A running fan is like a blanket for the eardrums; a slightly grating whir supported by a bassy hum. If you stop to reflect, you can pick out sounds between the whir and the hum, and if you pay attention you can hear them ebb and flow in and out of one another. Two sounds intermingling and going back and forth in a sustained tone tango.
Like many others, I cannot sleep without a fan, or at least some consistent white noise. If I’m feeling adventurous maybe I’ll throw on an album notable for aiding relaxation or sleep. But as much as I love Max Richter’s eight-hour-long Sleep album, it nonetheless changes quite a lot, and the variation is not friendly to my sleeping habits. With any noticeable shift in tone or speed my mind resets.
Luckily, most humans across history agree with me when it comes to finding and experiencing the most relaxing, calm-inducing music.
The key is, on the one hand, repetition. One of the reasons a simple white noise machine, or a fan, works is that it remains mostly unchanging for as long as it is on; similarly, lo-fi hip hop, best experienced through YouTube live streams, presents a constant flow of subdued melodies over a few variations of hip hop beat breaks.
The other key is sustained tones: the Drone. Why is it every religion’s sacred music has some history with the drone? From the chants of Christian monks to the droning Hindu Tanpura, to Buddhist monk mantra chants, not to mention a whole host of notable indigenous musical traditions that utilize sustained chants, hypnotic drums, and repetitive dance.
While I’m sure science can explain this all away to some degree or other (I hear it now, the voice which speaks: “The Resonance of Certain Frequencies Arising from Some Tones Can Alter Brain Activity in Frontal-Cortex, Spurning Neurons into Action, etc., etc., etc.), I like to preserve the mystery and delve into these issues of strange human overlap with a mystic bent.
Growing up I loved fans and noises that live invisibly in buildings. When I first started loving music, I drifted away from the random and sustained. I grew to love ever-shifting melodies that made me stomp my feet and want to dance.
That carried on until I reached my early 20s, when I found myself listening to a genre known as “Doom” Metal.
With a genre name like “Doom” Metal, I thought I’d be in for a harrowing and dread-inducing experience. And yet, when I first threw on Sleep’s Dopesmoker, an hour-long album consisting of a single song, with one riff, I found myself not terrified, but comforted.
The raging guitar riff, which sounds so menacing at first, is repeated so much and is fuzzed out to the point of a mere wall of melodic white noise, that it becomes much like the fan beside my bed. Although it took me a few listens to fully appreciate the heavy vocals that sound like a Stoned Viking singing some ancient chant about the Holy Land, when it all clicked it turned into a musical revelation. Within the sustained fuzz and heavy tones lay something transcendent, something ironically peaceful.
Despite years of interest in Western and Eastern mysticism, Sufism, Zen, Tao, you name it, I’ve never experienced a moment of religious or spiritual clarity. Although I’ve poured over texts and even written about it a great deal, the actual experience of nirvana, enlightenment, ego-death, transcendence, realization, whatever you want to call it, has never occurred to me. Self-reflection leads me to the conclusion that I’ve never experienced the transcendent, on the one hand, because I seek the transcendent. And on the other hand, I’ve never experienced the transcendent because I fear the transcendent more than just about anything. It’s difficult to explain, perhaps not possible, but when you feel yourself disintegrating, when you feel your brain leave the realm of the rational, it’s a little unnerving. It’s especially unnerving if you are familiar with psychosis, which I am.
But despite my fears of the transcendent and my equal desire to experience it, I’ve come close to a peaceful transcendence one time. A few months ago I saw Boris in concert. Boris is a drone/doom metal band I’ve loved for many years. Seeing them was my first experience hearing doom and drone music in person.
Like the tales of gurus discussing the difference between hearing about transcendence and experiencing it, hearing Boris live felt like experiencing something entirely new, shedding light on a past experience I’d never understood in full.
The riffs are hypnotic as always, but they are so loud the vibrations rumble the whole building. The bass is so thick and fuzzed out your chest feels as if it might implode. And the sustained tones, The Drone, contain multitudes; within its single tone, a thousand notes are dancing, intermingling in feedback and noise.
Although access to transcendence seems somewhat denied to me, I realize that I do not actually desire it on the level that many spiritual teachers speak of it. Many speak of transcendence as a void, the absence of all being wherein you find True Being. A realization that reality is not material or spiritual, and not good or evil, it is the absolution of dualisms. After hearing The Drone, I realize that, for better and often the worse, I like my world of dualisms; I enjoy delving deep into sustained tranquil tones amidst the sea of material chaos we are thrown into every day.
The Drone is sometimes called, as in Harry Sword’s book on the topic, “Sonic Oblivion.” This sends the wrong message. The Drone is not nothing, it is an overwhelming Thing, that represents All Things. Out of the one, many. My spirituality coincides with that vision of the drone: out of the one, the many. Or in the words of the Poets: I contain multitude.
I do not wish for distance from reality, some standoffish spirituality that celebrates enlightenment—for enlightenment seems always to signify that “I above the un-enlightened”; I cherish my broken brain as much as I disdain it, the manic Bi-Polar episodes indicative of a psychotic stormy riff, while the calm after the storm, a rumbling humming drone.
