Alpha Drone

The debut of Alpha Drone is thus far the only major release I haven't commented on, and that's due to the perhaps surprising amount of coverage the project's first foray has received. Certainly, this is as underground as you're able to go without entering the Earth's mantle, but for those frequent users of this website it cannot be withheld that the sole composer and musician in Alpha Drone once entertained a prominent role among the discussion and information of the site itself. In the same way as the music he creates seems weirdly distant, several layers of reality separate the self-styled John Gill from his real persona, leaving the quandary of classification and the difficulty of a fair assessment. It practically goes without saying that you should divorce Alpha Drone with all notions of black metal you already entertain, while I'm not sure whether or not it's useful to think of this self-titled album as music in the strictest of senses, despite being a good deal more musical than other AD works like For Ana and Da Capo.

Why do I attempt to draw a line between music and Alpha Drone? In part, it comes down to intention, and also methods. Never do I feel that John Gill wants to give a clear picture of the core to these songs, neither thematically nor musically, which leads to elements of several unconnected genres appearing, as well as brief flashes of concept and then long disappearances of meaning. Regardless of the near-decade before Alpha Drone received any follow-up, that has remained consistent throughout the project's almost 20 year history. Somewhere, deep down, some of the songs have a metal base, and indeed black metal specifically is intimated through the use of distorted harsh vocals, rattling blastbeat drumming, and singing tremolo lines of guitar that refuse to sit in a comfortable pocket of the mix; however, almost as often the album reverts to untamed soundscapes of echoes and distortion, as of distant industrial noise, which is how 'Theozoology' starts off. Nothing discernibly musical enters that piece until an isolated organ line beams in from high above the rest of the sounds, or perhaps far below, as if the main sonic elements were an old military aircraft screaming through the sky on the way down to bomb a church from extreme close range. The booming windy voices that arrive late in that opener shed no light on proceedings, and the voices across the entire listen continue to inspire fear and bewilderment, 'Shambala Serrano' following on with weird primitive groans that give way to black metal howls.

As such, one could look upon the 5 songs here as bedroom black metal with awful production EQ and little grasp of songwriting dynamics, yet that hardly seems the point of the release. Plenty of instruments go into the creation of these pieces, often synthesized from keyboards and played with more than tolerable skill when desired, yet the caustic, parchment-dried texture of everything seems to repel the ears and capture the mind. As an equivalent, let me suggest that this album sonically represents what the visual of faded tapestries and nigh-eradicated cave paintings do to my perception of art - transport me past the gaps to a sense of the gaps having meaning. Do not confuse what I've said with the mark of a masterpiece, because Alpha Drone can be musically poor at times, and even musically obnoxious, but the aim is clearly elsewhere and in that spirit manages to send me beyond the act of merely listening. Although I mention images of antiquity in my comparison, I feel that this album hints more at philosophical than historical distance, which a quick glance at the song titles and band etymology should confirm. It helps that the almost tribal nature of 'Shambala Serrano' feels like an alien reference, but even the noise parts of the release come across as ritual electronic and industrial sound rather than anything more consonant with musical references. When the piano in 'Shambala Serrano' holds sway, it reminds a little of some symphonic black metal acts, though again the minimalism and starkness of the production sets it more in the light of the atavistic sounds that Burzum managed to magic up from limited components, increasing the mystery rather than the clarity of the passage.

Several other moments of Alpha Drone leave me wanting to say, "That's weird but it works," mainly due to the effect the awkwardly arranged instruments have on me rather than the songs according with my idea of pleasant listening. The very long 'Shambala Serrano' covers much of the content, using up 15 minutes of a sub-40 minute runtime, while 'To Take Earth Back from Man' works more as a 4 minute piece made up in its first half of an interlude, not that the spread mix ever makes it clear what should be a focus and what should not. 'Akashaganga' turns up as the other main content piece, getting into relatively normal black metal after a couple of minutes, yet here again things don't work as you'd expect and the monotonous blastbeats can be practically tuned out as drawn out soothing vocals waft over the foreground, making it sound like 2 songs are playing at once. If this were a real attempt at black metal, you'd throw out the horrid programmed rhythms and start again, but that's just how you know it's not. Even the spoken sample that opens 'The Sophonaut' can barely be discerned through its own distortion, and that's sort of how the whole album works: the more you strain your ears to hear the more the sounds escape, and the harder you try to catch the meaning the harder it becomes to do so.

