Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal by Coggins Owen

Author:Coggins, Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

The unstable interchangeability and continuous deferral of these ways of talking shows an unwillingness on the part of listeners to allow drone metal experience to be reduced to a particular domain of language and interpretation. The point here is not that drone metal experience is inadequately expressible in terms of sound or drugs or spirituality or travel, but rather that descriptions of drone metal in one idiom always drift towards other ways of talking, thus again placing the initial trope in question. Between rhetorical tropes, too, drone metal is always elsewhere.

Just as description switches between the language of pilgrimage, intoxication and music, so too does the spoken or written representation of the relation between sonic experience and religious concepts. For example, statements like ‘drone metal is about pilgrimage’, shift to become ‘drone metal is like a pilgrimage’, then to ‘drone metal is a pilgrimage’, never settling finally on one established relation in the form of language employed. Frequently the effects of drugs and drone metal are conflated as well as combined. Not only are albums described as being good accompaniments or substitutes for smoking marijuana, but also as being narcotics themselves, such as the reviewer quoted earlier who ‘got high off the notes’ (Dave 2006). A similar shift occurs in this review:

It [Om album Advaitic Songs] is a pan-global pilgrimage in forty-four minutes; it’s a pilgrimage well worth your time. There are certain songs like ‘Sinai’ which sound very much like the kind of music pilgrims would listen to in a Hindu temple. (Mateeva 2013)

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