A Song Of The Vast Beyond

Sense of finitude and drone music

“Drone music excels in creating and maintaining tension. It aestheticizes doom, opening a door onto once and future catastrophes, those that are imminent and those that, once believed to be imminent, are now detours in a past that turned out otherwise.” ¹

In the introduction of the book ‘Drone and Apocalypse’, Johanna Demers argues that drone is the sound of death: in that sense, it is a contemplation of the void, of oblivion.

I listen to a lot of Drone music. The sound, a repetitive humming soundscape devoid of rhythm or clear melodic progression, gets me into a state of contemplation. It draws a veil between me and the world, draws me into nothingness. On the surface level, I listen to Drone to distance myself from the overstimulation of the inhabited environment. On a deeper level, I am after an unfathomable promise of the other world that glimmers through the music.

We can view the soundscape of the endlessly repeating modulations and sustained tones without any rhythmic time markers as an acoustic foundation, a primal ocean of sound, from which all the sounds emerged and where all the sounds would eventually dissolve. That makes Drone the afterlife of music; it is a glimpse into non-being. It carries the potential of a closer sensual relationship between the embodied anticipation of death and the ghosts of the afterlife.

Joshua Shrei, the author of ‘The Emerald podcast’ that explores “currents and trends through a mythic lens,” argues that “practicing dying before we die” is essential for living meaningful lives. Echoing this notion, shaman, bodyworker, and psychologist Yulia Tsvyak said in our conversation that in the Buryat shamanic tradition, this life is seen as a preparation for the next, just as the time in a womb is a preparation for life on earth. Shamanic journeys are considered a practice of contact with the realm beyond. Preparation for the end takes an important place in many other cultures. ²

Death practices often rely upon a specific imagery of the afterlife. What is the relationship between such an imagery and an agreement with finitude? What does the sensual perception of mortality look like in the context of the secular technologically-driven order?

In his article ‘Terminality: Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene’, Abou Farman examines the secular understanding of mortality. The author uses the term terminality to describe the affect ³ created by a secular understanding of the self and finality of death within a scientifically measured and constrained time. In other words, terminality refers to a scientifically determined and validated finiteness. The countdown begins, and there is nothing after the last count.

“The finitude that is so palpable at the end of secular lives is amplified in the larger envelope of collective finitude, in which not only do individual beings end but everything in the universe is also subject to the ending. It is a condition in which the impossible future is all that remains, and so pleasure today becomes the order of the day.” ⁴

Personal mortality in the contemporary context is entangled with the visions of the apocalypse, capitalism, and the information age. The accumulation of goods and information locks us in the loops of the eternal, narcissist, consumerist now, producing an illusion of escaping death. This leads to a sense of suspended time, an illusion tainted with the dread of losing the promised infinity. ⁵

The narratives about the catastrophic, irreversible changes that lead our civilization to a proposed, feared, and almost awaited extinction can be argued to be based in secular eschatology, as these narratives are an extension of the secular view of death as an absolute ending and are proposed by the authority of science. ⁶ The constant expectation of doomsday is an extension of the terror of death into a much broader and more ultimate end in the sense of collective undoing, the end of all things – not only a personal demise but an ontological one.

“If the earth is beyond hope, what is to be done? <…> Terminality as a kind of collective mortality starts to look like an ideology that underwrites everything from space exploration to white male privilege.” ⁷

Progress and doom are intertwined so tightly that they become inseparable. Both narratives rely on the same infrastructures, tools, measures, and knowledge production; for instance, the branch of science concerned with the planetary ecological crisis has roots in nuclear research and the impact its testing has had on the planet. The tracking of the atomic debris has allowed scientists to map out global wind patterns, which led to studying the soil and water, thereby creating an image of the biosphere by connecting pieces of data about landmasses, waterways, and atmosphere. ⁸ The climate crisis, the nuclear Armageddon, the extraterrestrial threats of asteroids or alien invasion, – all of these horrors are produced by the upside of scientific achievements and explorations.

“Expert knowledge and scientific bodies come together to create matters of ultimate concern through quantized warnings about the future, using mass death, annihilation, extinction, and the specter of doom as their horizons. The abstractions of the end—too large in temporal and spatial scales to be apprehended locally and in the present—are transformed into authoritative perceptual future events through the repetition of probabilities, charts, statistics, and temporal frames made by experts and mobilized for social ends.” ⁹

The bright future promised by the technoscientific advance is no longer possible with the doom upon us: such is the paradox of the coil of progress and apocalypse. The progress is very productive, however. Technologies gemmate, overtaking more and more space in our lives.

Technogenesis, a concept explored by N. Katherine Hayles, refers to the notion of a mutual and reciprocal influence in development between humans and technology. In essence, this concept explores how our interaction with technical objects changes us, and how, in turn, this change transforms the way we conceive and build those objects in relation to time, space, perception, and other realms.

According to Hayles, present-day technogenesis involves a circular relationship between human cognitive capacities, defined by a quick registration but a rather slow narrative comprehension of the stimuli, and an increasing speed of the computer processing power. In other words, contemporary technogenesis entails a rift between computational speed and human information processing. ¹⁰

“The technological shift from analog media to digital ones is a change from reversible to irreversible time and, to put it into more psychoanalytical terms, against death.” ¹¹

The design of applications with endless scrolling capabilities epitomises the illusion of eternity. That lack of anticipation of the end refracts back on our perception of the embodied selves in a way that challenges the understanding of the fundamental finitude of things with opposing experiences, creating an ontological tension. That, combined with the capitalist imperative for accumulation as well as disembodiment fostered by technology, alters our perception of mortality and impacts the ontological grounds of the technical objects we build, further exacerbating the complicated perception of finiteness.

Yet, I believe technology could instead help create an embodied relationship with the metaphysical, one that can help sensually access and symbolically process ‘the tragic predicament’ of individual mortality. I see a lot of potential for creative interventions in the relationship between technology and the realms of the symbolic and mythical. Repurposing and introducing new symbols and ways of interacting with reality can create magical and mysterious disruptions to the continuous logic of reason.

I can’t imagine anything more mythical than sound. Music evokes sensations that are inaccessible through verbal processing, thus creating space for listening to new myths. In one lecture on Irish folklore (the reference for which is lost in the primordial chaos of the internet), it was said that myth is not something we create; it is something that is always there. We just need some space to hear it.

“Drone music is liminal, a straight line of sound that marks the edge between the present and future, presence and absence, essential and incidental.” ¹²

Music can be considered a technology of emotion. Drone music surpasses our narrative and symbolic interpretations, instead interacting with a deeper layer of our perception of reality. Drone music evades words – attempts at describing the sound, its meaning, and emotion, feel vain.

The vibration of the sound directly impacts our sensual apparatus, creating an immediate affect. It hints at a threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit, or alternatively, in the case of drone music, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Abstracted sound devoid of arbitrary ‘rules’ of musical composition and order could thin the veil between the real and unreal, between this life and the one beyond.

“Drone music could be intended as a bridge toward spiritual ecstasy, or as a way of enhancing melancholy or madness.” ¹³

In a blog post ‘A slower urgency’, writer and philosopher Bayo Akomolafe argues that slowing down in urgent times can create the necessary hiatus to see what resources and knowledge we can use to address crises better. “The idea of slowing down”, he writes, “is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions.” Listening to what is, rather than anxiously fixing.

Collective listening and making space for prolonged contemplation of the unfathomable could bring us the necessary mind-state to act otherwise. Death meditation practices are usually intended for the individual, and I understand why – only deep within lies the relationship to one’s finiteness. However, I think that death meditation can be collective, too. Coming together to contemplate death through drone music would touch upon a different side of finiteness – the collective rather than the individual. It could allow us to grieve together without trying to solve the problems we face; to make other decisions that come from a place of stillness; to hear new myths and stories from beyond.

Death can only be imagined since it is not “an event in life: we do not live to experience death”, as Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’. Yet, it is the only certainty, the unshakable pole against which we make sense of the living world. The relationship to it seems paramount in creating meaning and organising life. We can only do it together.

The end is already, and always, a beginning. The apocalypse has already happened. Drifting on the waves of the oscillating and reverberating sound, we can relax into that space of nonexistence and ask it for a vision of a previously unconceived future.

***

Bibliography

• Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan. “Loops of the Posthuman: Towards Machine Fictioning.” FICTIONING: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2019, pp. 437–455.
• Demers, Joanna. Drone and Apocalypse - an Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World. John Hunt Publishing, 2015.
• Farman, Abou. “Terminality. Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene.” The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century, School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2022, pp. 27–52.
• Sbordoni, Alessandro. Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse. Institute of Network Cultures, 2023.
• Schrei, Joshua Michael. “No One Here Gets Out Alive (The Death Episode).” The Emerald Podcast, 17 Sept. 2022, https://www.patreon.com/theemeraldpodcast . Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
• Waller, Lewis. “Introduction to Affect Theory: Brian Massumi & Eve Sedgwick.” Then & Now, 24 June 2023, www.thenandnow.co/2023/06/15/introduction-to-affect-theory-brian-massumi-eve-sedgwick/ . Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.
• Akomolafe, Bayo. “A Slower Urgency.” Weblog. BAYO AKOMOLAFE (blog). Accessed 2024. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/a-slower-urgency .

Footnotes

1. Demers, ‘Drone And Apocalypse’, 29 ↩
2. Schrei, ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive (The Death Episode).’ Accessed 1 Mar. 2024. ↩
3. Affect is a term that builds on Spinoza’s conception of it in Ethics in 1677*.* It was further developed by many philosophers. Affects are conceptualized as being ‘like forces, they are prior to intentions, autonomic, pre-subjective and visceral. They are the intensities that move us. Affects are a way of theorising about the social forces that we encounter that might trigger the body to respond in a certain way’. (Waller 2023) ↩
4. Farman, ‘Terminality. Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene.’, 47. ↩
5. Sbordoni, ‘Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse’. ↩
6. Farman, ‘Terminality. Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene.’ pp. 27–52. ↩
7. Dawdy, Introduction. In The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century, 16. ↩
8. Farman, ’Terminality. Technoscientific Eschatology in the Anthropocene.’, pp. 27–52. ↩
9. Ibid, 36. ↩
10. Burrows and O’Sullivan. ‘Loops of the Posthuman: Towards Machine Fictioning.’ pp. 437–455. ↩
11. Sbordoni, ‘Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse’. ↩
12. Demers, ‘Drone And Apocalypse’, 54. ↩
13. Demers, ‘Drone And Apocalypse’, 53. ↩