Harry Sword – Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion

Third Man (US) / White Rabbit (UK)

Something that’s always useful, before going into a book, is to have some agency which is managing your expectations. Perhaps ultimately that’s why we have reviewers, like me, to hold your hand through a thing. We do the tutting so YOU, dear reader, don’t have to.

Foreshadowing yeah?

I’m going to go for the good bits off the bat. Harry Sword is a good writer. There’s a raft of witty turns of phrases — “Early SunnO))) took the immovable bones — Earth 2 and [the Melvins‘] Lysol — threw them in the cauldron and boiled them into a roiling, gluttonous stock, like Sumo wrestlers building a chankonabe soup”. Sword’s enthusiasm is infectious — there’s plenty of records I stuck on after a mention here.

His concept, so far as I can make out (more on that in a minute), is that ‘the drone’ is a constant throughout human history. So we get a lovely, and too short, exposé on the crossroads of archaeology, acoustics, sociology etc. We get some charming, highly speculative cosmic inference about the nature of the universe and the drone it creates. The drone is also the sound of the womb. That kind of thing.

And here’s problem number one for me — I see the word ‘drone’ and I think of ‘a long sustained note’. I think of a harmonic function which is typically static, limited. And there’s a ‘devil in the details’ thing there. What isn’t a drone, in typical terms, is a strongly articulated tonic – the ‘bass note’. Anything greater than one chord, including one chord with rests, isn’t quite a drone. Sympathetic strings — such as those of a sitar or Hardanger fiddle — aren’t necessarily ‘the drone’ (note definite article). My issue isn’t so much that Sword takes liberties with a musicological standard, but that the concept of ‘the drone’ is musicologically convoluted. His notion of the drone seems to mean whatever’s convenient for the genre under discussion. It’s a case of ‘everything’s a drone if you squint’ — in much the same way that traffic is a drone the further you get away from the side of the road.

Page 5 — “Static, hiss, white noise, feedback — these are all drones. In essence, drone equals sustain — sustained sustain, if you will”. Typically, static and hiss are typically white noise, sometimes enharmonic function; feedback of the slower kind is largely controllable and falls under the rebus of harmonic material. There are, importantly, those who’ve endeavoured to formalise a relationship with the perjorative term ‘noise’ — musique concrete, spectralism from the academy, your synth geeks with a highly precise understanding of wave shape and noise functions, composers like Helmut Lachenmann, sound artists like Alvin Lucier. And countless less studied bedroom racketeers / noise musicians / tape gonks.

My point there is really that the concept of ‘the drone’ quickly flounders on a lack of musicological grounding. Fine, there’s the caveat in the introduction “After all: music is so often about wrestling with emotions so big and real and here and now that they can’t be left unsaid … often beyond cold sober analysis”; but the problem for me is that the book is convoluted by the drone concept. What is good about this book is that it’s a decent pass at joining a bunch of dots. Sword is great at contextualising a bunch of records in quite a specific continuum — and to my knowledge it definitely fills a gap for ‘books that take metal seriously‘. If you want a valorisation of metal in the last twenty years — its history with Sabbath, St Vitus, Neurosis up to SunnO))), Earth, etc — this is a great book.

The narrative is a bit more expansive than perhaps I’m alluding to there — the line that’s drawn (if we leave out the early doors archaeo-acoustics) looks a bit like La Monte Young –> Velvet Underground –> minimalism –> no wave –> industrial –> early metal –> twenty-first century metal. There’s a few cursory bits, but that’s the meat and bones of it. It’s interesting but it’s perhaps lop-sided — Sword is clearly entirely at home chatting about metal, but there’s a few oversights and misrepresentations outside of that world.

The concern for me is that some of those misrepresentations are fairly egregious — “Medieval monks in some dank abbey … voices rising as haunting Gregorian madrigals fill the hall.’ He’s talking about monophonic chant — chants with a single line, and minimal harmony. Madrigals (circa fifteenth century) are a much later invention than Gregorian chant (from Pope Gregory, circa sixth century); they are formally polyphonic, and they are secular. Elsewhere there’s some iffy collocation: “To Buddhists and Hindus alike, the Om is the sound of the universe …” on goes the paragraph — immediately next paragraph is a quote from Dharimbir Singh. It’s not so much that a Sikh like Singh (clue in the surname there) can’t possibly comment on the Om, but it gives the impression that Singh is from the Buddhist / Hindu background that is the broad subject of the preceding paragraph. It’s not wrong-wrong but it is misleading.

From sins of commission to sins of omission. Now it may seem churlish, but it’s 2022. It’s absolutely possible to feature black people and women. Colour me churly. Dub is mentioned parallel to the kind of heaviness of the Swans –> ’80s metal –> doom continuum, but never really investigated; if the subject at hand was “bowel-worring heaviness” you’d absolutely have to talk about dub. Moreover, roots culture and dance music are only brusquely mentioned, and the examples are nearly exclusively white practitioners.

There’s naturally a limit to what can be talked about, but there’s plenty of dance culture that uses drones. If not lighter business bashment then at least milquetoast psytrance. Speaking of milquetoast, and adding the adjective ‘charlatan’, it’s odd that ‘anti commercial’ composer of the Windows sound Brian Eno is interviewed but someone who honest-to-goodness actually composes long static drone pieces like Phil Niblock doesn’t get a look in. Robert Fripp is alluded to but never actually looked into — and King Crimson / Frippertronics are bang in the middle of the confluence of ’60s-’70s music Sword is writing on emphatically.

Further — Diamanda Galás is not, typically, doing overtone singing. There’s loads of fry tones and singing on the break, but I’ve never heard her doing strictly overtone singing, Sainkho Namchylek or Tanya Tagaq being great examples of that. Again, no book is an island and etc, but there are so many actual drone traditions globally that are not mentioned at all — not a single mention of the hurdy-gurdy, a very cursory mention of only the highland bagpipes (no uillean, binioù kozh, dudy, etc, etc), no nykelharpa, hardanger, crwth, rubab, banjo, bandoneon … sympathetic strings aren’t drones, but they’re more likely to support them. This is top-of-my-head business, I’m sure ten minutes googling would turn out a whole Chinese pípá tradition with drones or some Sumatran gamelan accompaniment.

I do have more issues, and I’m concerned I’m looking picky. One such pick I cannot, uh, notpick — it’s really worth framing what ‘atonal’ means, because what is doesn’t mean is ‘very tonal’. It doesn’t have to mean ‘strictly Schoenbergian twelve-tone’, but when rock musicians play circle-of-fifths music it is the opposite of atonal. Which is to say, finally, that the problem with this book for me comes down to needing an editor. If the pitch was “avant-metal, from Sabbath to SunnO)))”, this book would be spot on. If it was “heavy music to get stoned to that’s not reggae-influenced”, likewise. The problem is that the reach into some hyperbolic eternity cracks under the weight of aspiration.

Anyway, this is kind of a digression. Principally this is about two-thirds of a great whistle-stop tour, in the form of review-ettes, of a bunch of albums that draw a line between one thread of US experimentalism and contemporary metal. If that’s something you know about, you’ll love it; if it’s something you want to know more about, you’ll love it. If you’re inclined to be sent apoplectic at minor inaccuracies and insufficient breadth, I’d steer clear.

-Kev Nickells-