ABoneCroneDrone

People who don’t create regularly from scratch, critics or journalists who interpret others’ work for example, in my experience, find it difficult to understand that most creators do not create from a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but that they create from a place of nothingness where things spontaneously arise. That is the place of the unknowable and in our lives it is very difficult to live with what is not known (yet), even though “I don’t know” is essential to true change and new growth. Instead, we’re taught to find the answers to everything, and we have to quantify everything, we have to have the cash flow chart for the next five years!

Things don’t happen like that, but we run our lives as if they do and that’s why our lives break down. And when our lives break down who do we turn to? We turn to the artist to express our pain, we turn to the artist to provide inspiration, but I think we turn to the artist because on a psychological level we know that the artist is comfortable living with the unknown. The artist has had to face the unknown, had to make a living today out of something which didn’t exist yesterday, and we take comfort from that.

If a piece of work is derivative, we know where it came from, we can spot the influences. But often, when someone comes up with something outlandish, instead of concentrating on the fact that, say, seventy percent of it is new and original, we tend to concentrate on the thirty percent of the structure that we do understand from the past. There is almost a resistance to experiencing new things in a vulnerable and fresh way. (Certainly musically I think we are hooked on familiarity.)

There are some things that relate back to the previous albums. With The Zen Kiss I talked about “being sung”— this album focuses on the experience of the listener being between my ears or hearing what I hear, which is a way of getting closer to the experience of “being sung”. The album is incomplete whilst it lacks the attentive listener’s experience, and that makes it much more like performance art. Although the album uses the same structures and the same techniques as The Zen Kiss and Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices, this time it puts you in the place of the creator.

I have a single skill, from which many others have grown, and that skill is to be able to connect to a world of potential, swim alongside it, learn from it, and birth its ideas into this world. There is something going on under great creative works that we all need to face— not the blank page, but the darkness of potential, where you can hear little whispers of ideas or gifts of insight that the creator births into the real world. I want the listener to be able to hear those whispers of things for themselves, and that is why ABoneCroneDrone attempts to place the listener inside the creator’s cauldron.

I’ve become so attuned to what’s going on within drones that now I sometimes hear fully formed melodies in them, played on appropriate instruments, and these “performances” don’t usually relate to my current level of skill as a writer or singer— they are often far beyond my skills— nor do they sound like any composition I can recall, but they carry the same joy that I experience from any brilliant performance. It’s rather like “seeing things”.

Sometimes I could swear that what I’m experiencing exists in reality for anyone else to hear.

On this album I’m attempting to give the listener access to this experience, what’s inside me and to the place that I connect to, as far as I possibly can. One could say that it’s impossible to do that, it is impossible to give you the fullest access to my imagination and to what I hear as it happens. But what I can give you is some sense of what I feel, some sense of what I hear a split second before a melody hits me, and I can perhaps get your own imagination to play tricks on you.

In order to do this I’m putting what I hear under a magnifying glass. When you walk up to a stone— it’s grey and just sits there. But when you put a magnifying glass over it, suddenly the stone has texture, it’s got surface, it’s got history— it’s a world within a world. That is the kind of sight that I have when I look at a drone all the time. But I recognise that many people see drones the way I see a lump of rock. (Six lumps of rock— is that an album?!) So I’ve had to put in an artificial magnifying glass— in this case my voice and various production techniques which I’ve used to enhance the harmonics, the whispers of melodies that I’ve actually heard in these drones. I’ve listened to the harmonics and by playing with several arrangement psychologies and vocal approaches attempted to pull the listener in by singing what I’ve heard. But I’ve kept it very simple— this time I’m letting the drones speak.