You could easily deep dive into Alpha Drone and come up clutching only handfuls of mud, while you could just as easily sift out a pearl on your first try if you feel at home in the environment. I don't want to say that this debut excels in painting any kind of image or producing any specific effect on me, but I should applaud its ability to obfuscate all guesswork and remain fiercely different to the point of intrigue. When I listen to drone music, I find I can often place my own meaning onto albums and thus gain more satisfaction from listening to them; with Alpha Drone, it's more like I hear a language that I have heard impossibly once before, and with every subsequent listen I forget a little more of what I first knew.

I come to review the self-titled release of Alpha Drone having been contacted by the man behind the entity, one John Gill doing some admirable self-publicity work for his one-man band. Obviously I've no prior knowledge of Alpha Drone but seeing 5 reviews on Metal Archives averaging 84% I had thought there would be some grounding for this mark being awarded to what is being described as 'dark ambient/noise, black metal'. However, after struggling to make it through two complete listenings I honestly cannot see where such gradings have come from, and refuse to censor my opinions merely cos the protagonist is in direct contact.

Having neglected to read the booklet at this point in time for fear of jeopardising my impartial view of the music within, I instead get 5 songs of the most hideously recorded bedroom BM I've ever come across. Take virtually any segment across the album's 38 minutes and it will make a Burzum recording sound clean and glossy in comparison; the midi-sounding guitars in the likes of "To Take Earth Back From Man" carry less weight than an inflated balloon (which is a pity for this song holds what sounds like the only (highly Burzum-ic) interesting riff) while the programmed 'drumsound' would have been better served if the sound of wet cardboard boxes being bashed by twigs were recorded. I sense greater intention is behind these recordings but to be labelled as 'dark ambient/noise' seems, to these ears, an attempt to justify such poorly recorded music with a dubious genre-tagging, while rating it up in the 80%+ leagues is an insult to albums that manage even an average 50-60% reward.

I don't decry others liking this (or anything similar) but one who does must accept that there is little basis for awarding even mediocre grades to such an album despite the piquing of one's interest. Despite how it may read I take little pleasure in shitting all over the creative efforts of another music fan but pretentious elitism must be removed for the basis of honest reviewing and this effort of Alpha Drone's has seriously tested my huge listening patience to the limit.

Originally written for www.Rockfreaks.net

"We live and we die, day in and day out...and we dream!"

Such is the passage that concludes the liner notes for the self-titled debut of John Gill's Alpha Drone, a margin walking musical entity so far departed from the ball & chain of convention that it defies reality itself, assuming an alien configuration safely outside the confines of simple classification. At its core, you may very well identify with some fraction of the whole. There is a black metal influence here, or something that once called itself black metal, now a mere reflection in a dissonant stream of harsh, distorted vocals and the subdued, bitter flow of guitar chords that creep across a recessive, programmed drumming which exists solely to measure the momentum of the listener's descent into madness (or ascent into nirvana, your choice.)

But that description alone would be selling the music sort, for in addition to its raw, metallic components there is an overarching, ambient sadness throughout the near 40 minutes of this album. Not the gentle gleanings of an emergent Brian Eno, mind you, but the foreboding of the free form noise, ritual and martial genres, convergent upon this one, single cipher of expression. Having delved into the works of many such artists in my time, I can tell you that Alpha Drone does not quite sound like any one other. To forge a direct chain of recognition is nigh impossible. But try and dream of an electric-age Beherit jamming to Lustmord, or an Abruptum chilling by the pool, Raison d'Etre in It's headset. Or perhaps an extra terrestrial interpretation of old Summoning with a spark of the late Muslimgauze's more twisted emissions. This is an electric array of names I'm dropping, and yet Alpha Drone conforms to none of this.

But it's just as far out.

The inspiration for the project's name comes from an old science fiction tale the creator once drafted up in some earlier flight of imagination. Imagination is a positive thing. I'm a space cadet myself, engaged at any one time in a myriad of science fiction, fantasy or speculative media that challenge my perceptions and fuel my simultaneous addictions to nihilism, nostalgia and boldly asserting myself where no cosmonaut has gone before. So the concepts behind the compositions of Alpha Drone intrigue me, especially after a perusal of the album's archaic visual aesthetics and the extensive food for thought provided in the liner notes. There are no lyrics printed in the CD, but I've read that they follow the liner notes pretty closely. Ancient civilizations, elements, cycles of existence, the illusions of modern science, the farce of religion, all of these are considerations behind the music. The album is akin to having an existential archive of history, philosophy and every thoughtful (if theoretical) History Channel pseudo-documentary about religion, extra terrestrials, conspiracies and the coming Armageddon slowly hammered into your left temple simultaneously with an iron piton. When was the last time you enjoyed such a feeling?

The experience of Alpha Drone is delivered through five separate acts, each of which takes subtle liberties from another, deftly avoiding the chagrin of monotony that might develop if Gill were to simply follow one idea beyond its welcome. Other artists might decide to forcibly bludgeon the listener with the same cycle endlessly, mistaking an inflated flair for minimalist drama as effective expression. Most of these have failed. Gill doesn't even attempt such folly, because his universe is just too damned vast to dwell for too long on one caustic spark. Truth be told, there is some sense of numbing repetition here, in particular with the 15 minute epic "Shambala Serrano", but hardly impossible to digest, since you'll be reeling from the uncanny procession of deep, throat chants, distorted background chords, harsh vocals hinging on the edge of pure distortion, and most impressively, a keyboard sequence worthy of any truly ghastly 70-80s horror film. And even here, the tempo shifts from a crawl to a more punishing, slowly blasted segment over which an additional synth alights like a star signal from afar.

The rest of the tracks are not so extensive, but equally riveting. "Theozoology" is the opener, a swelling opus of trembling noise that slowly introduces a distant, martial percussion battery, a vibrant yet thin flourish of frightening organs, clean if subtle guitars, and ungodly distortions that sound like Galactus is slowly taking a chunk out of your world. The vocals arrive after 3:00, like a late warning, and then a deep chant carries the track out. "To Take Earth Back from Man" is a terrible joy despite its extremely wish-wash, background feel, a melodic black/ambient metal charge erupting beyond a martial chant segment set to the samples of storm. "Akashaganga" is as desolate as anything Malefic or Wrest have penned, a subdued, submissive stretch of horror so void of warmth and hope that it would perhaps best serve as a soundtrack to Lord Byron's classic, end of times poem "Darkness". The album has been so punishing to this point that the shimmering rays that open "The Sophonaut" come as a total surprise, for somewhere within the guitars is a distant wisp of hope. But it fades out all too soon, into voice samples and throbbing, electric atmosphere that sounds like an Elder God dropping bong hits dangerously close to a Tesla machine.

I don't know John Gill personally, and I'm not familiar with his other projects (of which there are a good number). It took me some time to fully digest what I was listening to on this album. Weeks. Into months. But all of the most interesting works do. Alpha Drone is not an act that will reward you with any semblance of bold melody or conventional metal structure. It's instead a fabric of finely woven, alien torment, threaded through the grasping talons of the Fates into every awaiting orifice. There is no hiding from this end. You can complain about the album's roughshod production (it was created over a number of years), and you could attempt to write it off as mere noise, reveling in its own liberating obscurity. But then you wouldn't learn anything. Alpha Drone feeds your head. And it bleeds your head. I haven't heard anything quite like it before, and I'm not sure I ever will. I'd like to think even Alpha Drone itself would move forward from this, as there is nothing to improve upon. Only more to explore. And isn't that last word the key?

