Drone Music Starter Pack

Earth- Earth 2 (Special Low Frequency Version)

This record sounds like black heat waves radiating off of black pavement. Like sweltering heat. There's no other album quite like it. This was Earth's first album and it's usually pointed to as their best. If you're looking for a starting point this is it, but this album isn't for the faint of heart. It's long and dense. It's an hour and fifteen minute exercise in patience and meditation. This album will burn away all of your insides, leaving you purged of your prior self.

Sunn O)))- Monoliths And Demenions

A slow river of pain and desolation starts flowing as the first track takes off. The low-tuned guitar riffs have a double function: it creates an immediate atmosphere of darkness and it also constructs a general potentiality which caused me to listen intensively. The ringing effect that is created by the slow riffs is very unnerving and contributes to a general atmosphere of horror. After awhile the vocalist starts reciting some dark thoughts. His voice is brilliant and is well in league with the uncanny aura of the music. Some pieces of piano are also mixed with the music and fits in very well with the guitars.

Boris- Amplifier Worship

Ahhhh, Boris…I just love this band. Placed right in between the monolithic post-rockish Flood and the ear-ripping drone masterpiece Absolutego, Amplifier Worship is another part in the genre-hopping madness of Boris. It’s as if in the beginning, they just spun a roulette wheel with some of the sickest metal subgenres and made an amazing album belonging to that subgenre. Well, unlike Absolutego and Flood, this is a sludge album (and what beautiful sludge it is). But like Absolutego and Flood, this album just kills with heaviness.

Tim Hecker- Virgins

Hecker’s music has always been eerie, but never this forceful. Some sections of Virgins feel like soundtracks for horror-movie climaxes when the camera fixes on a sickening image and refuses to turn away, fascinated and trapped at the same time. Even the album’s quieter moments are more tense than they might’ve been on Hecker’s earlier albums—a function, maybe, of a live-room environment where every creak and whisper seems to be happening a few feet from the speakers instead of at some artificially cavernous distance.

Nadja- Radiance Of Shadows

Aidan Baker is surely the hardest working musician in the area of experimental / ambient / noise / sludge metal right now and worthy of the mantle of the mighty Masami Akita of Merzbow of whom it could once be said that a month just wasn't a month without a new full-length Merzbow album. So far in 2007 Baker's Nadja project has released at least four full-length albums plus two splits with two other artists and in the same period Baker has put out quite a few full-length albums as a solo artist and in collaboration with others - and he still found time to go on tour with Nadja!