Ambient drone

Ambient drone is the format par excellence for long, meditative sonic excursions: tracks that run past ten minutes, sometimes reaching half an hour or more, unfolding without recognisable melodies or a rhythmic structure; instead, a mass of sound that branches out slowly and enveloping: the harmony stays almost motionless, with variations that sway like slow fluctuations, repeated in a virtually endless back-and-forth. Stars Of The Lid are perhaps the most celebrated example, but reducing the genre to that one name, however precious, only tells part of the story. Not that mapping it out is easy: there is, after all, no true geographic centre to the scene; rather, there's a quiet apparatus organised around a few hubs that communicate at a distance.

Once the kosmische musik phase of the Seventies and the new age period of the following decade had run their course, the music shifted toward dimensions of domestic intimacy. The United States remains a historic point of reference, but the coordinates have changed over time. Japan is the other fixed point, with Tokyo and more peripheral scenes like Kobe. Europe, for its part, has carved out a growing role, especially as a platform for distribution and reissues. But more than the hubs themselves, what matters is their constant movement: a label is born in one country and then relocates elsewhere, maybe two or three times, ending up operating thousands of kilometres from where it started. These are migrations almost always tied to the private lives of the people running the labels, not to market logic, and that's why there is no real geographic centre.

The identity of the artists moves along similar lines too, made up of pseudonyms and names that choose to stay in the shadows. The same goes for how the material is handled: there's no single way to approach the stretching of acoustic space, and every artist develops their own method. The American duo The Fun Years build loops off the turntable starting from unidentifiable sound sources; Will Long uses tape loops left running continuously; Ayami Suzuki works only with voice and electronics, and others still turn to digital tools to achieve a grain impossible to get with traditional instruments. It's precisely these differences, set against an almost uniform sensibility, that make up the geography of the genre: a map that the ten records gathered here try to trace.

Ayami Suzuki – Passages (2023)

Ayami Suzuki's art lives in the voice, and every element revolves around it. Based in Tokyo, she studied Celtic folk music when she was young, though little of that training remains audible today. "Passages" layers sung chant with loops, reverb and delay to create organic drones: she records a sung melody, loops it cyclically, and sings other vocal lines over it, as if improvising a session of minimalist polyphony. A delicate, fleeting vocal delivery, without ascents or climaxes, always soft and measured. The titles mix languages: "Mugenkaidan" (from the Japanese "mugen", infinite) and "Denkmal" (German for "monument"), mirroring the cyclical, potentially endless progression of her compositions. Suzuki's voice is doubled, tripled, until it forms a chorus of doppelgängers and sonic illusions, veering from the celestial to the esoteric yet elegiac drone.

Celer – Engaged Touches (2009)

Recorded by Will Long and his wife Danielle Baquet-Long across two sessions, "Engaged Touches" is the melancholy dialogue of a fragmented memory, the recollection of faded photographs and nostalgia for the past. At its core is a cyclical structure, at once triumphant and tragic. The vocabulary is that of a slippery, elusive imagery: piano, strings, bells, field recordings of trains, dining cars and fireworks gathered during a trip to India, all reverberated and rendered hazy. The cover, showing a man standing up, already visually anticipates that sense of threshold and waiting that runs through the record. Released just months before Danielle's death, "Engaged Touches" became, against its own will, something of a swan song too: unlike other works by the couple, here the instruments coexist within the same space, in what remains, in all likelihood, one of the most moving moments in the genre.

Hakobune – Love Knows Where (2015)

Behind Hakobune is Takahiro Yorifuji. His technique consists of layering guitar through pedals and reverb, rendering it so static that it becomes hard to believe the sound source is the six-string instrument at all. What emerges is a harmonic landscape that thickens without ever losing its calm: an instinctive method, which he himself describes as uncomplicated, best practised in the morning. "Love Knows Where" was released on cassette and gathers three tracks: two long ones and a shorter one acting as a hinge between them. The first plays an irony on its own title: rather than "Rapids", it's a calm, transparent expanse. From there, the record descends into melancholy and dissolves into minimalism, a dark escape wrapped in its own isolation. Before devoting himself to this lo-fi stillness, he played in Whales, a powerviolence band: a contrast that makes the stillness and bliss of his solo work all the more striking.

Hirotaka Shirotsubaki – Hyogo (2020)

Born in 1986 in a small town near Kobe, Hirotaka Shirotsubaki has been releasing music since 2011 with admirable consistency. His early works were tied to the quiet of the suburbs where he grew up; over the years his output has become more universal, leaving the listener free to interpret it. "Hyogo" captures both hemispheres; the record takes its name from the Kobe district where he spent his childhood, and, as the artist has stated, it serves to fix the memories of that place. It's an imagery that Shirotsubaki explores track by track, as in "Daikai", named after the metro station that collapsed during the 1995 earthquake. But the soundscaper's gift also lies in the ability to touch the intimate chords of lived experience, whether rooted in his native Japan or elsewhere. The artist's catalogue counts over thirty-five releases, yet "Hyogo" stands out as an enveloping, sentimental cartography.

