Solo full-length albums

These albums all consist of an hour-long drum roll drone performed continuously in one take, each featuring a different instrument. The experience of playing a drum roll is one of the most meditative sensations I’ve ever known. For a percussionist like me, it provides a rare opportunity to produce a sustained drone-like sound, while also facilitating an exercise in delicate balance across the entire body. These entirely DIY albums are an exercise in bypassing the many hurdles that often delay sound creators’ ability to share recordings in a timely, intuitive manner. Maybe they could sonically benefit from professional engineering/mixing/mastering/distribution, but that’s not the point.

When people use the phrase “drumroll please,” they actually almost never care very much about the drumroll at all. A drumroll is typically a liminal event that is presented as a tool for instigating audience anticipation for something presumably much more exciting than the drumroll itself. Most people are usually looking for relatively instant gratification, so drumrolls are most often pretty brief. If the drumroll ends and there’s no reward of any sort, there is usually a feeling of disappointment to some degree. This is funny to me because a drumroll is such a mesmerizingly intricate hand-woven blanket of sonic frequencies, and I easily get lost in it for a very long time. It’s a magic carpet of sound.

I’m noticing that my drumroll practice is also gratitude practice. I am thankful for the present moment, for my body’s ability to perceive & produce sound, for the external tools needed to continue this practice, the ability to share documentation & thoughts about it with others, and the consideration of those who might happen to be paying attention. Practice is a very important concept to me, but it seems to be a concept that can be very inaccessible and misunderstood within a fast-paced modern lifestyle. When I was first learning to play music, it was presented to me as a process of leveling-up and working towards very specific goals, and the faster I achieved those goals, the better. I am not trying to achieve *anything* by doing this. I’m just trying to practice.