What is the point of a drone? Is it about stasis? Stability? Slowing time down? Annihilating a sense of rhythm? One might view a drone simply as a note that does not change, a position affirmed by Keith Potter's description of La Monte Young's music as ‘… a fresh look at the potential of boredom’.Footnote ¹ Two new albums, however, by contemporaneous British artists Simon Whetham and Robin Hayward, present dissenting alternative views: one is edgily noisy, using sustained and ambiguous recorded sounds; the other deploys musical instruments to contemplative, if nomadic, ends.

Of the two composers, Whetham has been particularly prolific. His catalogue of solo releases over the past decade totals more than 30, disregarding various compilations. Judging by the impressive catalogue of gear listed on his website he is serious about his field recording, but his approach is catholic, freely mixing recordings with performed moments on guitar, bowls, megaphones or any number of found objects (his French label Baskaru describes him as a ‘sonic cook’). He typically makes recordings in specific locations and later uses them as building blocks for compositions, aiming to evoke something of the original experience. Despite this, he is open to the subjective nature of listening and does not expect us to identify particular sounds. He is therefore less concerned with replicating a landscape than revealing elements that are present but easily overlooked, ‘uncovering sounds or vibrations that surround the listener on a daily basis that they are not normally aware of or appreciate’.Footnote ²

Whetham's latest album, Against Nature, is his third full-length release for the Portugese label Crónica. It comprises five tracks (Against Nature [1–5]) constructed from recordings made in Norway two years earlier. I haven't yet visited that country but my impressions from this record are of an impervious and eerie landscape in which the human is largely absent. Whetham occasionally reveals his sources – a brief peal of bells, a scraped bowl, overdriven swoops on what sounds like an electric guitar – but his overall approach is abstract. The result is a turbulent, uneasy concoction in which extended throbbing bass waves switch abruptly to sustained cracklings and fields of white noise. Despite its indistinct materials, however, the album follows a very musical logic. It plays with counterpoint throughout: between registers, between durations, between natural and human-made sounds. For Whetham, long-held noise bands are less about stasis than heightened potentialities; they slowly shift from tone to noise, creep up in volume, transform and twist in density. They operate as sustained forms of energies that threaten to break up at any moment and they frequently do just that, suggesting we cannot trust their veracity. This is not, after all, a reconstructed Norway but a terrain newly constructed from the memory of it.

Whetham's title references the 1884 novel À rebours (Against Nature) by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, a ‘wild and gloomy fantasy’ that deliberately rebuked literary naturalism. It's difficult to pin precisely the novel against this record but I'm reminded that Whetham's aural snapshots, like all recordings, are deliberately mediated. Caleb Kelly, for one, notes that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ field recording:Footnote ³ even an apparently flawlessly captured landscape arrives via the woollen-socked microphone, held by the artist's parka-sleeved arm. Are field recordings themselves, then, ‘against nature’? Can we ever trust them as anything but subjective? Perhaps a further reflection on the drone is useful here. Acoustic ecologists such as R. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax consider the drone as a ‘flat line’ in nature, quite distinct from the natural flux of most sounds. In this sense, static sounds are indeed against nature. La Monte Young, by contrast, has always understood the long-tone as a melding of natural forces and human intervention, drawing on his childhood memories of the wind articulating overhanging power lines, and this observation might help decode Whetham's approach.

If Whetham's Against Nature evokes a chilly and volatile landscape, Robin Hayward's Stop Time (on Important Records) conjures a warm and meditative one. It is built entirely on drones but, as with Whetham, is less about standing stock still than propelling, slowly, forward. Hayward is a classically trained tuba player who has spent most of the past two decades in Berlin, working with such luminaries as Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier and Éliane Radigue. Beyond playing and composing, Hayward has turned his hand to instrument design, developing such innovations as the noise-valve (1996), the ‘world's first microtonal tuba’ (2009) and the Hayward Tuning Vine (2012), a software interface that maps just intonation using a simple colour scheme. Stop Time repurposes the app both temporally and spatially: in its original 2013 performance the stage was lit with coloured spotlights cueing the microtonal pitches the players were directed to follow.

Hayward's album evolves a series of asynchronous suspended tones on tuba, cello and saxophone (played by Hayward, Pieter Matthynssens and Bertel Schollaert respectively) that resemble a slow-motion muted accordion. The effect is delicate and restrained, like a soft line drawing: whilst the attacks are mostly gentle, a grainy timbre occasionally steps forward like a deeper stroke of the pencil. The pitches are semi-diatonic yet aggregate beyond their simplicity, not with great drama but with a consistent and refreshing openness. The work's title sums up the cumulative effect: the half hour drifts rapidly past. Stop Time ticks several classic boxes of drone-oriented minimalism – long tones, just intonation, consistent dynamics – and it's easy to compare it to touchstone works by Tony Conrad, La Monte Young or Phill Niblock. However, Hayward's approach suggests alternative reference points. Its untethered structure, with its constantly shifting harmonies, more closely resembles the restless suspensions of late Cage or Feldman; its stately frame echoes Laurence Crane; its overall sound world ports with any number of drone-based electronica albums; perhaps, in his even-tempered if elusive logic, Hayward is a natural heir to the mechanistic approach of fellow German-UK composer (and tuba player) John White. Like Against Nature, Stop Time treats the drone not as an unwavering monolith but as an extended unit of energy, less a prolonged full stop than a sequence of perpetual question marks.