Highlights: Earth is still here. For now. It was not eaten during this recording.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Having never afforded much time to old school styled black metal bands that incorporate the dark ambient, or noise genres, I was fairly excited about hearing Alpha Drone’s self-titled debut full-length when it arrived in the post. It’s somewhat intimidating reviewing a record created by someone who lurks on these here parts, but it’s made much easier when you’re reviewing a genuinely good piece of music with bundles of atmosphere, which is what we have here with the enigmatic arrival of John Gill’s solo project, one which reminds me of the Scandinavian second wave in some ways and the movement in France of the Les Légions Noires in others, whilst maintaining an incredible sense of individuality. Originally intended to be a follow-up to Gill’s other venture, Black Tribe, a band with whom I’ve not heard much of, Alpha Drone have kept on going, despite the fact that this is intended as a side-project to a band who have since changed their name a few times, finally settling on Antabus.

With the mysterious band photo, the lyrical themes of esoteric occultism and the origins of the bands name (stated in the additional information), Alpha Drone are certainly an intriguing prospect for any listener looking to expand upon their knowledge of all things ambient, black and noise related. My only experience of black noise last year came with the discovery of Worm blood’s ‘Mastery And Creation’, a difficult, but ultimately rewarding musical adventure into the realm of living nightmares and melodic undertones which thumped beneath the surface like an unsteady pulse. Given the level of experimentation carried out on that 2009 debut by the three piece American band, I expected the same levels of experimentation to be a leading factor on this record and I was right for doing so. Despite the fact that this is probably a very cheaply made, perhaps bedroom based band, the material is often quite delicate in places, despite the use of waves of chaotic distortion throughout most of the records duration.

Given the long nature of some of the songs, it’s to be expected that Gill, who has a history with experimental black metal bands, would meld high levels of creativity and innovation into this record. So much so that it’s hard to decipher who or what the influences are, beyond looking to Aldous Huxley's masterpiece novel "Brave New World". At times, I hear variations of what Burzum laid down in the early 90’s in Gill’s shrieking vocals (as shown perfectly on ‘To Take Earth Back From Man’) and at other times, I hear instrumentation akin to work done by Darkthrone on some of their earliest black metal recordings. The lack of explanation serves one true purpose and that is to help build upon the already huge sense of mystique behind the music. The atmospheres present within the songs themselves already do this tremendously, but with the help of other factors, it makes the feeling of mysteriousness even stronger.

One can only assume what the influences might be and how they are used to pull the strings behind the scenes, but it would definitely seem that Norway and it’s long history with black metal have a major part to play in the formation of this record. As I pointed out previously, songs like ‘To Take Earth Back From Man’ show a distinct likeness to Burzum’s material from all eras as it blends repetitive guitars, distortion and Varg-esque vocals superbly. The production is very thin and doesn’t do the greatest job at holding together the music and vocals that well, but it does suffice and still manages to highlight the better areas of Alpha Drone’s performance where old and new meet to form a relationship between differing characteristics as shown in the use of clichéd weather samples, repetitive riffs and Burzum inspired vocals. Although I wouldn’t call him an inspiration to Gill, given the timeline in which this record and The Ruins of Beverast’s records came out, but some of the disturbing ambiance reminds me of Alexander von Meilenwald’s eclectic style, especially songs like ‘The Sophonaut’.

Areas such as these are very cyclical and don’t tend to offer the kinds of variation a person might wish to find within associated genres such as dark ambient and noise, but there is enough creative spark hidden deep beneath the poor production as the instrumentation aligns the various influences with a good degree of melody and wintry haze, which is viewed as perfection to people like me who’re fans of bands who use huge, densely populated atmospheres where each facet of the instrumentation works closely together to form a tight knit community - though, to be fair, Gill was probably working on a very tight budget and has managed to transfer his macabre ideas well. In fact, despite the production, much of the material still manages to form atmospheres worth hearing due to their eerie nature and compelling listening. Definitely one for the open minded metal fan who has an interest in black, ambient and noise music.

