more from
Milieu Music Digital
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Workingman's Drone [Year Four]

by Brian Grainger

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $55.55 USD  or more

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    Purchasable with gift card

      $236.95 USD or more (90% OFF)

     

  • SUPPORT ME AT PATREON FOR MORE ANALOG BOTANY

  • Ultra-Limited Edition 12xCD-R Box + Bonus Previously Unreleased CD-R
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Assembled by hand, one copy at a time, in the White Pillar Workshop! Twelve white 5" recordable discs, printed and duplicated via an Imation D20 disc duplication machine, held inside a black plastic case (about the size and shape of a VHS tape), bearing a wraparound kraft cardstock insert with a WDY4 decal sticker on the front cover and custom text sticker work on the spine and back cover. Also includes one separately packaged supplemental drone session, previously unreleased: "The Silver Pioneer Crossing the Threshold of Neptune". A total of over 15 hours of drone music, wall-vibrating frequency and deep synthesis, available for a reduced price of $32 less than all 13 discs would cost if purchased separately. ONLY FOUR BOXES PRODUCED!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Workingman's Drone [Year Four] via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

about

Year Four of the Workingman's Drone series continued where Year Three left off - single-voice or single-machine studies of sustained-tone drone music, released one session per month, for a year. Unlike Year Three, however, much of Year Four's source sound was shaped by a theme of absence, with many of the sessions focusing upon input-less scenarios of self-oscillating filters, feedback routing and low-frequency oscillators driven well into audible range - informed by a sense of being surrounded by possible musics that remained invisible and peripheral until and unless I tuned the correct instruments and pointed them in these directions.

That said, more "traditionalist" sessions materialized as well, such as WD43's 'Ombilical Brainwave Tether' being one of my first sessions with the Roland Juno 106 polyphonic synthesizer, or WD45's 'Pareidoliad' being my first session with a Moog Werkstatt synthesizer (all my prior Moog sessions were in fact generated by self-oscillating a Moogerfooger MF-101 lowpass filter, or using the carrier output wave from a Moogerfooger MF-102 ring modulator - both are indeed Moog synthesizers in a technical sense, but neither were designed to played as instruments necessarily). These sessions felt significant in their own ways, given their usage of machines that I quite literally never imagined I'd have the opportunity to design with. So Year Four is a combinatorial work that measures the emptiness of the abyss against more Earthen and human aspects, but presents them all in a uniform sense according to the ethos of the project.

Taken all together, Year Four is another monolith of drone music, within a landscape that is itself filled with many other such structures, and if I didn't enjoy using sessions such as these to the degree that I do, for meditating and sleeping and generally just disconnecting from the stress of everyday life, I would question why I even recorded them to begin with. Aren't drones by any other name going to sound just as sweet (as the Bard might ask)? To answer this, I feel it must be noted that the disparate sound sources that I have gone out of my way to have dedicated sessions with are in fact the discipline itself - an exercise in material and spiritual asceticism, a challenge given to myself to prove (???) just what may be accomplished using a minimum of tools.

For something that is ultimately a proof of concept work, the act of proving is immediately redundant upon listening - reasoning, justification, expectation, all of those things melt away beneath the wall that I've laid down before. The drone becomes everything - it looks backward to a primordial time when the plates were shifting and microbial life first began, it looks forward into the void, to the end of time, space, sound itself (see my essay 'The Last Music' published at Difficult Art & Music, 2022: difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com/album/everything-lasts-forever-and-nothing-ever-dies-a-compendium-of-drone-in-all-its-guises ) and as such, it is the very definition of totality, all-encompassing in every direction. In doing these sessions, I feel I have attuned myself to things that feel elemental, timeless, vibrations that (for all I know) exist somewhere else in the universe, on some deserted planet, where the shape of rocks and the velocity and direction of wind patterns combine to produce this sonorous annunciation of nothing at all.

So, here they are collected in one long, deep breath of sound, another monument to deify the vibration at the center of everything that exists, and whether your cranium or eardrums allow you to resonate where my body resonates, feeling what I am feeling, as these masses of sound wash over us both, is simply a matter of biology. If you know, you know, and if you don't, then pass this by as you might any other nondescript building or unexplored path. Perhaps your destination is still yet to come.

N.B. There is a bonus 13th session with the Behringer TD-3 included, previously unreleased, recorded on June 13 2021. This session has also been issued separately (digitally) for those who do not wish to buy the full collection in order to obtain it.

credits

released July 20, 2022

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar Workshop, January-December 2021, using twelve different but singular sound sources in conjunction with the R-EW Audioholistics generative system and modular processing path. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WDY4. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All flights deferred.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Brian Grainger Dayton, Ohio

Drone music, warm atmosphere and textural ephemera for the working man.

I also release music as Milieu milieumusic.bandcamp.com and Coppice Halifax coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

contact / help

Contact Brian Grainger

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Brian Grainger recommends:

If you like Brian Grainger, you may also like: