What Does It Take to Survive 24 Hours of Drone?

Photo by Juri Hiensch

Spoiler alert: I didn't make it through all twenty-four hours of the 24-Hour Drone Fest. The marathon, which took over a dark, fog-filled room at Le Guess Who in Utrecht, ran midnight-to-midnight, opening with Tim Hecker's tremulous washes of bass and piano, and closing with Stephen O'Malley's distorted guitar onslaught.

As a mid-size, multi-venue music festival, Le Guess Who combines broadly appealing indie acts with a defiant weird streak: Musicians you'd expect to see at Pitchfork or FYF Fest—St. Vincent, White Lung, Benjamin Booker and Parquet Quarts—are paired with left-field, avant-garde sounds. The biggest rock star was a sixty-six-year-old Turkish psych-rock singer named Selda who looks exactly like my Sicilian grandmother. While Mac DeMarco spun a DJ set of disco and cornball 80s music, William Basinski's Disintegration Loops played on a lonely PA speaker in a vacant corridor around the corner, with no explanation given.

The drone sessions took place as the festival drew to a close, and were held in an arts complex called TivoliVredenberg, a huge, brand new, escalator-filled space that resembles a movie multiplex. Despite the spit-shined setting, a full day of drone music is the kind of thing that could only come together under the influence of drugs. Festival co-founder Bob van Heur describes coming up with the idea after hearing about neuroscience research on the benefits of drone music. After some psychedelics-inspired encouragement, van Heur decided that hosting a daylong session at the festival would be the best way to test out the hypothesis (he plans on testing it out again this April at a similar event in Hudson, NY). As he say it, attendees will leave with a new sense of consciousness, free to be different people and lead new lives.

At midnight I walk into a room decorated with floating question marks—the festival's logo—and the main question in my head is, "Why? Why am I here again? Why have I come to a city as old as Jesus to sit in a dark room and watch someone stand behind a laptop? A few blocks away, King Tuff is playing to a tiny packed room. People are having fun." From the balcony I watch as the room slowly fills with smoke; the guy next to me rolls a joint. Shrouded in fog, Tim Hecker plays a hazy opening set full of lush overtones, throbbing bass and John Carpenter-esque synth riffs. When the music stops, unexpectedly, there is silence: the DJ hasn't finished setting up yet. The fact that the music isn't totally continuous is a slight disappointment.

I realize that pillows have been placed around the venue, and lying on one allows the soundwaves to move horizontally across your body. For Emptyset's chains smashing, lightning harnessing music, the effect is sort of like hanging out in one of the massage chairs at Brookstone. At this point I decide to regroup for the final push. Though some people spent the night, security made rounds to make sure folks didn't doze off. At 10AM, those who had stayed overnight were politely asked to leave, as a more human-looking, freshly washed, and well-rested audience began to file in. At noon, I return for the twelve-hour run to the end, ready to fully submit to the concept. A prepared piano, trombone and bass clarinet create long sustaining tones in contrast to the harsh sounds the night before. Juliana Barwick spins angelic vocal loops in front of acid-drop visuals, and James Blackshaw, testing the limits of the concept, fingerpicks an acoustic guitar around open tunings.

Photo by Juri Hiensch

I should also mention that this last session in the room was done without any alcohol or drugs, a prerequisite I assumed was meant to test out the correlation between drone music and brain chemistry. Somewhere around Steve Hauschildt's Vangelis-esque synth set, I feel something click. For the first time in seven days, I didn't want to check my phone, text my friends in New York or scroll through Twitter. This was good. Hauschildt makes music that vibrates through you both body and mind. It's as narrative as instrumental synth music can be, a soundscape of digital sounds and rising chords: ideal stoner music even if you're not stoned.

New York tape-loop wizard William Basinksi, with his wild mane of hair and aviator sunglasses, follows up with a laptop-based piece that was similarly trance-inducing. If there's any credence to the idea of music as a a chemistry altering force, it's in his repetitive patterns, which seem to stop time and cut a path to the center of your brain. A quick look around the room reveals hardly any tiny glowing screens. The last artist, Stephen O'Malley of SunnO))), closes out with nearly an hour of distorted guitar played through six amp stacks. It's powerful, body shaking stuff that acts as a huge reset button for the hypnotic music that came before. The schedule lists ten minutes of silence as the final act, but as soon as the lights come on folks are up and chatting, ready to get back to their lives.