Drone Day is an annual worldwide event founded by Weird Canada which sees experimental music enthusiasts convene each year to create a twelve-hour long stream of music in a tradition which dates back to over a decade. Beginning at 12PM on May 24th, Peterborough’s local chapter of the event saw a wide array of musicians turn Sadleir House’s lecture hall into a bona fide noise chamber.

In Peterborough, the event started around 2015, initially being hosted by the now-defunct venue The Spill before moving to Sadleir House while also occasionally being broadcast on the wavelengths of Trent Radio.

This year’s organizer, local artist karol orzechowski, A.K.A. garbageface, spoke to Arthur about his desire to honour the original organizer of the event, the late B.P. Hughes.

“B.P. kept doing it over the years, and it kind of grew into this pipeline for people to get plugged into the experimental music scene in Peterborough more broadly and a way of encouraging people who were musicians in other ways, and even just tangentially related to the music scene to give it a try,” orzechowski told Arthur.

Under Hughes’ patronage, the event became a gathering space for experimental musicians, academics, and “the guitar player from the local garage rock band” alike, orzechowski said.

After Hughes’ passing in 2022, orzechowski took on Drone Day’s organization.

“There wasn’t necessarily going to be someone to pick it up, and since I always really loved the event and really appreciated being part of it. I knew that it was coming around and I just booked Sadleir House and was like, ‘fuck it.’”

“I try and approach the event very much from the spirit that B.P. did, which was very low gatekeeping,” he added.

This spirit was at its most palpable in Sadleir House’s lecture hall. There, orzechowski could be seen assisting other performers in setting up for their half-hour sets. Radically different visions came together into a continuous stream, orzechowski’s own apocalyptic tones blending into Sunny Malik’s dissonant rhythms of a contact microphone rubbing against a bare bike wheel.

“I don’t know if all of the Drone Days that happen around the country or around the world necessarily ask their performers to create a continuous sound with other performers, but the way B.P. always ran the events was to have a few minutes of overlap each set,” orzechowski explained.

To lifetime participant Jeremy Kirkland, stylistic diversity is one of the event's greatest feats. 

“You need something like [Drone Day] to open your mind and be like ‘oh, music can be all sorts of things.’ It can be improvised, it can be noisy, or it can be very slow-developing, or maybe not even developing at all—like a white noise.” Kirkland told Arthur.

Drone Day also showcases a diversity of performers, such as Kelly Egan and Anne Pasek, two Trent University professors who make up the duo Normal Human Amount.

“Having that kind of level playing field means that you can take a swing at doing something interesting without having that kind of often gendered and gated set of gear and experience, and mentorship that can walk you through it,” Pasek said to Arthur.

Normal Human Amount formed at last year’s Drone Day. In Egan’s words, the “girl band” represents “a way of applying my theoretical approach to media studies and cultural studies into an artistic adventure.” 

The duo treat Drone Day like an embodied experience—“the sounds that we are making are material objects, so they’re not things that are just ethereal, they have some kind of matter to them,” Egan said.

For Kirkland, the experience of ambient or drone music on its own merits is what sets Drone Day apart from other music events. 

“In a film, a lot of people are experiencing it as a whole, they’re not thinking about the music. Like hearing the fridge running—you notice it when it’s gone,” Kirkland told Arthur.

“One of the dimensions of it that’s more important than other musical genres is time, because you’re in a certain time period in the composition and the changes come much more slowly than in a pop song where you’ve got a kick and a snare every couple of seconds.” 

“Some people, they’re listening to one of these half-hour sets, and they’re like ‘was that five minutes?’”

orzechowski echoed this sentiment, recounting his first-ever drone show.

“When I left the room, my perception of the world was changed. It’s kind of like if you stare at a different-coloured light for a really long time and then you look away. Everything looks different,” orzechowski told Arthur.

“I think the longer you spend with drone, the more you get out of it. There's no shortcut. You can’t, like, fast forward through the experience. There is no skipping ahead to the good part. There is no good part. It's just sound.”

“If you can’t be there for a whole day, set aside a few hours and commit to being there for four or five sets. One, to experience all the differences that inevitably happen, but two, to really get a sense of what drone is, cause it’s not something you can encapsulate in just a sentence,” orzechowski said.

Each participant in Drone Day has their own unique account of what makes the event so special. To some, it’s the manipulation of sounds, as though they were as malleable as the objects they emanate from. For others, it’s the experience of listening to time pass over a 30-minute ambient track.

orzechowski calls it “anti-curation,” a sort of slipstream of improvised, overcoming, and embodied noise. Ultimately, he stressed to Arthur, Drone Day is a piece of Hughes’ legacy of building an experimental music scene in Peterborough.

“Back in 2015, there was significantly less awareness of what drone music even was. I was aware of it just ‘cause of an interest in experimental music; it functioned in this educational sort of way,” orzechowski said. 

“It really is something anyone can do. It takes patience and it takes dedication of time. It’s music made in the moment, and you get out of it what you put into it and really not much more.”