The book itself It has a particularly drone-like feel in that middle section: like the same story is repeated with different players, facing different emotional challenges, in different cities, on different drugs, each one influencing the next. So. many. drugs... If you are interested in a book that looks at sound in its various forms, the book has some interesting chapters and Sword writes about a wide variety of genres and bands with focus on the 20th century. One of the most idiosyncratic electronic producers of recent years, the Canadian sound artist creates subtle drone pieces that fuse baroque atmospherics with the warm, idiosyncratic and sometimes unpredictable tonality of old analogue synths in combination with live instrumentation.

A shorter chapter that follows on from the avant-garde exploration. Sword charts the origins and development of The Velvet Underground and the drones influence on the band. Lou Reed’s solo career post Velvet is briefly covered as well. TVU are a great band, I don’t need to A shorter chapter that follows on from the avant-garde exploration. Sword charts the origins and development of The Velvet Underground and the drones influence on the band. Lou Reed’s solo career post Velvet is briefly covered as well. TVU are a great band, I don’t need to tell you that but an underrated aspect of their sound is the drone and Sword highlights that brilliantly. For a while I thought I might use this book as a reference. So Harry and I disagree on a few things. Who cares? I can just ignore his wittering and explore the numerous musicians he mentions myself, right? But then I realised - if he's making such mistakes and such dumbfounding assertions about stuff I am familiar with, then who knows what sort of boneheaded things he's saying about stuff I'm not so familiar with?Beginning in 1963, performances of his Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble – which at one point included John Cale, soon to be in the Velvet Underground, and Tony Conrad, who would work with Faust in the 1970s – were long explorations of single, sine-wave tones. Young and his wife, light artist Marian Zazeela, hummed; Conrad played violin; Cale played a viola with a flattened bridge that he’d strung with electric guitar strings. It wasn’t just the nakedness of the drone that was transformative. It was also the volume. Every element was heavily amplified. The sound, by all accounts, was overwhelming – wild, raw, and elemental – an embodiment of the romantic idea of the sublime as beauty plus terror. The drone, Young said, is “an attempt to harness eternity”; the primal is neither nice nor pretty. You can still find many interesting bands and album recommendations in this book, but, to be honest, I would have preferred a simple list format for that. Harry also has a habit of inserting himself into the narrative. He seems to think he's Hunter S. Thompson - our fearless gonzo reporter issuing harrowing dispatches from the frontline of his chemical misadventures. So it's a pity he comes across as more like Alan Partridge out of his depth on a Manchester drug bust. What then does the drone speak to? I was going to write that the drone is sacred and profane at the same time, but really, that’s a category error. It is neither of those things; it predates them. The drone is one way in which humanity has learned to connect to, commune with, corral the Other – to balance our own vulnerability and transience against the immanent and eternal. “A lot of the aspects we find so graceful in ancient cultures are to do with their ability to interweave their own lives with the bigger processes they were part of,” Brian Eno tells Sword. “They had to build their lives around surrendering.” The drone has a role in ritual music that delivers repetitive rhythms and sensory excess just as it does in music of spiritual discipline and devotional austerity. Which is to say, the drone sometimes demands surrender, and sometimes merely enables it. One part sociological study of the drone and two-thirds of history of a variety of musical artists across multiple genres ranging from religious chants to "tribal", to jazz, heavy metal, pop, and electronic; the drone is regarded as the very essence, the beginning and end of music and how it underlays throughout much of popular culture. Much of the sociological writing is very reminiscent of Mark Fisher's work on rave culture and music.

And what followed was just dismal. The chapter on techno and industrial music ("real" industrial music, mind you!) was dreary, and the final chapter was just miserable. Rather than concluding his tedious tome with a final hurrah about the transcendent possibilities of music, Harry instead decided to lash out at some of the usual modern boogeymen. Even though Harry and I likely agree on many points, nobody wants to get trapped in the corner by a pub bore after he's had a few. You might nod along at the points they make, but you're still going to leave the pub covered in their stale spittle. So thanks, Harry, you vampire. You drained your subject of all its joy and power. The Quietus awaits! Getting familiar with droning sounds fra Indian raga to British dubstep is neat, but it leaves me wanting for a more in-depth exploration of the drone as a concept.

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Sword writes the book with infectious enthusiasm; it is a breezy, friendly read. At the end of the day he's a metalhead (albeit a slightly pompous one) and this is where he's happiest. Unfortunately, I don't think he clearly defines what he means by drone music. He frequently talks about "the drone" as if it's something that can be invoked, or as if it's some cosmic force that one can tune into (usually aided by drugs). There's a lot of talk about "transcendence", and other wavy-gravy ideas - he even ends the book by asking "do we play the drone or does it play us?" To me it sounds exactly like the "New Age woo-woo" that Sword clearly looks down on. This is not the book it claims to be. This is not an exploration of the drone in music. It starts out as such, yes. But the author loses his way almost immediately, and what we get instead is a turgid trudge through a select history of various disparate forms of music throughout the latter half of the 20th century. And by the end, the only drone is the sound of a Sword grinding his axe in impotent rage at the perceived evils of the modern world.

Great introduction chapter. The drone in: doom metal, household appliances, the womb, drones flying over warzones, industrial music, actual industry and the universe itself. This chapter is great as it really shows Sword setting out his stand and what he’s going to offer you in this book. It is never single minded, he’s great at looking at the drone from the countless angles you can examine it from.

My only problem with this book is that I knew a lot of what it talked about already. Being pretty well informed about metal music already and having read Alex Ross' Listen to This and JR Moores Electric Wizards, Monolithic Undertow came in a LITTLE redundant.