Hearing Gray but Waiting for the Orchestra to Surface

The more you listen to drones, the less they sound like drones. One person’s gray wool flannel sweater of a sonic experience becomes someone else’s expansive orchestral grandeur. “Elixir,” heard here in an excerpt — though at over four and a half minutes in length, it’s more than enough to go by — is good training for those who hear gray and want to get through the gray to the detail.

It’s a thorough composite, a swollen, soupy mass of sound, but in it there is so much to pay attention to, glimmery effects and arpeggiating fragments, all moving behind a veil drenched in white noise. The track is credited to Keith Berry, who, as Invisible Birds notes, recorded for the excellent Trente Oiseaux label, run by Bernhard Günter. “Elixir” is from a forthcoming album by that name, due out on Invisible Birds around March of this year.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/invisible-birds. More from Keith Berry, who is based in the U.K., at invisiblebirds.org and twoinchesoffground.com.