Experimental · 8D · Drone
Movements, record labels, festivals and installations where drone found a home.
CTM Festival: Berlin's festival for adventurous music and art, born in 1999 as club transmediale alongside the transmediale media-art festival.
Dark ambient: the shadowed branch of ambient music, grown from the industrial underground, built on deep drones, reverberant space and a sense of dread.
Dia Art Foundation: the New York foundation created in 1974 that commissioned the Harrison Street Dream House and maintains Max Neuhaus's Times Square.
Editions Mego: the Viennese label Peter Rehberg rebuilt from Mego in the mid-2000s, home to Fennesz, Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ and Recollection GRM.
Fluxus: the international network of artists and composers gathered by George Maciunas in the early 1960s, where La Monte Young's first drone scores circulated.
Industrial music: the confrontational genre named after Throbbing Gristle's label Industrial Records (1976), that made noise, tape and drones into provocation.
Isolationism: a bleak, withdrawn strain of 1990s ambient music named by Kevin Martin and gathered on the 1994 Virgin compilation Ambient 4: Isolationism.
Japanoise: the name given abroad to Japan's extreme noise scene of the 1980s and 1990s, from Merzbow and Hijokaidan to Incapacitants and Masonna.
Kosmische Musik: the cosmic music of early-1970s West Germany, from Tangerine Dream's Zeit to Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht, built on synthesisers and vast space.
Kranky: the Chicago label founded in 1993 by Joel Leoschke and Bruce Adams, home to Labradford, Stars of the Lid, Tim Hecker and Grouper.
Longplayer: Jem Finer's thousand-year composition for Tibetan singing bowls, playing without repetition since midnight on 31 December 1999.
Lowercase: a quiet, microscopic sound aesthetic of around 2000, named by Steve Roden, that magnifies tiny sounds and waits to be discovered.
MELA Foundation: the New York organisation behind the Dream House of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, presented at 275 Church Street since 1993.
Onkyo: the near-silent improvised music that took shape in Tokyo around 2000, built on sine tones, feedback and tiny sounds played at very low volume.
ORGAN²/ASLSP: a John Cage organ work being performed in Halberstadt's St Burchardi church from 2001 to 2640, a span of 639 years.
Room40: the Brisbane label and curatorial platform founded in 2000 by the composer Lawrence English, devoted to experimental sound, drone and listening.
Sonic Acts: the Amsterdam arts organisation that grew from a 1994 festival at Paradiso, exploring sound, art, technology and, increasingly, ecology.
Southern Lord: the label Greg Anderson started in 1998, home of Sunn O))) and the main outlet for drone metal, including Earth's later albums.
The Kitchen: the New York arts space founded in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka, where Tony Conrad premiered Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain.
Times Square: Max Neuhaus's unmarked sound work of 1977, a deep, pulsing drone rising from a subway grating on a Broadway traffic island in New York.
Touch: the London publisher of sound and image founded by Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding in 1982, home to Chris Watson, Fennesz and Hildur Guðnadóttir.
Unsound: the festival of adventurous music and art founded in Kraków in 2003, known for themed editions and concerts in salt mines, churches and hotels.
Wandelweiser: an international network of composers founded in 1992 by Antoine Beuger and Burkhard Schlothauer, devoted to silence and very quiet music.
12k: the New York label founded by Taylor Deupree in 1997, moving from glitch and microsound to warm, minimal ambient built on acoustic detail.