While seemingly everyone was baking bread or running garden marathons, I coped with the hard lockdown at the start of the pandemic by creating a two-track drone LP under the moniker Billy Deathray Cyrus.
Listen:
The project started after I briefly moved back in with my parents after the death of my grandmother during the start of the pandemic. I was dealing with a situation and with emotions that I could have never imagined before that time. I was listening to a lot of very ambient drone music while working from home, and I became inspired to create something in the genre. I set myself a target to create a two-track LP, with each track being roughly 20 minutes long. I think I wanted to reflect the static nature that all life around me had suddenly taken on.
Both tracks were created entirely “in the box”, on my work laptop, using Reason 10. Unlike most of my previous composing, here I focused almost entirely on creating pleasant textural sounds with minimal dynamicism before weaving them together into simply-structured musical pieces. Two of these instruments that I am most pleased with are the pulsing sound that slowly becomes more present in the first track, and the somewhat violent crashing instrument at the end of the second.
The project moniker and the track names (taken from the chorus of a famous Blink-182 song) have a tongue-in-cheek quality to them, but the aim was to create something wholesome and comforting, especially against the bleak winter that was fast overtaking our home. I reimagined the phrase “turn the lights off” to be evocative of lying in the backseat of my parents car as a little kid, eyes closed, and feeling the streetlights pass overhead. This is reflected by subtle traffic samples played in key moments, and by the pulsing synthesiser that seems to flash by every few seconds. “Carry me home” continues the imagery from there, depicting being carried to bed in glacial slow motion. There is an extremely slow yet constant pulse that suggests heavy footsteps on creaky floors.
Structurally, both tracks use groupings of three descending notes as musical motifs. For track one, long single-notes act as harmonic roots that play a vi-V-IV progression underneath the slowly-evolving textures. In the first half of track two, a three-note melody first suggests an alien key, but the piece eventually settles on the tonic centre, with the crashing bass bringing in a IV-vi-V harmony which mirrors the first track.
At the same time that I was finalising this LP, my brother completed his own ambient LP, which had been in the works for much longer and ended up being a truly grand record. Listen below.