I’ve not been getting as much reading done as I’d have hoped thanks to fresh air induced tiredness (the best kind of tiredness) and a prevalence of internet (something that won’t be a problem next week) but this passage from page 22 of Paul Morley‘s Words and Music on his experience of listening to Tangerine Dream for the first time in the 70s really hit home.
I hear drone. The drone of existence. The drone of meaning, and of no meaning. Drone as repetition and monotony and a reminder of something that is either the sound inside the womb, the sound of your thoughts before words become your thoughts, the sound you expect after death, or all of that plus the sounds that seem to confirm not only that there is life on Mars, but that there is life on earth too. Within the drone, you can hear noises that, quite simply, seem to be coming from the darkness, strange whispers that you are quite possibly imagining, and an echo of the sound of highly evolved insects reading aloud from a script by Samuel Beckett. This, despite evidence to the contrary, can actually be quite comforting.
Over the last year I’ve been listening to a fair bit of “Drone” though it was always something of a novelty, or at least a dish best served live and never through the earphones. But on downloading a load of Sunn O))) tunes and throwing them on the iPod for a laugh, intending to later take them off when the humour waned, I found myself listening to one of their 10+ minute tracks while walking down Kings Heath high street and, like a blast of dark light, I suddenly got it. But until reading that passage of Morely’s I didn’t fully understand what I’d got.
As someone who has followed Tangerine Dream’s music from the beginning I fully understand Morley’s comments – but it really only applies to their material up to around the early eighties. Then it went pear-shaped, a big fat pear with lots of juice and no flavour. I still follow the material of Edgar Froese and chums, but in a kind of blinkered hope that something of worth will be emitted. Listen to Rubycon, Force Majeure and Phaedra, perhaps even Poland (from 1984) – forget everything that came after. Rubycon was the first album I bought when everyone else was buying Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran. I lost myself to the drone during my teens, couldn’t afford booze ;)