One Note to Rule Them All

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Music does things to people. Some genres make you feel nostalgic and happy. Some get you feeling sad, while others make you angry or hyped-up. I’m not going to give examples because, let’s be honest, we’re all different and what gets me hyped-up might be the exact thing that makes you sad.

There’s one genre I listen to that most people aren’t keen on, and that genre is: Drone. So what exactly is it?

Drone?

Drone music is built around sustained tones, minimal harmonic movement, and repetition. Instead of focusing on melody or rhythm in the traditional sense, it emphasizes texture, atmosphere, and gradual change over time. The sound can feel meditative, hypnotic, or even overwhelming, depending on how it’s performed.

Types of Drone

Let’s be clear, there are a lot of Drone subgenres. I mostly listen to drone-metal, with the main proponent of that subgenre being Sunn O))) (pronounced “Sunn”), but here’s a more formal (yet incomplete) list:

Drone Metal (Drone Doom): The heaviest and most physically intense subgenre. It uses massive, down-tuned guitars, heavy distortion, and feedback. It is meant to be felt as much as heard, often lacking traditional percussion.
Ambient Drone (Drone Ambient): A softer, more textural approach that prioritizes atmosphere and spatial sound. It often overlaps with New Age and focuses on creating a sense of calm or introspection.
Dark Drone / Dark Ambient: Characterized by ominous, low-frequency rumbles, industrial noises, and a “horror” or “catacomb” atmosphere. It often uses minor keys and dissonant overtones.
Minimalist / Avant-Garde Drone: The “academic” roots of the genre. Emerging in the 1960s, it focuses on the mathematical and psychoacoustic properties of sound, often using “just intonation” or very slight frequency shifts.
Drone Rock / Space Rock: Rock music that ditches traditional chord progressions in favour of a single, sustained harmonic centre. This style often uses motorik beats or repetitive psychedelic rhythms.
Folk / Traditional Drone: This category includes centuries-old traditions that use instruments specifically designed for droning, such as the Scottish bagpipe (pibroch), the Indian tanpura, or the Australian didgeridoo.
Blackened Drone: A fusion of Black Metal and Drone. It takes the “wall of sound” and tremolo picking of black metal but removes the speed and drums, resulting in a bleak, freezing atmosphere.

…and there’s more than this still.

The History of Drone

You might be surprised to discover that drone isn’t something new. When I first started listening to what I thought was drone music, it was actually drone-metal. I was fascinated to discover that one of my favourite bands in that subgenre wasn’t the originators (not even close!).

I went back to 1993 and found Earth, who released an EP called “Earth 2: special low frequency version” which was ahead of its time (at least in the subgenre of drone-metal). But then I discovered no… a popular sludge band called The Melvins released an EP called “Joe Preston” (named after their bassist at the time) which seems to be one of the earliest known recorded drone-metal releases.

💡 FUN FACT:
I discovered many years later Joe Preston covering live bass duties for one of my favourite bands SUMAC.

Again, at this point, what I’m thinking of as drone was actually drone-metal, and so my mind was suitably blown when someone much older than me told me to go check out The Velvet Underground’s song “Loop” (from 1966). It’s not quite the same as drone-metal but it’s unmistakably drone.

So I started digging into the history and realised, why of course, this is an ancient sound. A spiritual tool. The goal was often to induce a trance state or represent the infinite. Drone was the “eternal hum” that mimics everything from the wind in caves to the circulatory system in our own ears.

Let’s consider some of the ancient roots:

Indian Classical Music: The Tanpura is perhaps the most iconic drone instrument. It provides a continuous harmonic foundation that represents the “unstruck sound” of the universe.
Aboriginal Australian Traditions: The Didgeridoo (Yidaki) has been used for over 1,000 years, using circular breathing to create an unbroken, resonant low frequency.
Byzantine and Gregorian Chant: Early Christian music often featured an “isison,” a lower vocal part that held a single steady note while other voices moved above it.
Bagpipes: From Scotland to Iran, the drone pipes of various bagpipe traditions provide a constant harmonic floor that creates that “wall of sound” effect.

