Drone Logic
Daniel Avery; "Naive Response"; from Amazon
Daniel Avery’s Drone Logic is one of the under-sung masterpieces of electronic music that, like a a fine Barbera, pairs with just about anything. When it came out in 2013, it was in persistent rotation as I cooked dinner in our Chinese kitchen. Whether it was chopping vegetables or boiling noodles for soup, the analog sounds of the synthesizers humming and chirping blended with the sounds of food preparation naturally, as if they were originating in the same world. The cleaver thwacking against the cutting board could have been a woody snare drum; the sizzle of the wok a white noise riser.
At that time in musical history, many people have been making their electronic dance music in the box, abstracted away from the physical hardware. This was, of course, owing to digital audio workstations and other kinds of software eating the world. The rise of YouTube and the proliferation of tutorials for the same stuff being significantly more accessible and affordable for a full generation of music producers—it’s also probably why I was able to do some self-study to learn software development, complete with a special looping soundtrack.
Fighting against the historical moment, Daniel railed against this tendency--what he conjured from his shipping container on the River Thames was a special kind of jubilance, embodying the old idea of the club as a cathedral—all these people coming together to experience something greater than themselves. I experienced that same feeling in the blending of spices in my nostrils and the smell of starchy water as the noodles were brought to a boil.
I hate to use the lazy descriptor “nostalgic” to describe this album, but one of the strongest touchstones I have for it is the grainy oversaturated Video8 moment, during which the last round of your laser tag match ends and you and your friends empty from the glow-in-the-dark cave-like dank of the arena, still tasting the fog machine brew in the air, into the fully-lit vestibule of the strip mall storefront, boxes of pizza staged on the air hockey table at the ready to fuel up, the breakbeat music with singing acid basslines from the resonant TB-303 filters echoing through the corridor while you tally the scores and reshuffle the team composition before the next round. Maybe this is another reason why the music so naturally connects with food.
In the years hence, I would occasionally go back to listen to other music by Avery. The reason this record was profoundly interesting to me in the first place is because he delicately balanced electronic dance music with the walls of sound that shoegaze was known for. In subsequent music he produced, he would tip the scales slightly more towards shoegaze and away from the sounds of the Midwest and dance floor ebullience. There is something lost for me in that. But for a time, this was the thing to listen to, alongside the sounds of the kitchen.
Verdict: Keep
What do you cook to?