The pulse in music is, we often say, related to the heartbeat, which means it is animated. And the drone is perhaps related to the breath. Which is why it is often yoked up with meditation. Cage has that comment about the drone of the central nervous system, which I never quite believe. But maybe he’s onto something there too.

By the way, I love Reich’s “18.” It was a transformative moment, for me, hearing that for the first time. And I love “In C” as well. That Bang on a Can recording is great. I guess I find, after a while, that the pulse is predictable for me–I know how it’s going to go. Which is why, e.g., I can’t really stand Phillip Glass anymore. But I have a part of me that loves that early pulse of minimalism a lot. And maybe, as you say, the ocean surf pulses anyhow.

I’m drawn more to the pulse than the drone, and I’m probably a bigger fan of Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” than you are (if only for the fact that it’s quite likely my most favorite piece of music). I don’t think of it as drone—and by the way, the Fireworks cover of “Sheets of Easter” is more Reichian than anything I’ve come across by Oneida. I know Young’s “The Romantic Chord” is considered drone, but it has so much more delineated structure than most of the drone music I’ve heard (Dead C, Coil, Stars of the Lid, Sunn O)))). Same with Riley’s “In C” (the recent Bang on a Can recording is very dynamic and rhythmical). Phil Niblock’s works seem more pure drone to me (what I’ve heard of his stuff).

Doom metal sometimes gets near to drone for me in a way that I like (bands such as Bunkur and Monarch slow everything down to a death crawl).

Does drone exist in Nature (in such a way that we can hear it without technological assistance)?* Perhaps I’m resistant to that aspect of it—it occludes the human element.

*The sound of ocean surf—as the obvious example—sounds more like pulse than drone to me.

Surely the verbal ambiguity is intentional. Especially at the outset, I wonder whether they’re all singing different things? “light, right, night, might. . .”

The voices come and go —almost imperceptibly, blending in with the instrumentation so perfectly— dropping out completely, for instance, by the fourth minute (really hard here to differentiate voice from echo of voice), but coming in all together at 5:13, with what sounds (to me) like a definite “right right right.”

At times, when the voices are strong, I think a little about the Dropkick Murphys: “ight ight ight. . .”

And when the voices return again at around 8 minutes, they’re definitely singing “sight sight sight. . .”

There’s so much going on in this piece! Thanks for the insightful, informative essay. I always learn from your posts!

I agree about the motivating force in band construction that is “love,” which today we will call an incalculable value-added item in the Utopian community, a sort of phlogiston, whose precise list of ingredients we cannot accurately describe, even as we believe we know what we mean about the aggregate. It would be interesting to try to smoke out Kid Millions on that issue, though one thing I admire about him in the particular is his resistance to being lured into public comment. He is a guy who is kind of serene, in general, he is a guy with a Zen warrior aspect to him, and I’m not sure he would take the bait. (It should be noted, however, that he has corrected the catalogue of things I impute to his high school bands, which should read: Dead, GnR, Traffic, Neil Young.) Love, as in the Utopia song, is the answer, though how exactly it is the answer remains a mystery. Also: what I always admire in the failing marriage (and I know something about this experientially) is how love is still in there somewhere. Even at the darkest times, when being driven to extremes of apartness seems to be the rule of marriage.

Oneida is not failing, though it is in a different place lately, somehow . . .

As for your (and my) divergent sets of interests (and I so think the II in Absolute II is meant to be a “too,” and is just a restatement of procedural intention, as in: “this album is also thoroughly uncompromising”), my suggestion would be only that you like smaller increments of repetition (Martin Arnold) than I do. (Although I love Martin Arnold.) Miles Davis once said about popular music that the “melodic phrases” were getting shorter. I believe he said this ruefully. Or at least I’m going to interpret it as a rueful statement. The difference between Morton Feldman and Orthrelm and Oneida is a different attitude about lengths of melodic phrasing. I think. I like the drone. One note for ninety minutes? I’m there!

Meanwhile, one day I will, perhaps, write about feminine apostleship, which would be a topic where language might really happen in a generous way. And then I would work off the bad karma of SWS #40.

To push your opening metaphor even further, playing together in a marriage (partnership) is what makes that partnership sublime, no? There has to be improvisation, there has to be some sort of private (collaborative) recording studio, some superb woodshedding going on as often as possible—love is the zenith of the utopian ideal and insists upon an absolute commitment to not compromising when it comes to compromise (it must be done because that is its truest nature). It locks in and finds its group identity.

I’ve listened to Absolute II several times and am as fascinated by the II, begging both a I and a III, perhaps equally, and therefore standing in some transitional space between two non-existent constants. But I don’t hear its structure or its absoluteness. Am I—who usually consider myself a patient attender—too impatient to apprehend continental drift while being overly enamored with the movements of insects? To cut myself some slack, though, I love the glacial shifts in Morton Feldman’s long compositions as much as I’m drawn to Orthrelm’s ten-second shreddings. They feel like the same thing to me (whether coarse-grained or fine-grained). I’m not convinced Oneida hasn’t turned its disciplined back on the intricacies of structure and gone the easier route of John Cage-like freedom from form…

Perhaps Godspeed You! Black Emperor also deserves a mention when speaking of rock utopian collectives? And I second Harry’s comment regarding the Deleuze quote.

By the way, speaking of love, whenever you write about something you love, say, music, your measure approaches that of Thomas Mann’s to me, and I’m reminded of your once saying (about The Magic Mountain) that you never wanted it to end. I feel this about “Sheets of Easter” and the ascending fellowship in Coltrane’s “Ascension”—I also feel this about the very best of your work (e.g. “The Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal”). In other words, you need to write another essay, this one beginning with Appendix Two and moving onward to speak of feminine apostleship. This strikes me as yours to do.