So when did we start transitioning from “ancient ritual” to “art movement”? Well, we have a few people to thank for that…

Luigi Russolo (1910s): Wrote The Art of Noises, celebrating industrial hums and machinery.
La Monte Young (1950s): Often called the “Daddy of Drone.” He focused on “sustained tones” and created a 6 hour movement called “The Well-Tuned Piano”**.
Tony Conrad & John Cale (1960s): Members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Cale took these “dream chord” ideas straight into The Velvet Underground.
Brian Eno (1970s): Defined Ambient Music. His work moved drone from the “challenging avant-garde” into a soothing, atmospheric space.

💡 NOTE:
**I’ve tried listening to “The Well-Tuned Piano”, but it’s too sparse for me.

Why Drone?

So… what is it about drone music that makes it so appealing to people?

Think about it. Inside the womb, a fetus is surrounded by a constant, ²⁴⁄₇ wall of sound. This isn’t just a quiet hum; it’s often measured at 70 to 90 decibels, roughly the volume of a vacuum cleaner or a loud shower. Because the baby is submerged in amniotic fluid, high-frequency sounds from the outside world are muffled, leaving a thick, bass-heavy drone.

This is why we often play “white noise” to calm babies when they go to sleep. The sudden silence of a nursery can actually be startling and stressful. White noise signals their nervous system that they are safe. This is also why many adults listen to white noise when they go to bed.

Silence is deafening.
– Thomas Carlyle (Circa 1831)

It’s not the noise that wakes you. It’s the inconsistency of sound. In a silent room, a floorboard creak or a car door slamming creates a massive spike in acoustic energy. The drone “fills in” the acoustic gaps, making sudden noises much less likely to trigger the brain’s “alert” reflex.

Now, we’ve been talking about “white” noise, but really there are multiple colours:

White: Equal energy per frequency. Sounds like a harsh hiss (think radio static). Rarely used as a melodic element but often serves as a “wall” in harsh noise music.
Pink: Equal energy per octave. Sounds more balanced to the human ear, like falling rain or leaves rustling. In drone, this is often the sweet spot for creating a sense of natural space.
Brown: Energy decreases as frequency increases. Much deeper and bass-heavy, like a distant roar or a low rumble.

When talking about drone-metal (which is what I’m focused on), what we’re really talking about is the amplification of brown noise. The goal is often to vibrate the listener’s body. This requires a heavy concentration of low-end energy, and brown noise is mathematically the closest noise colour to the sound of a wall of dimmed amplifiers vibrating at sub-bass frequencies.

Drone-metal guitarists use massive amounts of distortion and fuzz. As you add more gain, the signal clips, adding harmonic content that begins to resemble white or pink noise. Controlled feedback loops act as a living, breathing noise floor that the musician sculpts over time.

While white noise can feel clinical or irritating, brown noise provides the warmth and doom essential to the drone-metal aesthetic.

At a basic level, drone strips music down to time + tone. When you remove melody and rhythm, your attention shifts. There’s also a physical angle: sustained low frequencies literally vibrate your body, which makes the experience less intellectual and more visceral.

With repetition and no clear “events,” your brain stops anticipating what’s next. Because nothing is demanding your attention, your thoughts start to surface. For some, that’s clarity. That ambiguity is the point. Unlike most music, drone doesn’t tell you what to feel; it creates a space where feeling happens.

For me, drone (or specifically drone-metal) makes me feel like I’m being swallowed by a black hole. By being engulfed in sound, it helps me lock out any other thoughts. It’s very much a meditative experience.

…ever breathe a frequency?

Have you ever been so surrounded by a sound that it feels like it’s part of your body; like you’re inhaling and exhaling it? It’s less about music as entertainment, and more about music as an environment you inhabit.

Sunn O)))’s live shows have a very physical impact on their audience. With their use of volume, their sound turns into a bodily experience. You don’t just hear it…you feel it.

Sunn O))) are one of the most famous modern groups connected to drone music. But they didn’t start there.

Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson formed Sunn O))) in 1998. Both came from heavier, more structured backgrounds. O’Malley had been playing in Burning Witch, a doom/sludge band that leaned into slow, punishing riffs but still had vocals, song structure, and recognisable metal form. Anderson was in Goatsnake, a stoner doom band with grooves you could actually nod along to.

Their shared obsession was Earth. Specifically, the Earth 2 EP I mentioned earlier. That record was already stripping out drums and vocals to leave nothing but massively amplified, glacially slow guitar. O’Malley and Anderson wanted to take that idea further. Not just slow and heavy, but dense.

Their early recordings (the ØØ Void and Flight of the Behemoth era) still had traces of metal DNA. There are moments of black metal influence, particularly in the atmosphere. That frozen, cavernous quality, that bands like Burzum and Darkthrone were known for. But where black metal achieved that feeling through speed and tremolo picking, Sunn O))) achieved it through absence. No blast beats. No shrieks. Just massive, sustained chords decaying into overtones.

By the time White1 and White2 came out (2003-2004), the transformation was more or less complete. These records aren’t metal in any conventional sense. They’re explorations of texture, volume, and physical space. White1 features collaborations with people outside the metal world entirely, like Merzbow and Rex Ritter (who brought analogue synths into the mix). This was Sunn O))) becoming something closer to a sound art project that happened to use guitar amplifiers.

The Black One (2005) is where things get really interesting. It’s their most overtly “metal” record since the early days. There are vocal contributions from Wrest (Leviathan/Lurker of Chalice) and Malefic (Xasthur), both one-man black metal projects known for isolation and claustrophobia. As the story goes: Malefic recorded his vocals while locked inside a coffin 😬 (helping to capture the spirit of the record).

From there, the collaborations kept expanding. Altar (2006) with Boris blended their drone with Boris’s more dynamic range. Monoliths & Dimensions (2009) brought in brass, choirs, a trombone soloist, and arrangements by Eyvind Kang. By this point, calling them a metal band felt genuinely inaccurate. They’d evolved into something that sat between doom metal, academic composition, and performance art.

Their more recent work, Pyroclasts (2019) and Metta, Benevolence BBC 6Music: Live on the Invitation of Mary Anne Hobbs (2021), leans further into the meditative side. Pyroclasts was built from improvised drone sessions recorded at the beginning and end of each day during the Life Metal sessions. It’s some of their most accessible work, and also some of their most beautiful.

What makes Sunn O)))’s evolution worth tracing is that it wasn’t a clean break from metal. Each release peeled away another layer of conventional structure until what remained was pure tone and physical presence. They didn’t reject their roots. This was simply boiling them down to their essence.

💡 FUN FACT:
Sunn O))) took their name (and logo) from Sunn Musical Equipment, an American amp company that ran from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The O))) part? That’s the company’s original sun logo! They basically named themselves after their favourite amplifier.

Drone-metal Hall of Fame

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably someone who has the right level of curiosity to want to try out some drone-metal. So here are some tracks worth starting with. Most of these are Sunn O))) because, well, I love them. I’ve thrown in a couple of older tracks that predate Sunn entirely (as mentioned earlier), because you can’t appreciate where drone-metal ended up without hearing where it started.

Hands First Flower

The Melvins - Joe Preston (1992)

Before Earth 2, before Sunn O))), there was this. The Melvins’ Joe Preston EP (named after their bassist at the time) is one of the earliest proper drone-metal recordings. “Hands First Flower” is a slab of slow, crushing, feedback-drenched guitar that just sits there. There’s no progression in the traditional sense. It’s a single idea stretched to its breaking point. Coming from a band known for sludgy punk riffs, this was a sharp left turn that basically said: what if we just played one thing and made it unbearably heavy? It predates Earth 2 by a full year, which makes it arguably the first recorded moment where someone thought “what if doom metal, but less?”

Seven Angels

Earth - Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version (1993)

If “Hands First Flower” planted the seed, “Seven Angels” grew it into something enormous. This is 20 minutes of a single, massively amplified guitar chord decaying and regenerating over and over. Dylan Carlson (Earth’s guitarist) tuned his guitar absurdly low and let the harmonics do the work. There’s no drums, no vocals, no structure. Just a wall of tone that shifts like weather. Earth 2 didn’t push drone-metal into the mainstream (nothing ever really has), but it exposed the idea to a much wider audience. Without this EP, Sunn O))) probably doesn’t exist, at least not in the form we know them.

