Self-generating, autonomous, and indifferent to the vagaries of harmony and fundamentals, the drone is maybe the last of the non-domesticated musical beasts. We know that the same frequencies can be achieved with electronic or acoustic means, but their manipulation requires subtlety and attention to detail that is beyond the scope of many musicians and trained players. One, by Wave.Collapse (aka Henry Oakley) is a powerful, intense, and breathtakingly new spin on the drone genre. Divided over 21 tracks and more than 2 hours, One feels like a research manual for constructing the most discrete electronic sounds imaginable, marshalled in such a way as to feel as though they were always already there, festering and decaying on the margins of the auditory spectrum.
The lengths of the various cuts on One vary pretty wildly, from one minute and change to some over 13 minutes. If you listened without paying attention to the arbitrary divisions between songs, you might never know when something ends and when it begins. The temporal swarm that One envelops is all or nothing, there is almost no room for periodic fluctuation or moments of repose, just the pulsating transfer of air. At full volume, differentiating between what is moving inside of your ear and what is the sound source becomes impossible and probably futile, all for the better. This is not to say that One is an aggressive takeover, forcing listeners into submission. No, there is a warm and rounded quality to One that belies its endless march, likely a result of slowing taped recordings until their oscillations hit the desired frequencies. At times, on tracks like "jeden", something vaguely metallic and warped enters the fray, as if we are caught inside of the recording mechanism itself. Maybe self-generating, or generative, music is something akin to self-awareness in other disciplines.
This really is an amazing and unique work of drone music, one that merits repeated, if not permanent, listening. Play it loud and the material boundaries between sound source, reproduction, and listening get all nice and blurry. Very highly recommended!
