Quakers, Spirituality and Drone Metal

 Now there are things that don't often go together, but I feel that should. I do need to explain first.

I should also point out that this post is coming out of reading a book by Owen Coggins  about spirituality, mysticism and drone metal, which is a very academic - but very interesting - consideration of this overlap. And, in the midst of reading this, I went to head Divide and Dissolve, a new drone metal band. 

Actually, whenever I try to explain what drone metal is, people make faces at me, and tell me how terrible it sounds, so I will address it in different ways.

Drone music as a whole - it can be applied across varieties of music - does not really comform to the usual assessment of music, which is usually driven by the three parts of Rhythm, Melody and Harmony. In that, id doesn't have a strong or consistent rhythm, there is usually no melody and harmony is also only present in very broken or distorted ways.

Drone metal in particular very much has a focus on volume, and because of this, the whole process of listening to drone metal is experiential. That is, you don't really "listen", because that is not how you interact with it - you feel it, you are enveloped in it, it is a whole body experience, not just a hearing experience.

There is also an interesting visual experience. I have not been to that many drone concerts (OK, just one, but I have another one in the calendar), but Coggins explains more about the visual aspect of a concert - especially by bands like Sunn O))) (pronounced just sun, and one of the leading drone metal bands) - which is less watching the musicians, and more seeing the towering speaker systems. In fact, there is a view - outlined in Coggins - that the real instrument on a drone metal performance is not the guitar, but the amplifier.

So how does all of this relate to spirituality? Well, mainly that there is a drive to force you to experience the sound, and the performance. People say that they have experiences while listening that are not dissimmilar to deep spiritual experiences - being elsewhere, encountering a reality that is different to the normal one.

The nature of the music - the all encompassing experience, the way that it utterly removes a chance of remaining untouched, or unconnected - is important. It refuses to allow other random thoughts, or distractions. It is so all-encompassing that it forces a review of the world. Like other spiritual practices, it takes you out of yourself.

Another interesting aspect is that drone metal usually it produced by a downtuned bass string with fuzzy distortion. This means, in lay terms, the bass string(s) (sometimes all of the strings) are tuned to be lower than usual, so it doesn't have quite the tightness and sharpness it normally does. Also the effects are used to make the note very fuzzy - so that even the natural harmonics that you would get are often not present.

The effects of this are to make the sound very earthy. It means that the music has a tendancy to ground you, to make you feel part of the earth (that may well be shaking!). In fact, as Coggins points out, there is a lot of imagery around this genre that focuses on weight and solidity - and this whole experience gives a sense of our connection to the earth, the planet. There is something deeply spiritual in that - it is not a fly-away form of spirituality, it is about our existence as part of the planet we spin on.

Incidentally, in case you thing this is all very strange music, bear in mind that Pink Floyd on "Shine On" start with several minutes of a single note with some guitar on top of it - a style that is close to a drone style. And John Cage's As Slowly As Possible is being played on a church orgen in Halberstadt over an estimated 600 years. So others have toyed with these ideas. It is only in fully fledged drone metal that the intensity and volume are also added to make the experience even more immersive.

But can I relate this to Quakerism in any way? Well, at Christmas, I did describe a meeting as like a drone version of other churches 2 minutes silence. But it is more than that. The spirituality of drone metal is an all-embracing sense of connectedness, sense of earthiness, and presence-with-non-presence.

There is a spirituality in meeting that is not always easy to understnad or appreciate. It took me several meetings before I started to understand what the silence was about, what it meant to be there. When you first hear drone metal, if you are not used to it, there is a sense of it just being noise (like a meeting is just silence).

Spirituality in drone metal, as well as in a quaker meeting, is about being both in the here and now, and in another place. It is the sense of connection with "here" and "elsewhere" is the essence of the spirituality. It is the connection with the numinous, the divine, that is so important as Quakers. But it is this connection with the "other" that many people find in drone. That is spirituality.