3 out of 5

Label: Monofonus Press

Produced by: Romain de Ferron (?)

Three longform drone tracks done on Harmonium and Synthesizer.

Drone – like a lot of more specific genres, want you start venturing away from the main “pop,” “rock,” “rap,” and etcetera designations – is a hard genre for a casual / new listener to differentiate much between various projects. Loud, quiet, or maybe the specific instrument chosen – it can just seem like a surface level difference, and not much else. But it’s an experimental genre, one that, to me, quite purposefully uses those surface level expectations to encourage deeper listening, and requires time and mental space to process.

Still, for the first ten minutes or so of Romain de Ferron’s Notre Dame Des Neiges, I was ready to shut the thing off, rather dismissively wondering if Ferron had listened to any drone before, because there was nothing about the recording itself or the tones that felt – in any way – new. I could name a couple records from my teeny tiny collection that came before and did the same sounds, so I imagined there were plenty more beyond that…

But time, and space. And patience.

As I continued the walk I was on while listening, Mardi finally started to build on its single note template. The back half of the song adds some more menacing undercurrents, and the song grows and grows, building to an emotionally overwhelming stretch that atmospherically befits the church in which it was recorded. This gives way to the album’s centerpiece, La Mauvaise, which is essentially only the maximalist part of Mardi, with even further emphasis on the alien / unknown feelings of countering tones, and some added recording clatter, which ups the organicness of the track. …And then back to where we started – i.e. not much new or impactful – on muted closer La Petite Grosne.

With a bit of editing, and some better counterpoints, Notre Dame Des Neiges’s peaks would be perfection. As-is, it feels more accidental, which isn’t unwelcome in drone, but the runtime of good stuff to indistinct stuff on the release makes it somewhat inessential. But: using it as a balm and pick-me-up during a long walk is an attested-to positive experience overall.