PrologueCRIMSON
Prologue
Sonic ceremony, ambient function and the weaponised drone
Showing all 023 works
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001
Miserable
Bongripper
Bongripper had just finished performing their aptly named Miserable LP in its entirety – a slow-building endurance test of brute physical bass weight.
Album 2014 Open ↗ YouTube -
002
Suspiria
Dario Argento
Where a chilled Sunday afternoon lull in the programming is a screening of Dario Argento’s opulent giallo bloodfest Suspiria, with its creepy score performed live by Italian proggers Goblin, sending those poor souls who had indulged too freely in fungal-based hallucinogens scuttling for the back doors.
Film 1977 Open ↗ IMDb -
003
Dopesmoker
Sleep
Records like Sleep’s Dopesmoker or Neurosis’ Through Sliver in Blood carry a sense of ritualistic power: you don’t listen; you partake in sonic ceremony.
Album Open ↗ YouTube -
004
Through Sliver in Blood
Neurosis
Records like Sleep’s Dopesmoker or Neurosis’ Through Sliver in Blood carry a sense of ritualistic power: you don’t listen; you partake in sonic ceremony.
Album Open ↗ YouTube -
005
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan
One freezing January morning, I stumbled across the following paragraph, quoted in a Velvet Underground biography, from Marshall McLuhan’s seminal 1967 text The Medium is the Massage.
Book 1967 Open ↗ Goodreads -
006
On Time Out of Time
William Basinski
Ambient producer William Basinski’s recent album On Time Out of Time works with a similar sound, sourced from MIT’s Gravitational Wave Observatory in California – a piece of equipment tasked with observing cosmic gravitational waves.
Album Open ↗ YouTube -
007
Sleep
Max Richter
Producer Max Richter’s 2015 Sleep is an eight-hour piece mirroring a typical sleep cycle.
Album 2015 Open ↗ YouTube -
008
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Aphex Twin
Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin sought to harness the peculiarly fertile psychic ground between wakefulness and sleep on his record Selected Ambient Works Two.
Album Open ↗ YouTube -
009
Biostasis
Éliane Radigue
Biostasis (1974) – by minimalist composer Éliane Radigue – combines slowly unfurling synthesiser tones with the heartbeats of her son and unborn grandchild.
Album 1974 Open ↗ YouTube -
010
Trilogie de la Mort
Éliane Radigue
Trilogie de la Mort (1988) was inspired by the death of her son and follows the journey stages of the Tibetan Book of the Dead: Kyene (birth), Milam (dream), Samtem (meditation), Chikai (death), Chonye (clear light) and Sippai (crossing and return), playing like an attempt to articulate what she described as the ‘mysterious power of the infinitesimal’,5 forging a sonic path through to the beyond.
Album 1988 Open ↗ YouTube -
011
Defensible Space
Oscar Newman
His book Defensible Space (1972) observed higher rates of crime and anti-social behaviour in New York’s high-rise as opposed to ground-level projects, although both were occupied by people of broadly similar backgrounds.
Book 1972 Open ↗ Goodreads -
012
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault
French philosopher Michel Foucault framed the social theory of ‘panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
Book 1975 Open ↗ Goodreads -
013
The Art of Noises
Luigi Russolo
Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises futurist manifesto published in 1913 argued for a new order of sound – seldom, it must be noted, actually realised – that reflected a changing of the sonic guard.
Book 1913 Open ↗ Goodreads -
014
The Futurist Cookbook
F.T. Marinetti
In The Futurist Cookbook Marinetti railed against the way that it induced ‘lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism … anti-virile … no food for fighters.’)10
Book Open ↗ Goodreads -
015
England’s Hidden Reverse
David Keenan
As writer David Keenan so memorably put it in England’s Hidden Reverse, industrial music was ‘an attempt to say yes to no’.
Book Open ↗ Goodreads -
016
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs’s own description of Naked Lunch applies here: ‘The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch – a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’
Book Open ↗ Goodreads -
017
Sexy Beast
Jonathan Glazer
The joy of noise, the shock of the new – or as Sir Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan in Sexy Beast would have it, ‘… the sheer fuck-offness’ involved in the visceral joy of creation – is prized.
Film 2000 Open ↗ IMDb -
018
Stepping into the Dark
Chris Watson
Stepping into the Dark (1996) is a case in point, and saw Watson work with powerful wind drones at Glenn Cannich, capturing the eerie multilayered tones as they whip across the glen and also the doom-laden scratch and craw of the ‘parliament of rooks’ at Embleton rookery.
Album 1996 Open ↗ YouTube -
019
El Tren Fantasma
Chris Watson
Key to Watson’s acoustic philosophy is the idea that each location holds a particular spirit: on the haunting El Tren Fantasma (2011) he evoked a ghost train journey – the now defunct railway that traversed the Mexican Pacific coast – by travelling the former line and recording the sounds, people and wildlife that once surrounded it.
Album 2011 Open ↗ YouTube -
020
One Pig
Matthew Herbert
His heartbreaking One Pig (2011), for example, follows the journey of an animal bred for meat.
Album 2011 Open ↗ YouTube -
021
The End of Silence
Matthew Herbert
The End of Silence (2013) took a five-second sample – heard untreated at the album’s start – of a fighter jet dropping a bomb in Libya.
Album 2013 Open ↗ YouTube -
022
Storm of Steel
Ernst Jünger
In Storm of Steel – the first published account of trench warfare, written by German infantry soldier Ernst Jünger in 1920 – the phenomenon was recounted.
Book 1920 Open ↗ Goodreads -
023
LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra
John Cale
However, in 2014 John Cale – ex-Velvet Underground composer – sought to recalibrate perceptions of the devices by framing them as ‘airborne architecture’ alongside a dronal musical backing in a Barbican installation called LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from the Drone Orchestra.
Album 2014 Open ↗ YouTube
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