Etna

Sunn O))) & Boris - Altar (2006)

Altar is the collision of two bands who approach heaviness from completely different angles. Boris bring dynamics, rhythm, and a willingness to actually move between ideas. Sunn O))) bring the glacial weight. “Etna” is where those two approaches fuse most effectively. It builds from near-silence into something genuinely volcanic (the title isn’t subtle about it). Boris’s Atsuo plays drums on this record, which is notable because Sunn O))) almost never use percussion. The result is drone with forward momentum, which sounds like a contradiction but works beautifully.

Kannon 1

Sunn O))) - Kannon (2015)

After the sprawling orchestral ambition of Monoliths & Dimensions, Kannon was a deliberate step back. Three tracks, all called “Kannon”, all built from the same basic elements: guitar, amplifier, feedback, voice. The album takes its name from the Japanese bodhisattva of compassion, and there’s a ritualistic quality to it. “Kannon 1” opens with that familiar low rumble, but there’s a clarity to it that the earlier records didn’t have. It feels focused rather than sprawling. Less “look what we can do” and more “this is all we need.”

Aurora

Sunn O))) - Life Metal (2019)

Life Metal is the warmest thing Sunn O))) have ever made. Recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, the production is remarkably clean for a band built on distortion and feedback. “Aurora” captures that shift perfectly. There’s a tangible positivity in the sound that’s hard to describe if you’re used to their earlier, more oppressive work. The harmonic overtones ring out instead of collapsing into mud. It still vibrates you, but it feels like sunlight rather than suffocation. This is the record I’d give to someone who’s never heard Sunn O))) and might actually want to enjoy the experience.

Frost ©

Sunn O))) - Pyroclasts (2019)

Pyroclasts was born from the Life Metal sessions. At the beginning and end of each recording day, the musicians would improvise a drone piece together, no plan, no structure, just tone. “Frost ©” is one of those improvisations, and it’s some of the most meditative music Sunn O))) have produced. Where Life Metal had shape and direction, Pyroclasts just floats. It’s the closest they’ve come to pure ambient drone, and it’s genuinely beautiful in a way that would surprise anyone who only knows them from the robed, fog-machine era.

Troubled Air

Sunn O))) - Metta, Benevolence BBC 6Music: Live on the Invitation of Mary Anne Hobbs (2021)

This is a live recording, and it takes “Troubled Air” (originally from Life Metal) and stretches it into something much larger. The extended arrangement brings in jazz elements that weren’t present in the studio version, with brass and woodwind weaving through the drone. It’s Sunn O))) at their most collaborative and expansive. The live setting adds an unpredictability that suits the improvised nature of their music. You can hear the room, the space between the instruments, the moments where the musicians are listening to each other and deciding where to go next.

Evil Chuck

Sunn O))) - Evil Chuck EP (2023)

Named after Chuck Schuldiner (founder of Death, the band widely credited with pioneering death metal), this EP is Sunn O)))’s tribute to someone who pushed boundaries in a completely different direction. The track itself is dense and low, even by their standards, with a funereal quality that suits the dedication. There’s a reverence to it. Where a lot of metal tributes try to imitate the artist they’re honouring, Sunn O))) did what they always do: they filtered the idea through their own process and turned it into pure tone.

Raise the Chalice

Sunn O))) - Eternity’s Pillars (2025)

Eternity’s Pillars continues the trajectory that Life Metal and Pyroclasts set in motion. “Raise the Chalice” has a ceremonial weight to it. The title suggests ritual, and the music delivers on that. It’s slow, layered, and patient in a way that rewards repeated listening. Each time through, you hear overtones and textural details that weren’t apparent before. This is Sunn O))) fully settled into what they are: not a metal band, not an ambient project, but something that exists in the sustained space between the two.

Glory Black

Sunn O))) - Sunn O))) (2026)

Their self-titled Sub Pop debut, and it feels like a statement of arrival (thirty years in). “Glory Black” is the standout. Piano and nature elements run throughout the record, which is a significant departure from their usual palette of guitar and amplifier. The piano doesn’t soften the music so much as give it a different kind of weight. There are moments where field recordings of wind and water surface beneath the drone, grounding it in something organic. It’s Sunn O))) acknowledging that the sound they’ve spent decades building doesn’t have to come from a guitar.

Death

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I was six years old, I’ve been scared of dying.

I’m not talking about the “scared to die” that most people will occasionally admit to before getting on with their day. I mean the kind of scared that cripples you on a daily basis and stops you from sleeping. The kind that triggers daily panic attacks if you don’t work very hard to sidestep them, because let’s be honest, this is a fear you can’t escape.

There’s actually a clinical term for this: Thanatophobia. Derived from the Greek thanatos (death) and phobos (fear), it describes a profound and often debilitating anxiety about the process of dying or the concept of non-existence.

It’s perfectly natural to feel uneasy about the “great unknown”, but thanatophobia goes beyond typical concern. It becomes a clinical anxiety disorder when it starts to interfere with your daily life.

The night my brain broke

Very early on. Unfortunately.

I remember the moment vividly, and I often wonder: if certain things had happened slightly differently that night, would I have ended up as damaged as I did?

I was lying in bed, just thinking to myself, as kids often do at bedtime. (I know this because my two kids are never more verbal about what’s rolling around inside their heads than the exact moment I try to close the bedroom door so I can finally get a glass of wine and relax after what was likely a very long day.)

Whatever I’d been thinking about (I’m pretty certain it involved how cool Heaven would be and all the things I could do “up there”), the thoughts stopped. And I said to myself: “but… what if there IS NO God?”

The thought just sat there, rolling around my head, while my mind scrambled for anything in my experience or knowledge bank that could save me from the panic that was rising.

Once you start thinking “what if God doesn’t exist?”, the next obvious question is: “what happens when you die?” As a child, I equated death with God. Any time you talk about death around children, you’re usually talking in terms of God and Jesus (in the Western world at least). Death wasn’t associated with anything else. So take God out of that equation and there’s not much left to hold it all together, not at that age anyway.

Once the panic took hold (and let’s not kid ourselves, it was going to take hold, and it was not going to let go), I started crying and screaming because my little brain had begun to unravel at the horror of oblivion. Not that I knew what the concept was at the time. It would be many years before I’d learn the word for it, or for nothingness.

I ran out of my bedroom in absolute hysterics just as my mum had started coming up the stairs to put my older sister to bed. I started babbling “I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die” over and over. Now, understandably (and I only really came to appreciate this once I had kids of my own and experienced the daily nightmare of getting two young children to bed), she was on the cusp of wrapping up a very long day of looking after two kids all by herself. My dad worked away from home for months at a time, so there wasn’t much of a male role model in sight. Having to deal with me getting out of bed and screaming something incomprehensible was not something she was going to suffer any nonsense for.

So what did she do? She hustled me back into bed. She didn’t listen. She didn’t try to understand why I was upset. She just wanted me out of the way so she could get my sister down and finally have a well-deserved rest. As a parent of two, I fully understand this now. But for many years I resented her for it, because of the damage that night ultimately caused.

I should be clear: I’ve never spoken to my mum about this incident, nor about how crippled I am by my fear of death. It’s something I never really spoke to anyone about until I explained it all to my wife, many years later. I think we’d been together 13+ years before I first told her why I was having a panic attack at bedtime, something I’d hidden from her as best I could. But on that occasion it just had me defeated, and I think I was tired of keeping the secret and not being able to release the weight from my shoulders.

Every. Single. Night.

Every night (and I do mean quite literally, every night) I would have panic attacks about dying. My mum had shooed me away the first time, which meant this wasn’t a topic up for discussion. So I had to deal with it myself.

This was the early 80s. I didn’t have access to anything as futuristic as “the internet” to find out what this meant, or to discover that other people felt it too. I was alone. Stranded on an island of anxiety with no escape.

