Summary: Joanna Demers is associate professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post-1945 popular and art music. Her book with Zero Books Drone and Apocalypse was published on December 11th in 2015 and this week she returns to the podcast to discuss drone music more generally. I want to thank people who reached out to me in the last week or so. Many people left compliments about last week’s podcast with Iona Singh and I think this week’s podcast about drone music works well as a follow up. Again we return to discussing aesthetics, perhaps from a formal perspective. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from an old BBC documentary about Musique-Concrete, an original work of drone music created in Audacity by combining imported digital noise from the Adobe application and combining that with a stretched version of the National Anthem, an excerpt from John Cage’s album Indeterminancy, and the dronification of Star Wars, and Negativland’s Yellow Black and Rectangular.
