A Citizen's Guide To Getting Into Natural Snow Buildings (Part 3)

A couple years ago, as I was preparing to go to my first Big Ears festival in Knoxville, in my excitement, I told one of my co-workers about my sense of anticipation, especially for the overnight, 12-hour drone performance by multiple performers taking turns at keeping the drone going.  People talk, as people do, rumors went around, and a few days later the boss walks into my office and asks if I'm really going to Knoxville to hear a concert of one note being played for 12 straight hours.  

Most people don't really understand drone, but rather than explain it to him I played along and simply told him, "yes." 

Which brings us around to Natural Snow Buildings.  So far, we've listened to the first two of their albums, the hour-long Ghost Folks (2003) and the 2½-hour Winter Ray (2004).  Both of those albums could be classified (if you insist of labeling things) as "post-rock," defined by Wikipedia as "a form of experimental rock characterized by a focus on exploring textures and timbre over traditional rock song structures, chords, or riffs."  To me, post-rock is basically using traditional rock instruments (electric guitars, drums, etc), either with or without other, non-rock instruments (strings, reeds, etc.), in non-traditional ways to produce music outside of the usual rock format.  Both definitions apply to the two NSB records discussed so far.

But after 2004's The Winter Ray, NSB apparently went through some changes.  They didn't release another record until 2006, and their sound after the two-year break was different from before (although still recognizable as NSB). The music still met both of the above definitions of post-rock, but was characterized by raga-like droning sounds produced in a variety of ways on many different instruments.  With their 2006 album, The Dance of the Moon and the Sun, NSB went from being an obscure French post-rock band to being an obscure French drone band.  

The Dance of the Moon and the Sun is easily NSB's most popular record - it's one of their most accessible albums and one of the most melodic of their post- post-rock period.  In short, it's a masterpiece that's come to define NSB as much as they've come to define drone.  Most people who've even heard of the band have only heard TDOTMATS.

It's another 2½-hour affair - two full CD-Rs - that ranges all over the spectrum from quiet folk songs, to extended raga-like instrumentals, to orgies of feedback and dissonance, sometimes all in the course of one track.  They still employ their trademark field recordings and Solange's Nico-like vocals, but they had changed styles, exploring and inventing a new genre of experimental rock and moving out of the shadow of post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor  (who were themselves on hiatus while NSB were in a chrysalis of their own)   It was a turning point for the band.  

The first of the two discs, titled Moon, starts off by alternating between folk songs and instrumental drones.  The opening track, Carved Heart, is only 1:06 long and is so gentle it barely even registers in one's consciousness before it's over.  The second track, the 15-minute Cut Joint Sinews & Divided Reincarnation, is both an album highlight and a drone showcase, as NSB shows off some of the new techniques and methods they've discovered and/or invented.  

Cut Joint Sinews opens with washes of electronic sound resembling an orchestra warming up - strings and possibly horns playing a sustained tone.  Some guitar feedback soon cuts through and rises above the sound, and then settles back in with the other instruments.  This is the sound of drone, and it's beautiful and at the same time suspenseful.  However, the instruments soon drop away, revealing a sinister electronic growl behind the sound. Some middle Eastern-sounding percussion and a cello riffing on a single note emerge to give the electronics an urgent and very organic rhythmic drive. Eventually, the percussion fades into  the background, leaving just the electronic growl again, which then slowly morphs into some spacey synthesizer sounds.  After letting the listener free-float in space for a while, sleigh bells and a clanging cowbell bring everything back down to earth, and a field recording of someone speaking is heard in the background behind some darker synth sounds.  The electronics repeatedly change texture and timbre, and a slow-speed distorted voice give the close of the track a hypnotic, almost narcotic, feel.   

It all doesn't make any more logical sense than does the title of the piece (the title might make a little more sense after you listen yo Disc 2), but that's not the point.  NSB has just spent the past 15 minutes displaying the arsenal of drone strategies at their disposal, while creating a sound montage that operates in its own world and by its own logic.  

I'm not going to go over the entire TDOTMATS album track by track, or even the first Moon disc alone, but after Cut Joint Sinews & Divided Reincarnation NSB play another gentle and short folk song, Interstate Roads, this one using piano, a gently strummed guitar, and what sounds like a couple of sticks or maybe bones for percussion. The lyrics are barely legible but soon give way to whistling anyway before the track ends and transitions into another extended drone, the 12-minute Wisconsin.  

Wisconsin, another highlight of the album, is closer to some of the post-rock instrumentals of the earlier albums - we previously noted how the second half of I Was Always Cold from The Winter Ray sounded like a working draft of Wisconsin.  Here, the guitar strings are allowed to echo and fill the sonic space between the notes, and eventually the guitar stops altogether leaving a ringing, ambient sound.  A new, repeated guitar figure soon emerges thorough the stasis and subtle washes of electronic sound color the mood of the piece.   The volume of individual instruments rise and fall in the mix like a dubbed reggae track, and at one point, everything but the crystal-clear sound of the guitar drops away.  There's some double tracking and building up of layers as the repetition of the guitar notes creates its own hypnotic trance, and yet despite all the changes, a relaxed and pastoral feel is maintained throughout the aptly named Wisconsin.

All in all, Wisconsin is a showcase for another approach to drone, one that uses repetition, echo and reverb to create the drone effect instead of sustained tones over rhythm.  After Wisconsin, we're now only 30 minutes into a 2½-hour album but have already heard two extended drone compositions, both highlights of the album, employing two radically different approaches to drone and a couple quirky, unusual folk songs.  We still have one more, 25-minute drone track to go, several more folk songs, more exotic Eastern sounds, some Eno-esque ambient music, and nearly every conceivable combination of the above to go before we're even through the first of the two discs of TDOTMATS.

Unfortunately, although popular, the album is out of print - at least I can't find it on Amazon or Bandcamp or any of the other usual retailers (Discogs has a used CD version available for $200 if you absolutely must own a hard copy of this).  Fortunately, there are several complete versions of the album that have been uploaded to YouTube, but streaming a 2½-hour album isn't necessarily the best way to explore TDOTMATS.  I'll admit that I found my copy on the dark web, and if you're morally ambiguous enough and willing to venture there, and assuming you've got good virus and identity-theft protection, you may have to do the same to download a digital copy for yourself.

But if I were a better man, I wouldn't be pirating music off the dark web, and instead of being smarmy and telling the boss "yes," I was going to Knoxville to listen to 12 hours of the same note being played, I would have shared a copy of The Dance of the Moon and the Sun with him to indoctrinate him into drone music.