It wasn’t until my late teens that I learnt to use breathing and meditation. I’d found some old Buddhist books in the local library, very dense reading for a teenager with ADHD, but I stuck with them because they felt important and might finally be the answer I was ~~looking~~hoping for. I stumbled across a copy of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, a sacred text originally dating back to the 8th century, and its talk of The Bardo was fascinating to me.

Through that I discovered Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. Jung had written extensively about his own near-death experience and how he correlated the process of dying with his branch of psychology. He didn’t create the concept of the “ego” (that honour went to his mentor Sigmund Freud), but he interpreted it as something that needed to die. Or more precisely, the ego had to be dissolved, giving way to what he called “the Self”, in order for a person to step beyond their physical being and accept that they were part of a wider net of consciousness (hello Alex Grey). Jung believed that what religions call “God” is actually a psychological reality experienced as the Self.

Part of Jung’s work involved studying dreams and how they might offer insight into the unconscious mind. This led me down the path of Lucid Dreaming. I was interested because I hated going to sleep, and as we know, that started very young. I’d wake up in the morning with no recollection of falling asleep and no memory of having dreamt, so I equated being asleep with being dead. A dreamless sleep was death. I didn’t know it had happened, and that was just too real. Too scary.

The path to lucid dreaming was a fun journey: setting alarms to wake myself up at different times during the night to see if I could catch myself mid-dream, writing some of them down so I didn’t forget (and wow, I had some weird dreams). The idea was that my body could get used to being woken up, and my brain would start to “wake up” while I was still dreaming, and thus begins the ability to lucid dream, to be aware you’re dreaming and to control it. But ultimately this was a journey of self-gratification, as I clearly just wanted to do naughty things in my dreams.

“Have you tried talking to someone?”

Honestly, I saw no point. Either way, nothing could be done about it. I felt so confident that death was, and is, the end, that talking to a psychiatrist would just be a waste of money and time. What were they going to tell me? “Oh it’s ok, we all get scared of dying; it’s very natural.” I know it’s natural. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I also, selflessly, didn’t want to fuck up anyone else. There’s an old proverb:

“Ignorance is bliss”
– Thomas Gray (Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College)

This is demonstrated rather well in The Matrix, in the scene where a disgruntled crew member, Cypher, meets secretly with Agent Smith to negotiate his betrayal of the story’s hero. While savouring a digital steak, Cypher explicitly acknowledges that the meat is an illusion (electrical signals sent to his brain), yet he chooses to embrace the simulation anyway. “Ignorance is bliss.” He agrees to hand over critical information in exchange for being reinserted into the Matrix with his memories erased. His character is a warning of the “Blue Pill” philosophy: the idea that a comfortable, high-status lie is preferable to the cold, exhausting reality of the truth.

For me, if I talked about this with others, their ignorance (happily going about their day without thinking about death) would be disrupted by me revealing some dark secret, and they’d spend the rest of their days worrying about when they would die. I just didn’t want to do that to anyone. And to make it worse, you can’t know if someone is ignorant without first talking to them about it, which is exactly how you start their mind thinking about the subject you’re trying not to bring up.

Somewhat tangentially similar are the following lyrics from the Meshuggah album Catch 33. The album is a single song divided up into 13 separate movements:

“The struggle to free myself of restraints, becomes my very shackles”.
– Disenchantment

The album explores the paradoxes of existence, the ego, and the “Catch-22” of the human condition. The title is a play on Catch-22 (a situation where you can’t win because of contradictory rules). The album suggests that the “self” or the “ego” is a trap. The more you try to understand yourself, the more you realize “you” don’t really exist as a separate entity. The struggle to be free from your mental chains actually becomes the chain itself.

That’s how I felt about Death. My constant struggle to somehow escape it, had shackled me to it. I was forced to face it.

The track “In Death - Is Life” is followed by “In Death - Is Death.” It suggests that life and death are just two sides of the same coin, and the “Truth” is found in the middle of that conflict. A lot of the songs describe a “shattering” of the personality, where the individual “self” is destroyed and then integrated into a universal, chaotic whole.

