18 :: humming world ::
[posted 1/19/01]
Thomas climbs the steps out of the L station and steps out into the snowy night. He shivers, draws his coat tighter around his not-very-warm waiter monkeysuit, and heads down the street, towards home. He passes a Walgreens (METABOLIFE and HERSHEY'S on their marquee), a Citgo, R & H Plumbing Equipment and Supplies. He reads letters painted on a door: Please deliver mail for 855 around corner. A long arrow pointing towards the door's edge.
As Thomas passes a large brick building at the corner he can hear something on its roof humming— a heating vent, or duct of some kind? He moves into the space of the hum, passes through its center, and moves out through its far edge. He remembers a phrase from liner notes: A continuous sound defines the space that it occupies. It has a center and a radius and an intensity curve that peaks at the centre and trails off to the edges. He smiles to himself as he passes through the space, pleased by the sound and equally as much by his having noticed the sound.
For a while now he has been taking notes for a history he wants to write—the history of drones. He's taken so many notes, in fact, that his zeal for the project has begun to sag under their accumulated weight. The history of drones is essentially the history of resonance, and the history of resonance is essentially the history of music itself. The world proliferates with resonating objects and spaces, from harmonicas to silos. The world is a humming space: where to begin the map?
He supposes that most of the drones that he listens to and writes about can be characterized by their minimalism — they opt out of exploring the whole range of dynamics that a resonator like a trumpet bell can produce, in favor of exploring sustained tones and harmonic patterns. But even then. Just listen. Cars go by on the street: their engines hum; their tires hum on the pavement. Each moving car tows droning spheres around with it. As the cars near one another their spheres intersect. Interference harmonics. The city is occupied at all times by a mobile drone orchestra. Stand on a corner and let the sounds wash over you. Or move through the city, towards home, and pass through a sequence of humming spaces defined by vents and fans. Your path is the score.
Music reacts. Drone music comes from people who have listened carefully to a world already thick with drones: they attempt to understand it by recreating it. La Monte Young: There are two examples of sounds of electrical power transformers that I remember listening to during the first four and a half years of my life. One was a telephone pole on the Bern road (there's only one road in Bern, Idaho; it is gravel), near where I was born and not too far from the intersection with the road that goes to Montpelier, the closest town. I used to like to stand next to this pole and listen to the sound. The other electrical sound was produced by a small power distribution station just outside of Montpelier next to a Conoco gas depot that my grandfather managed, and where my father worked. I often stood next to this depot outside of a fenced-in area, which had about twenty electrical transformers and produced a louder, more complex sound. Sometimes on warm days I would climb up on top of the huge gasoline storage tanks and sit in the hot sun, smelling the gasoline fumes, listening to the sounds, daydreaming and looking off at the mountains.
It is Idaho. It is over fifty years ago. The world is gravel roads and mountains. And it is humming.
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