Recently in Weird Music Category

The drone. It's a sustained note that hangs, while music happens (or doesn't happen) around it ... and when you start digging, you can find it everywhere: in Velvet Underground songs (John Cale's viola creates a drone throughout "Heroin") and Irish uilleann pipe music. Bulgarian folk singing and 20th-century minimalism. African American string-band music and doom metal. Indian classical music is built on the drone, as is much classical Middle Eastern music. In the 1960s, American musicians involved with the avant garde Theater of Eternal Music devoted themselves to exploring the drone's possibilities; way back in the tenth century, Japanese musicians used it to underpin their odd and angular court music.

There are also a ridiculous number of instruments that create the drone: The banjo's fifth string is the drone string, while the didgeridoo is all drone, all the time. Most stringed instruments have been used to make it. Some versions of bagpipes, one of the oldest drone instruments, are found all over Europe, from Ireland to Slovakia, and as far afield as Turkey. In India, the harmonium and tanpura are devoted solely to creating sustained notes that anchor qawaalis and ragas, but other instruments including the sarod and sitar can also create that aural haze.

Why does the drone show up in every corner of the earth? We can only theorize. A drone provides an open field of sound, in which the slightest variations in texture can feel enormous. In a world obsessed with time, the drone exists outside it; it elongates time, taking away temporal markers (beats) and leaving us with the musical equivalent of Mark Rothko paintings — one tonal color suffusing the air around you. Anything played on top of a drone is shaded by that constant tonal presence. There may be a spiritual component to it: In classical Indian music, a singer will open a raga by taking an extended improvisation (an alaap), first singing the drone and always returning to it, in a trajectory that supposedly signifies the soul's departure from its source and its eventual return. In my research, I also came across a theory that early drone music was meant to simulate the sound of bees, and was connected to mead (made from honey) and Dionysian rites.

Whatever its origins, we're fascinated by the drone's ubiquity in music, whether the setting is homespun folk, courtly classical music, or modern avant garde and metal excursions. We invite you to listen to a playlist of classic and surprising instances of drone. The set includes everything from French pop to the Stooges, and we supplement it with a bunch of albums that will help you understand just what that five-letter word means when it meets recorded music.

*This list is nowhere near comprehensive. It's meant only to get you thinking, and get you started. Please comment with your additions!

August is always a slow news cycle, so it's somehow fitting that this month's big viral sensation was about a really slow song.

The song in question is Justin Bieber's "U Smile," but you've never heard it like this before. Using a free audio application called PaulStretch, a musician named Nick Pittsinger has slowed the tune 800%, stretching the 3:16 tween-pop ditty to over half an hour long. (You can, and should, listen to it here.)

Editor's Note: Listen to a selection of the songs mentioned here on a playlist at the end of this post, or click through to listen to all of the artists listed here on Rhapsody. If you're not a member, click here and listen to all of your favorite music as much as you want — whenever and wherever you want!

The old adage that it takes all kinds to make the world go 'round is doubly true for music. Within the Rhapsody catalog, you’ll find everything from gay gangster rap to TV theme songs, but even these seemingly disparate niches fit into a certain range of acceptability. The albums collected here — from wolf noises to Charlie Manson’s folk collection — are, to put it bluntly, on some other sh*t. Are they important works or even great works of art? No. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But they are most certainly intriguing.

Sounds of Nature: The Howling of Wolves (Le Chant Des Loups) (Fonda-Mental S.A., 2006)
Backwoods blues singers and gothic garage rockers have been trying their pseudo-lupine darnedest to howl like wolves since the glory days of, well, Howlin' Wolf, and there was even a well-documented trend of indie bands with wolf names a few years back. But hey, why settle for less than the real thing? Neither coyotes, jackals, hyenas, nor German shepherds, these scary wailing timber canines and their cute yelping pups will add frightening atmosphere to your coven's next witches'-brew potluck for sure. — Chuck Eddy