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Having now entered into its eighth year of recordings, the Workingman's Drone series will again issue twelve more monthly installments of held-tone compositions, exploring combinations of any eight voices from my studio's long list of synthesizers, mixers, software, FX processors and modular components. While these aspects of Workingman's remain the same, along with the fixed 55:55 runtime on the recordings, every year offers the chance to cast these sessions in a different light, considering different purposes, themes, placements.

In 2023, the theme varied from month to month, naming sessions for interesting locations, events or phenomenon that I've long been fascinated about. In 2024, all twelve pieces were named for still-living ancient trees from around the world. Now 2025 has arrived, and the world feels markedly worse than ever before, with so many parts of our lives held in the thrall of negative forces - war, political divides, economic destabilization, racism, classism, sexism, ethnocentrism and nationalism, the list is just endless. In spite of all of those things, which remain important issues to be aware of, they and we as humans remain at the mercy of the planet herself, and although it should go without saying that there can be no humanity without the Earth, it feels truly horrific for me to see how close to the precipice we really are as a species.

I am writing, of course, about climate change, and here specifically you will find a new drone wall each month dedicated to the memory of glaciers around the world that are either receding, or have already disappeared entirely. The effects of ice loss are immense, worldwide and catastrophic, and even if every government in the world began to actively fight against it (they aren't) it would still be impossible to return things to the way they were before. Things are worse, and will still become worse, and there isn't anything that the grand majority of us can even do besides talk about it. So I'm talking about it.

Or, more accurately, I am droning about it. I am both reckoning with and escaping from the world in the only way I have ever really known how - by sitting down in my studio with all my strange machines, perhaps with a cup of coffee or tea, perhaps with a green pipe, and building a wall, one waveform at a time. It bears repeating that no matter the state of the world around us, no matter how bleak the future may become, or how traumatic the past may have been, all we ever have is the present moment, the always here and yet impossible to grasp 'now' - and drone music, as I've also written about it before, is exceptionally good at suspending one's perception of time, sometimes even spatial considerations, elongating the moment of now into a seamless Möbius strip to pour your mind down, unable to tell whether you're arriving or departing.

Drone music is the last music, the closest we can come in an artistic expression to approximating absolute stillness. And while it is still here being made in such a rudimentary way with wooden and stone tools like electricity and vibrating air (by comparison to the impossible mathematical stillness, the real and true emptiness of zero), it is what I consider to be my contribution to the long lineage of stillness in visual art - from the frozen light in the air of the Dutch masters, to the reduced lines and blocks of Rothko and Mondrian, and further still to Claesz, whose fruit and wine covered tabletops seem to exist completely outside of time. These recordings, for me, still manage to convey a wealth of thought and expression, to such a degree that they no longer feel like "minimalism" to me anymore. They are filled with color, texture, temperature and the melodiousness of overtones and intervallic relationships. They are dense with harmony, a distillation of emotional content, and they say everything I wish to say, at this stage of my life.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850
https://glaciercasualtylist.rice.edu/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-mountain-glaciers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/glacier-retreat

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March's eight held tones are:

1. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
2. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
3. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
4. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
5. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
6. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
7. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)
8. Waldorf Largo (Sinewave)

Recorded entirely within Waldorf's Largo digital synthesizer, using eight of the available twelve voices. Each voice is a sinewave, independently tuned and panned, frequency modulating itself. Post-proc included only a master buss compressor in FL Studio (pre-render), and parametric equalization and pitch alteration in GoldWave (post-render).

Drone music, warm atmosphere and textural ephemera for the working man.

I also release music as Milieu milieumusic.bandcamp.com and Coppice Halifax coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

1. milieu-music.com
2. patreon.com
3. bsky.app
4. YouTube