‘Record store guy’s head explodes and the critic is speechless!’ Questions of genre in drone metal

Abstract

This article examines questions of genre in the translocal and marginal music culture of drone metal, a radically slow and extended form of metal founded on extremes of amplification, distortion and repetition. I examine the tentative formation of genre in connections forged between musicians and between recordings, establishing sonic and symbolic conventions. I note the deliberate associations with bands (notably Black Sabbath) which situated this music as metal. I then turn to the role of listener discourse in constituting genre, attending to listeners' experience of and communication about the key terms 'drone' and 'metal'. After noting the importance of vagueness and ambiguity in genre designations, particularly in drone metal's translocal marginality, I show that relevant genre characteristics for listeners include not just musical sounds, but also affective, experiential, embodied and conscious subjective states. Finally, I suggest that treating genre as a constellation of points, viewed in different but related ways from different standpoints, is particularly useful in understanding drone metal as a loosely constituted genre with fragmented, disparate and intermittently connected audiences.

Dirty, soothing, secret magic: individualism and spirituality in New Age and extreme metal music cultures

“…New Age music is not well researched nor well understood: it is ‘difficult to define’ (Garneau 1987, p. 57) and subject to ‘highly contested and changing interpretations’ (Coaldrake 2012, p. 50). Prominent musicians reject the categorisation itself (Hibbett 2010, p. 283), although artists’ disavowal of genre terminology is far from unusual across music styles (Coggins 2016). Helfried Zrzavy has even suggested in a rare academic journal article on the music that, paradoxically perhaps, a lack of cohesion is in fact one of New Age music's determining characteristics (1990).…”