Deep time is the immense span of geological history, counted in millions and billions of years, against which a human life barely registers. The phrase was coined by the American writer John McPhee in Basin and Range (1981), his book on the geology of the American West, and has since travelled from earth science into philosophy, art and environmental writing.
For drone music the idea works as both metaphor and method. Pieces that hold a single sound for hours, or installations designed to outlast their makers, invite listeners to step outside clock time and sense a slower order of change. Jem Finer’s Longplayer, which began playing at the turn of the year 2000 in a lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London and is composed to run for a thousand years without repeating, is the clearest example; the bells Brian Eno devised for the Long Now Foundation’s ten-thousand-year clock pursue the same ambition, translating geological scale into something that can actually be heard.