Intro To Drone

“Dazzle Fox” by Andrew Sempere
 
My pal Deb, who you may remember from running the Zed Equals Zee music/tech blog, or the current Daily Idioms thing, decided to throw a conference for her birthday (and called it DEBCON 1), letting all of her multi-talented friends give short talks about an insanely wide variety of topics. So, I’ll be talking about drone, obviously. That’s where this mix came from.

Deb also asked me to put together some drone to play at DEBCON, and I figured this would be a good opportunity to do a chronology of sorts of the genre starting with its introduction to the Western contemporary music world in the ’60s up to the current crop of bad dudes. So here’s the background on this mix. I tried to go for more drone than ambient, and I generally opted for longer songs. I tried to go with “classics” but since you can’t really have a new classic, the later years are more of my favorite well known(ish) stuff. I tried to keep the spacing more or less equal between the decades and was pleased with a nice round number of 20 songs. I included the year of composition or recording when possible but otherwise the year is the release date of the record. I did some equalizing of the tracks but since it’s almost 7 hours (1GB) of drone, I didn’t have time to listen to the whole thing again afterwards, so please let me know if there’s any crazy shit going on volume-wise (side note: Radigue’s piece is on the low side, but it’s maxed out with no clipping so just dig deep and zone in).

Thanks and enjoy.
 

Download Intro To Drone for DEBCON 1

UPDATE: Someone mentioned having trouble unzipping the file, so here’s a link to a folder with the contents of the zip (just 1 mp3, a text tracklist, and the artwork)
 
1. Tony Conrad – Early Minimalism: June 1965 (Part 1) (from Early Minimalism Volume One, 1965)
2. Terry Riley – Untitled Organ (from Reed Streams, 1966)
3. Eliane Radigue – Onward 9,5 (from Vice Versa, Etc…, 1970)
4. La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela – 13 | 73 5:35 – 6:14:03 PM NYC (from Dream House 78′ 17″, 1973)
5. Brian Eno – Discreet Music (from Discreet Music, 1975)
6. Yoshi Wada – Bagpipe (from Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile, 1981)
7. Pauline Oliveros – Horse Sings From Cloud (from Accordion & Voice, 1982)
8. Phill Niblock – Ten Auras (from A Young Person’s Guide To Phill Niblock, 1994)
9. Windy & Carl – Antarctica (from Antarctica (Bliss Out Vol. 2), 1997)
10. Stars Of The Lid – Austin Texas Mental Hospital: Part 2 (from The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid, 2001)
11. Charlemagne Palestine – 2 (from Music For Big Ears, 2000)
12. William Basinski – Disintegration Loop 4 (from Disintegration Loops III, 2003)
13. Tim Hecker – Incurably Optimistic (from Mirages, 2004)
14. Mountains – Hundred Acre (from Sewn, 2006)
15. Fennesz – Happy Audio (from Endless Summer, 2001)
16. Sun Circle – Untitled 1 (from Sun Circle, 2007)
17. Deceh – Untitled 1 (from Deceh, 2009)
18. Kyle Bobby Dunn – Movement For The Completely Fucked (from Ways Of Meaning, 2011)
19. Nicholas Szczepanik – Untitled 2 (from The Truth Of Transience, 2012)
20. Eluvium – Memory Print Boutique (from Catalin, 2014)