your instrument, because the volume is so high up, that you’d blow your speaker. But every touch, and be it oh so gentle, produces some new noises that flow into the ones come before. There you go: “every debut is better than its follower” – track number three on here. It goes on like that a lot. Surprising, incorporating and always fascinating.

Have I mentioned that Bernd operates a nice little mailorder via www.dhyanarecords.com where he sells little gems like these above. Get in touch with him, because he might just hint you off onto some real beauty like he did to me with the CD by Dronaement vs. Rabbits’ Sorrow called “Between two yearthousands” (released on www.lecridelaharpe.com). Droneament features 9 ambient noise tracks that fit perfectly into the twilight hours of late nights you spend wide awake because you can’t sleep. So you stay up, listen to the sounds of the sleeping city (there always are) and find yourself falling into a trance-like constitution somewhere between sleeping and being awake. A lot happens very subtle and inbetween the sounds here. Definitely worth checking out, due to its warm and satisfying flavour.