The world of ambient- and drone-based music has never been so fecund, informing indie rock and pop in a large way this past decade. But no matter how much our ears are acclimated to these sounds, there remains something uniquely pleasurable about original, engaging works in a more austere, minimal vein. Bill Baird, who himself is a member of Austin-based drone-pop band Sunset, has produced such an album with Silence!, a collection of analog drone and ambient pieces. The titles are indicative of the mood the album creates, beginning with the exclamatory album name that demands your quiet attention and continuing with “Slow Implosion,” “Softly,” “Cloud Breath,” and “Rain on the Window.”
A feature of many of these types of albums is a detailed listing of how the tracks were conceived and recorded. Some listeners could care less, preferring to allow their imagination to take flight while listening to the music devoid of any context other than album art and song titles. But plenty of mystery and room for imagination remains in ambient/drone music, even when presented with something like Deep Listening Band’s detailed descriptions or spec-fetishizing acts like Black Dice and Kid 606 listing every piece of antique analogue equipment they used. Baird, however, favors a more casual, user-friendly approach, offering brief notes on the rudiments of each track’s production. The notes for “Surfing,” for example, state simply “One piano put through 24 stereo delays.” But reading this doesn’t even begin to prepare you for the sound you hear: a mini-minimalism primer that sounds like both Philip Glass playing piano alongside Charlemagne Palestine on droning organ and one of Conlon Nancarrow’s busier pieces for player piano.
(Speaking of Glass, Baird covers his “Koyaanisqatsi” in what for me is the album’s only misstep. The traditional song aspects of strummed acoustic guitar and hushed vocal chant that appears midway through the album interrupts the mood that had thus far been created.)
Elsewhere, “Slow Implosion” is a drone track in which Baird invited others to improvise over as “minimally as possible.” The result is a stretched-out, meditative piece that was initially 24 minutes in length (and could have easily taken up the entire side of the record and not lose steam), but has been edited down to 12 minutes. The inclusion of French horn gives it an even more Deep Listening Band-style flavor, but the track winds down with a keyboard figure that sounds not unlike the coda of the Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti classic, “The World Spins.”
Baird’s liner notes can’t help but color how you hear “Rain on the Window,” which is a hip-hop track with all hip-hop elements removed. The most obvious of the missing elements is the beat, leaving behind a simple repeating piano figure with a droning electric organ backing it. It’s a brief piece, a sketch for a song that, like all great hip-hop tracks, thrives on its repetition, only the absence of the beat makes it ethereal.
Aside from the album’s lengthier opener and collage-based closing track, every piece here feels like a sketch, compositions other musicians (or Baird himself in another setting) might stretch into long-form works. Most have the mesmerizing, repetitive patterns common to extended minimalist pieces. Not that we don’t enjoy those every now and then, but Baird’s going for something different, and on Silence!, he insists on cutting thing short, leaving the ear wanting more. Yet despite being rooted in a more abstract method, it works like a rock/pop album, inviting us back to listen again and again.