When I first heard this album and read the lyrics, I almost started to believe there was something greater than myself to be experienced. Not a “God”, but a universal truth. That somehow we are “all one”. It didn’t stick for long (I’m a cynic at heart) and Meshuggah are much more nihilistic than spiritual:

“My ignorance cast in the mold of all things absolute.
I sustain forever my gaze. A stare fixed on the distant oblivion.
Resting in the inverted state of being dead, non-sensory matter.”
– Re-Inanimate

I’ll be honest, I’m trying really hard not to quote this entire album right now. So many of the lyrics (along with the music itself, the sheer intensity of it) make me feel not just “alive” but genuinely seen and heard:

“Treacherous this deceit to make no choice matter.
To have and yet lose yourself, until finally all reasons why are forgotten.
To live through ones own shadow. Mute and blinded, is to really see.
Eclipse the golden mirror and the reflection is set free.”
– Mind’s Mirrors

OK, last one, I promise:

“I float through physical thoughts.
I stare down the abyss of organic dreams.
All bets off, I plunge - Only to find that self is shed.”
– Shed

Ironically, in most Eastern traditions you’re expected to accept death from a very young age because the sooner you start thinking about it, and worrying about it, the more prepared you’ll be on your deathbed. I’ve struggled to accept this. I flip-flop between thinking it’s the right way and disagreeing entirely. I couldn’t imagine being ignorant my entire life and then on my deathbed suddenly going “wait, oh no, shit, I’m going to die! What if there is no God?!”, having all those emotions and feelings I had at six years old suddenly appear in that final moment. Maybe it was better I’ve been tormented for all these years, because at least I’m more ready for that moment when it comes.

To be clear: I’m not ready. I will never truly be ready. But I stand a better chance of dealing with it this way than the other way around. It sucks either way, doesn’t it.

Darkness in Music

Music has been my support structure for probably 90% of the time I’ve been alive. I listen every day, across a very eclectic range of genres. But I also listen to a lot of challenging stuff: improvisational, avant-garde, heavy, dark. My two favourite bands are Sunn O))) (see also my post on Drone) and SUMAC.

My friends and family never could quite understand why I had such an interest in dark music. To be honest, I never really understood it either. But I’d always felt like I had a darkness inside me, an anger I was bottling up and afraid to let loose, because if I did I’d lose control of my body and mind and become someone else. This demon, this nightmare that would go on a killing spree and wouldn’t stop.

If you want a visual for what that feels like, look up The Red Dragon, a painting from the 1800s by William Blake. I came to know of it through the 1981 novel “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris (the first in the Hannibal Lecter saga). The serial killer in that story, “The Tooth Fairy”, believes the painting is transforming him into something beyond human.

I remember the first time I listened to “I Am Colossus” by Meshuggah. Much like that character, I could literally feel my body morphing into something as the song played. I started calling it “my Red Dragon song”. That’s when I realised the power music had over me, and that in a lot of ways it had protected me from doing bad things over the years. This is why a lot of metalheads are some of the kindest, most patient, and accepting people on the planet: they satisfy the darkness within them and express it through music rather than violence.

My family and friends just hear noise. When you play them something like Sunn O))), something devoid of melody or structure, they probably question whether I’m “right in the head”.

I’ve come to realise that I gravitate towards chaotic sounds because they drown out the chaos already going on inside me. My monkey mind is so chatty and paranoid and scared that I need something louder than it is. That’s why music helps me deal with my panic and fear. It’s a way for the ego, all that noise inside my head, to be swallowed up.

Still here, still scared

So where am I today? Basically the same place I was at six years old: scared, and constantly trying to find ways not to lose my mind to panic on a nightly basis. I have kids, so I try to put my focus into them and to appreciate every moment I’m conscious, whether that means walking along the seafront and feeling the sun on my face, or getting caught in the pouring rain and feeling the wind blowing through me and the water running over my skin. Either way, I’m alive, and I’m grateful I get another day. Because let’s face it, one day I might go to sleep and never wake up.

And in some way, that’s probably a blessing in disguise.