There is a problem with reviewing this CD. In fact there are many problems, or say, strange parameters that one has to adopt to to fully understand what is, or is not happening here. For starters, this music is created to be just what it is and not more. You will not find any at all insight to anything by listening to Alpha Drone. Alpha Drone exists for the sole purpose of existing. There are no gimmicks involved, no values, no any at all impressions that have to be made, other then the impression of intimidation. Another aspect that hovers like a heavy grey mist over the atmosphere of this CD is the incredible force that stands behind it which can be described as a concentrated form of nihilistic energy flowing like a stream in a valley. Physically speaking, the water molecules have potential energy that is transformed into kinetic energy, simply because that is their temporal purpose. In a similar manner, the music on this album is the result of a random occurrence of the right alignment of molecules in the right time. Just by listening to this you confirm the aforementioned statements in several ways.

To be confronted with such a nihilistic force is compelling and arousing at the same time. Similar to the death of tragedy, a certain fury is unleashed against everything that is socratic and rational in our self-defined reality. There is no message to be presented here, nothing that should teach or inform. This is music for individuals who have taken this one little step farther from apathy, to a direction of action, the maximizing of their potential, even though the materialistic parameters are low-set on this one. With the only luxury of a cheap 40 euro "made in China" guitar, a non existent bass, a computer microphone and respectively an onboard soundcard with the aid of digital distortion, John Gill did a very good job in pushing his ideas onto something concrete, to share with other lost and alienated minds and although the sound is utterly thin at times, the basic idea remains and conserves itself, only to fester onto the listener like a disease.

By taking a closer look at your surroundings you can easily comprehend that the cyclic nature of matter and everything else our senses allow us to perceive leaves us fading away in a grand gas cloud of nothing from which everything became and eventually ends. There is no direction, since it all leads to the same result. This fatal interpretation of everything is captured beauteously on this recording, since it shows that no matter what you dig into out of curiosity, it has no effect on anything, since the apparent nature of beings is to behave in a manner that still is a mystery to me. Be it psychological, biological or whatever concept you take to explain the constant fluctuation in man's behavior, there are no rules to adhere by. There is no logic, there is only anti-logic in a soup of matter with variating energy exchange. Theozoology is such a religious and philosophical concept developed by Dr. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels whose explanation would go beyond the scope of this review. The madness of this concept is captured by this record, unleashing a constant stream of hate for everything that we have to endure.

The music is very fuzzy with constant annoying thin sounding parts, which would do a lot better with certain equipment (what was used here can not be described as adequate equipment for the intellectual developing of this music). It is really a shame that everything we know and anything that we are so sure about is merely an illusion, but that way we can focus on anything that stimulates our brains just enough to make our curiosity go on and take control. This is the place this music takes you to. There is no why and what here, there exists only the how, only the manner in which this is produced. The raspy tormented and very authentic vocals express more than one can imagine. They burn through the music with a vengeance, capturing a feeling that will give you hours and hours of painful cephalic stimulation. With a variety of song length that ranges between four and fifteen minutes expand the perception of time and lead to a liquidation of certain thought threads. The album collides by its own mass, only to become a black hole, sucking you inside. The energy the supernova generates through this explosion transcends any and all concepts, such as the one presented here, so there is no need for coping, since there is no deeper explanation to this. For example the artwork is a slightly rendered version of the "Thule society", which was an antisemitic organization with very weird ideas about origin and such, leading to the great emotional and romantic impact nazism later made on the world.

It's a pity that this album could have been much more with the right kind of equipment, but nevertheless the beginning of something powerful is being witnessed here. Something that will shine very bright for a very short time. Something that will be forgotten very quickly. But that is the beauty of it all. This is the shape of a burning (non)existence, pouring its antipathy through liquefied music.

(TMO and MA on 30.01.2010)

It's kind of strange that despite all this talk about not conforming, being an outsider, etc, metal can typically be forced into just a few genres. It's kind of sad that when people think 'outsider music', they typically think 'Dudes who can't sing in tune playing folk music' instead of, well, bands like this.

Yeah, who needs Daniel Johnson or whatever when you've got this!? This is really bizarre, not necessarily 'good' but definitely one of the most esoteric things I've ever heard, with a powerful and truly otherworldly atmosphere.

