Drone Not Drones
Cedar Cultural Center
Minneapolis
1/26 – 1/27, 2024
By 6 a.m. on Jan. 27 at the Cedar Cultural Center, Drone Not Drones had been going for about 11 hours, and most of the audience was asleep. Onstage, one musician finger picked a guitar, shoulders rolled. Another sat behind a drum kit, their face half-shrouded from the projector by a hoodie. The music was ethereal and understated. About 50 people were on the floor in sleeping bags. Others wandered the venue wearing blankets. A few people sat upright, half-dazed, staring at the stage, as Matt Sowell’s set overlapped with Wendy Drums. The sounds overlaid with sounds for one, long continuous drone that was, by the time this reporter finished this piece six hours later, still droning.
Marking its ninth iteration this year, Drone Not Drones, as the organizers stated on the livestream of the event, “uses drone music to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders.” With over 70 separate musical acts rotating on and off the stage for 28 hours, the event was “part benefit concert for Doctors Without Borders, part art project, part community event, and part protest,” the idea being “to create a single uninterrupted 28-hour drone to protest the extrajudicial and immoral drone program and raise money for the victims of the United States military-industrial complex.”
Behind the musicians were animations — gestural line drawings, mostly of hands. Like drone, the animations were at first spare and delicate. Sowell rotated off; Wendy Drums was joined by Jaak Jensen. The music grew louder, more complicated. On screen, the animations shifted from drawings to overexposed photographs, eerie and skeletal, an elephant’s head layered over a human skull and ribs.
At its root, the word “drone” is related to “drown,” and to “dirge” and “ode” — to songs of lamentation. As a descriptor for music, a drone can consist of long, sustained notes, or lots of groups of repeated notes that achieve the same continuous effect. There are people who think of drones as boring, even nauseating. For others, they can be hypnotic, ecstatic, or deeply serene. There are reasons why drones appear all over the musical world and in meditative traditions; think the swirling pulses of sound in EDM, the saturated wash of distortion in shoegaze, the flutters of notes in minimalism, the sighs of sound from a tanpura in classical Indian music, and also the collective om chanted in Hindu and Buddhist practices. Drones can transport us, take us somewhere else.
Between 2001 and 2019, the frequency with which the word “drone” was used increased exponentially with the rapid expansion of military drones in America’s post‑9/11 wars. Sometimes called unmanned aerial vehicles, drones are used for military and police surveillance and for weapons delivery; the use of weaponized drones is the one that Drone not Drones wants to help end.
In Minneapolis, a large human eye twirled on screen, round and all-seeing. I remembered that in 2013, a Pakistani boy named Zubair, who had been injured with his sister in a drone strike in North Waziristan, testified before Congress that he no longer loved blue skies because drones could see better on those days. Drones hear, too, using radar to locate targets. Drones add to noise pollution; the sound of a drone flying is often compared to a low buzzing.
Leaning against the walls of the Cedar, I wondered how many children had died in the few minutes that it took for the animations to shift from ochre to fuschia, how many houses were destroyed as I decided to go back to my own apartment for another coffee, where I searched for videos of what a drone strike sounds like and tried to imagine how many people had limbs amputated or hysterectomies or Caesarean sections without anesthetic as I nursed my lukewarm coffee. What I mean is: how do you listen, and how do you grieve, what you can’t hear with your own ears?
On stage, the eye receded. As Jensen was joined by Electric Life Forms, the sounds started to crescendo — a soaring feeling. The lights grew brighter, lighter. People sat up as the colors changed again, and a coral-shaded dawn rose over the waking crowd.
Drone Not Drones is live-streamed here.
