Transforming Detail into Myth: Indescribable Experience and Mystical Discourse in Drone Metal

Drone metal’s vast, repetitive, and overwhelming dirges produce experiences that are reportedly indescribable. This chapter outlines the history of drone metal’s emergence in the 1990s as a distinctive subgenre with associated conventions and listening practices. It examines the question of genre, formed in the forging of symbolic links to the history of metal. The chapter shows how Michel de Certeau’s work on productive readings of popular culture, and on mysticism as a mode of communication, can offer ways of understanding drone metal as mystical discourse, produced by listeners as well as musicians, in reviews, commentary, and conversation, as well as in recordings and live performances. It investigates how drone metal listening practices and experiences are described in terms of altered senses of time, space, and the body and how these themes are often portrayed in rhetorically religious or mystical tropes, highlighting in particular the figure of pilgrimage.