It helps that much of it has been executed quite well, though, and a lot of is actually quite a good listen. 'Akashaganga' starts off sounding like Tim Hecker covering some old LLN material, before everything gets all blasty and murky. The guitars are muffled to the point where they sound like (really poor quality) synths, and the drums rattle around way in the background of the mix, sounding like really grim tambourines. In the middle of the epic guitar 'n' tambourine storm, some very pitch shifted vocals come out of nowhere, abruptly, to impart to us some sort of wise/sage-like/drunken knowledge before it all goes back into the epic metal.

And so it goes. There are plenty of those aforementioned guitar/drum BM style workouts, but John Gill seems to love throwing everything else into the mix, whether it's some epic Tibetan Chants and Neurosis-ish piano work (well, it certainly reminded me off it) in the really, really overlong 'Shambant Serrano', or the perplexing, but nonetheless awesome noise of 'The Sophonaut', which does everything from strange spoken word, to a rather happy guitar passage, to some epic, hostile noise action. It's an amazing song where all of his strange experiments come together into something that sounds really, really good. It just works so well, and it's backed up by some more epic atmospheric action in 'Theozoology', were some epic marching drums are joined by a huge amount of sweeping noise, synths and some huge german-man-vocals.

Still, despite some truly amazing moments there's a fair bit of fail. There is no way that 'Shambant Serrano' should be 14 minutes long, as it contains maybe 7 minutes of ideas at the most. The production is really, really bad- no excuses for it. While the murkiness of it works well in the non metal sections, it fails hard when the metal comes along. I don't think I've ever heard such a muddy, flaccid guitar tone. I guess these guys haven't heard of 'treble'. They should wiki it sometime! It might make their music sound a bit better.

Terrible production, overlong songs and questionable screamed vocals aside, this is an excellent, bizarre slab of noise and metal that should appeal to everyone who likes their music to be as unlistenable as possible. Absolutely mind boggling, not something I'd call 'enjoyable', and not even good, but still an album that you should check out if you're feeling adventurous and/or masochistic.

Now this is something you don't see every day: Black metal not only drawing from as distinctly modern a mythology as that surrounding UFOs, but throwing in influences from the most sinister corners of occultism. Yes, that's right... you might have heard of NSBM, but are you ready for FSBM as in Flying Saucer Black Metal?

It's an extremely varied album... the longer songs follow the "ambient black metal" tradition laid down by Burzum and Darkthrone, but with not only surprisingly complex textured songwriting but a high level of quirkiness. "Shambala Serrano", for example, has a prominent piano AND the rhythm being provided not only by the drums but by a repeated sample of chanting Buddhist monks that shows up at the end of "Akashaganga", a fast-paced chaotic number full of more traditionally sci-fi electronic sound effects expected from a band whose name reminds me of the Borg from "Star Trek". In fact, if Hawkwind were a black metal band formed in the 1990s/2000s rather than an old prog-rock band they'd probably sound a lot like "Akashaganga".

Two of the shorter songs, "Theozoology" and "To Take Earth Back From Man", are respectively a noisy industrial mood piece serving as the album's intro by setting up the entire "futuristic occult" vibe and the closest thing to conventional metal on the album. Both of those incidentally feature some military march-style drumming. The closer "The Sophonaut" is a most bizarre fusion of folk-rock and electronic noise with some slightly distorted spoken-work narration that are the only vocals much intelligible on the album.

On the subject of vocals, they mostly vary between a muffled but recognizeably human scream and what sounds like extraterrestrials speaking in their own language. The production is a bit fuzzy and somewhat cold, with the guitars not sounding that guitar-like at all... and did I mention all the sampled sound effects used? The Tibetan chants are only the tip of the iceberg. A didgeridoo even shows up at some point.

As different an atmosphere from most other black metal albums as Alpha Drone attempt, this album actually succeeds. The weird stuff doesn't make it come across as silly, it creates a very unique air of otherwordliness. This chance meeting of ancient and new mythologies is certainly worth a listen for those who like unconventional black metal and have a taste for the paranormal.