The Twenty Hertz label is a platform for Paul Bradley and associates - kindred spirits including Monos (Darren Tate and Colin Potter), Keith Berry and Ubeboet. Since his eponymous debut in 2003, on sometime collaborator Colin Potter’s ICR label, Bradley has released a stream of textural works exploring The Drone's various articulations. Sounds drawn from natural environments are combined with instruments, chiefly guitar, and digitally shapeshifted into rich driftzones. They emerge as tweeter-twirling woofer-rumbling sonorities that thread digital with analogue, mixing phonographic and instrumental strategies. At the interstices of post-industrial, ambient and microsound traditions, these elemental soundscapes slowly outfold into immersive texture maps. The drones Bradley and Dronemeister brethren peddle span a spectrum with those of a celestial open higher register orientation at one end and those inclined toward a deep dark lowflow at the other. While Bradley's earlier outings tended to mine the post-industrial chthonics of the latter, he moved into more ambivalent terrain in mid-period works such as Sophia Drifts, originally a ltd release on Mystery Sea, recently re-presented through Twenty Hertz Digital. Lately his goal has been if not beyond, then certainly delighting in departing the earth(l)y of his early period. This is apparent on Sirens, an assemblage of previously singular short-format releases from '07-'08. It evidences his recent turn toward more open expanses - a wider shade of drone, abandoning former isolationist tanks. Here, Bradley seems closer to kindred spirit in guitar alchemy, Andrew Chalk, whose manipulated guitar tableaux appear to have influenced Bradley's development. “Searching for the way” hosts fibrillating strata shifting across the soundfield suspended between wistful and blissful. “Horizon” takes off from where last year’s radiant Chroma left off, diaphanous guitar tones slowly swarming to as near swooning climax as ambient gets. "Cede" is more withdrawn minor-resolved meditation that seeks to extract something more directly emotional, even elegiac, gently tugging steel-strung source as if wringing heartstrings. Listened to in totality, the sound of Sirens is possessed of an incantatory allure.

Darren Tate is the main man behind Monos, and a raft of drone and field recording works in the pioneering tradition of the Ora collective, school for British Dronemeisters, in which Andrew Chalk was his main foil. Monos signalled Tate's re-emergence from Ora's demise, later coopting Colin Potter, long-time fellow-labourer at the coalface of UK Outsider music. Originally a limited release in 2000, Promotion was Monos' debut, Tate then flying solo. Now reissued, it makes for interesting listening, in stark contrast to the more developed electronic manipulations of later Monos. It's less polished material, stripped down and unadorned, apart from a few passing filter sweeps, transmitting the quotidian effluvia of an active room interior. A flurry of rustles and thuds and assorted clangour scud for 30-odd minutes across the soundfield. Rather than the metamorphosis into dronemass familiar from later Monos (cf. Landscapes and Generators), Tate leaves largely alone, Promotion thus presenting more like a noisy neighbour of the naturalist audio-documentary tradition exemplified by Chris Watson, albeit a wayward offshoot. One for Monos completists, and for lovers of the leftfield lurching tendency within British experimentalism.

Some way away from Promotion's somewhat unkempt fields is the more refined preserve of Ubeboet’s Spectra. Miguel Angel Tolosa, Ubeboet man, is a Madrid-based artist hitherto more absorbed in lowercase concerns. Spectra, however, finds the trajectories of musique concrète, drone, phonography and minimalism converging beauteously. A cathedral-esque space hosts a glass-sculpted entwining of tones, opening pieces, like "Premia Lucis", seeming to allude to medieval Christian liturgy. Soft tintinnabulations swim through light drone and flutter across the sonic spectrum. What initially strikes as a transparent work of digital drone with a few ambient flourishes, however, becomes increasingly episodic and opaque. Apparently realised using “field recordings, fm radio, tape recorder, lap steel guitar” added to the ubiquitous “laptop”, the rougher edge these infusions impart to base tone-motions make new disclosures, as Tolosa's lowercase breeding starts to show. A piece like "Vuelo, Son, Mar, Canto interno" displays his sound design prowess in endowing these vignettes with pockets and folds into which detail is tucked for questing listeners to probe. The further the album progresses, the more celestial sites are abandoned for more ambiguously shaded chambers. Spectra, overall, expertly offsets the compositional austerity of minimalism with a certain sensory indulgence of timbre, subtly blending numinous and luminous.

With a few releases on Trente Oiseaux and Crouton, Keith Berry may already be familiar to Drone adepts. His A Strange Feather is an evanescent piece of eerie beauty, of cryptic vanishings and re-emergences. Berry’s propensity for the quiet, though by no means serene, may align him with the Trente Oiseaux ethos, but the core aesthetic of contemplative unfolding ambience tags him as a Twenty Hertz man at heart. The characteristics of his music – its slow changes and recursivity – recall the asceticism of Morton Feldman-style minimalism or the lowercase absorptions of Steve Roden. But Berry’s inquiry is maximal, with its engulfing heft of extended electronic swathes of rich timbral variegation. While flecked with soft digital cracklings, odd environmental infusions, and delicate interludes, the emphasis is on billowing dronemass and sombre swells. Within the larger graceful gestures of glacial-warm sonorities, its granular orchestration is streaked with strange flutings and soft abrasions. Overall, his work spans the spatial driftzone from Thomas Köner to William Basinski with its tranquil brooding. Though not situated within the Twenty Hertz discography, two compelling examples of recent Berry work could well be captured for a future collection (hint, hint). The first is a soundtrack to video artist, Iain Stewart's 58º North. This video work featured in an exhibition held in Edinburgh last year (DVD obtainable from the artist's shop). Berry's audio-choreography strikes as both immediately sympathetic to the artist's visualisations and 'naturally' linked to this sometimes serene, sometimes perturbed, gaze on the sea's movements and the horizon's aspect. The second is a resonant remix for nouveau Ambient-Drone/Post-rock/Space-Folk stars, Rameses III's latest, Basilica. Both are sublime specimens of spatial minimalist sound-sculpting for those whose infatuation is with the Dark and Long, the Grain within the Sustain, and the finding of a feeling of something somehow transcendent in enigmatic tonalities. Out of all this emerges a kind of strange new romanticism, marrying postmodern compositional sensibilities of self-conscious forms with the deep inner content of romanticism - a keynote of those associated with the estimable Twenty Hertz enterprise.

By Alan Lockett