Ohio's C. Spencer Yeh is known for drone. (He named his record label Drone Disco, after all, and it’s far heavier on the former than the latter.) But the noise the avant-violinist bows and scrapes up on Burning Star Core's new Operator Dead, Post Abandoned is thick with textural variation, far more so than the steady, implacable screech of many 21st-century identikit dronesters. This is thanks to the constantly undulating layer of gritty analogue and piercing digital electronics from Yeh and bandmates Mike Shiflet and Robert Beatty, as well as the scattered percussion of drummer Trevor Tremaine. (Tremaine plays electronics too, because really, you can never have enough). In fact, the very listenable, if undeniably hairy, Operator Dead is the best BxC record to date, a master class in grotty, lo-fi droneology.
Sometimes the drones on Operator Dead scream until it sounds like the record's lungs are going to implode. At others, they're pretty, if not quite pastoral. (Occasionally, the band goes for both extremes on the same track.) Over the 19 minutes of opening track "When the Tripods Came", Yeh and crew build a resonant buzzing like a tamboura run through a distortion pedal-- you assume this is Yeh's violin, but the density of the music makes a mockery of figuring out which sound comes from which player-- that's joined by pounding, tribal drums and free flurries of cymbal by Tremaine. The electronics sound like everything from bagpipes squawking through crappy reverb to the traditional roar of psychedelic guitar fuzz. The track's opening half is actually intoxicating-- almost inviting-- but it slowly tangles into a climax of ear-bleed noise before painfully, and abruptly, shorting out.
The rest of Operator Dead feels like its aftermath. The 16-minute title track is similar to Repent and White House-era Dead C, full of sibilant scrap yard percussion and the suffocating feeling that the band has set a gasoline fire in its practice space and is slowly asphyxiating on the fumes. The album's two shorter codas are equally narcotic, especially the almost-beautiful shimmer of "Me and My Arrow". (But "The Emergency Networks Are Taking Over", which starts like a free jazz drummer sitting with the Bernard Herrmann orchestra only to finish up with the noise of a melting calliope, is also thrilling.) So Yeh knows his drones, and he also knows drones are tricky things. When you listen to a drone, you can start to hear a world of infinite texture. Or you can become bored enough listening for variations to go back to playing Wii tennis and listening to Lil Wayne. And actually, none of what Yeh does here is a strict, by-the-book "drone"-- BxC's tracks are far too busy for that, always providing plenty to listen for--but throughout Operator Dead, Burning Star Core does explore the immersive capabilities of noise, the drone's capacity to "snow you under." The band wants to overwhelm you, and it succeeds.
