BAD-BRASS: Kristoffer Lo’s Tuba and The Metaphysics of Drone Music
With its rich maritime history and complex coastline, there is perhaps no structure in Norway more iconic than the lighthouse. On the rocky island of Låven in the North Sea sits Ryvingen Lighthouse, painted cardinal red with a white stripe wrapped around its midsection. At night, towering 171 feet above sea level, it sends a brilliant flash out into the darkness at a pace of four times every forty seconds. Down by the pier, a hooded young man lifts several heavy cases off a fishing boat. He is not Ryvingen’s keeper nor a tourist:
“When I saw pictures of the place, I understood that we had to record in there.”
In 2013, Norwegian musician Kristoffer Lo came to Ryvingen to record an album inside his country’s southernmost light station. Fellow countryman André Loyning documented this sui generis sonic experience in his video portrait titled, “Tåkeluren” (The Foghorn). In the film, we see Lo gather his equipment together and prepare to climb the 500-meter hill to reach his ultimate destination. While his decision to record here felt destined, the physical task proves somewhat of a challenge, but all part of the adventure.
At nightfall, headlamp leading the way, Lo enters the tower carrying his instrument of choice: the tuba. That’s right, a tuba. Hunched on the floor over a bank of effect pedals, he begins conjuring up a drone sound so immense and arresting, it is as if it has been drawn up from the depths of the North Sea below. Primal waves of notes echo through the metallic chamber. As Loyning’s film cuts to the strobing lighthouse outside, Lo’s swirling creation syncs in uncanny cadence with the bright flashes of the station’s spinning halo of light. Like Lo’s tuba is powering the thing — not to guide lost ships (and souls) toward safety, but off instead to explore the metaphysical coast just beyond our comprehension.
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When one thinks of the tuba, what might spring to mind is the pomp of military brass and the circumstance of marching bands, not the ghostly repetitions of drone music. Lo’s first introduction to the instrument was no different. He began playing the euphonium at 9, but after the broadcast of a Norwegian television program where 72 tubas were played at the same time, his school conductor persuaded him to pick up the cumbrous tuba. Lo says, “it took some time to figure out to play the way I wanted to. It’s a big and not too convenient instrument, I had a lot of help the first years from my parents carrying and driving me around.”
It was at the University of Trondheim, where Lo studied jazz for four years, that he began to experiment and push the boundaries of the instrument’s possibilities. “I have always been kind of impatient and playing marching band tuba felt a little limiting to me. At the University in Trondheim, that’s where I understood that there were no limits to what you could do. The first band I explored with was a trio called Pelbo. I took my old guitar pedals (distortion and octaves) and applied it to the tuba. From there it evolved with Pelbo to looping and from there it was a short way to drones, metal and other things. But the teachers I’ve had have always been really encouraging towards exploring and searching…”
While Lo is known for his versatility and collaborations with bands including Highasakite, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and others, his first solo album came without much premeditation. In Provence, Lo was recording with another band and legendary sound engineer, Oz Fritz, a Grammy award-winner known for his pioneering work with Tom Waits and his sacred yet fluid approach to musical recording. After a full day’s work, Lo fell in love with one of the rooms they were working in. “I had him [Fritz] set up some microphones and press record, and I played for 60 minutes. No mixing, just a bit of mastering, and the album was done.” The resulting album — Anomie — is a sparse, menacing drone composition that both comforts and unsettles the listener, and like the tuba itself, is pretty breathtaking.
Music derived from drones has a long and varied musical history that cuts across cultures — bagpipe, didgeridoo, tambura, gagaku, chanting monks, you name it. In fact, the first time and place you heard a drone was before you were born — in the womb. Modern drone music is mostly seen as a offshoot of minimalism featuring extended repetitions, sustained clusters of notes and combining genres of post-rock, doom metal, noise music, dark ambient and more. Importantly, what defines drone is its relationship to time. Lo backs this up, “You can’t force feelings on anyone, and different people will find the music provocative and some might find it calming. But the key issue here is time. Time to listen to it, time to think about it and time to react to it.”
Joanna Demers, author of Drone and Apocalypse, a personal and philosophical primer of the genre, has also noted the music’s effect on temporal perception, evident on recordings like Lo’s. She describes how the decelerated aesthetic qualities of drone freeze the listener in order to open up a space for contemplation about life’s profound mysteries, impermanence and non-existence. According to Demers, these musical experiments “speak of the end of time, the end of the world, and all the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany such ends.” The ineffability of the music invites us to contemplate the beauty and terror of our limited ability to understand the world in which we (briefly) inhabit. Drone, then, is to be awed by the sublime immensity of the universe.
In contrast, anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure in things that were once pleasurable. It is also the title of Lo’s latest album, which was a little more planned — that is, a couple of days ahead of the recording. In Chicago, he linked up with seminal music producer, Steve Albini. “I had to borrow a tuba from Gene Pokorny of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and drag it across town with guitars, flugabone and pedals. That studio [Electric Audio] really inspired me to think a bit different. And also, I felt that this was sort of an end to a trilogy of albums that were all made without any preparations.” Apropos to his distressing choice of album title, Lo worries about the rush toward hyper-individualism: “Everything we do is connected to politics, all the choices we make. We are going towards a more and more individual society, and at the same time there’s more and more psychological disorders, especially amongst young people.”
Still, on Anhedonia, Lo hits a more buoyant and hopeful whir than in his previous solo work, and he admits to his commitment to a single note: “Each decision you make, has a huge impact on the whole piece of music. And I love that it demands time from people’s life to listen to…I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s definitely minimalistic because I don’t play that much. I try building big waves of sound without playing too much. And I want it to be loud and noisy, but also quiet and beautiful.”
In an age of quick fixes and the search for ever more frenzied sensations, maybe the slow burn of drone music reminds us that life is exalted and incomprehensible, a searching light in the dark.
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Originally appeared in ALVAR Magazine, Issue #6.
Photos by André Loyning
Kristoffer Lo’s music can be found here: https://www.kristofferlo.com