Marble Sky – The Sad Return (2007)

Marble Sky is one of the countless aliases of Jeff Witscher, already well known on the noise scene. In 2007 he released "The Sad Return" in just fifteen cassette copies, dedicated "to several friends in transit and passing through": it's the record with which he abandoned noise abrasiveness for its opposite, stillness. Listening to it is an autumnal experience, where guitar and electronics evolve with the weariness of someone who has suffered, while drone choirs mark out a grey atmosphere of reverb and droning romanticism. Space is stretched wide, allowing room to explore one's own memories and the emotions that will never return, sketching the ideal contours for the winter solstice and the loneliness it brings. Every note lasts tens of seconds, weaving into a context of intense harmonies and crescendos that are as delicate as they are heart-wrenching. It's a dim, low-lit sound, living in the half-shadow of a white noise capable of adorning every ponderous chord.

Opinion – YT (2020)

Very little is known about Opinion: the artist works out of Montréal and has never revealed their identity. "YT" was released in 2020 on a cassette of fifty copies, just three tracks spanning eighty minutes in total: the record opens with "Kansas", forty minutes of subtle but constant timbral variations, threaded with faint field recordings, able to evoke the seeming nothingness of the American Midwest plains while remaining almost motionless throughout its length. "Uranium City" is instead the only track with recognisable variations of organ notes, while the rest proceeds in near-total stillness. The label itself describes it as a kind of meditation on the great snow-covered expanses of the North, said to capture the atmosphere of a snowy Canadian day. As in the almost imperceptible scores of Jakob Ullmann, Opinion's sound lives on the threshold of audibility, an apathetic, subdued manifestation of an inner void.

Private Elevators – First Feelings (2014)

Private Elevators is the duo project of Adrian Knight and Matt Evans, both active on the New York scene with a far more formal profile than one might expect from an ambient lo-fi record. Knight writes music published by classical publisher Schott New York; Evans, trained as a percussionist, performs pieces by Steve Reich and Sarah Hennies. That academic background melts away on "First Feelings": everyday found sound seeps into hypnagogic textures that drift among the drones, an amalgam of dim clarity, almost a single sonic mass suspended in a late-night nostalgia; the result is a raw work, as if worn down by endless tape recordings. It remains a side note in both artists' biographies, and precisely for that reason it reveals a freer, less guarded side of two authors used to writing for orchestras and ensembles.

The Fun Years – Baby, It’s Cold Inside (2008)

The Fun Years are a duo made up of Ben Recht, on baritone guitar, and Isaac Sparks, on turntables. They're also among the most elusive artists on the scene: they don't give interviews, don't perform live, and when they do answer emails, they do so in as few words as possible. The star of "Baby, It's Cold Inside" is Sparks' turntable, used to draw out woolly loops from disparate sound sources, in a method reminiscent of Philip Jeck or a more hypnotic Jan Jelinek. Its kinship lies with the indie scene straddling the turn of the millennium: shades of post-rock surface in the guitar arpeggios, in piano ostinatos dissolved into hiss, and in reversed instrumental passages. The result is a harmony of unease resting on a bed of mantric low frequencies and vinyl crackle close to the sound of fire, with phrasing not too far removed from slowcore and shoegaze, but taken apart piece by piece and reduced to filtered noise.

The Hers – Tough Cunt (2012)

The Hers is one of the many aliases of Louis Johnstone, a British artist better known as Wanda Group. In an interview he explained the project's origins: "With The Hers I started out just using old classical records found in charity shops," before shifting "toward something more like one long, blinding drone." "Tough Cunt" was released in 2012 in just fifty cassette copies. The result is disorienting, built by layering worn-out samples, endlessly looped tapes and improvisations packed into an unusually short running time: the effect is that of a half-sleep in which memories fragment like sand and reassemble without warning. Moving between the anguish of an earthbound drone and the fumes of radioactive gas, Johnstone finds his touchstones in artists such as Gas and The Caretaker; "Tough Cunt" is a work that lives between lyricism and hauntology, micro-sounds and drones, delicate strings and unsettling stillness.

Uon – Superbath (2017)

Uon is one of the many aliases of a Berlin-based musician known to friends as Shy, also active as Special Guest DJ, Caveman LSD and DJ Paradise. "Superbath" is a single twenty-four-minute track, explicitly conceived as a sound bath — those guided relaxation sessions built from sustained tones, Tibetan bowls, gongs and bells, structured around vibration rather than melody. The piece seeks no resolution and promises no healing: it stands on its own (magnetic) simplicity, on a handful of watery lines overlapping unhurriedly, leaving it to the listener to fill in the rest with their imagination: a dense space to sink into, as if it were a sensory deprivation tank. Seven years later, in 2024, the same track was remastered and reissued, this time under the alias Special Guest DJ: a self-quotation across time, signed nonetheless by the same person.

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