Stickfigure Records

"Warning Light is deceptive. As the project was presented to me two years ago by a friend, the music is "loud drone music" created by a band. But since then, I've learned the project is really the collected labors of D Haddon. Unlike lots of other drone bands, the project doesn't seem to dwell on the thick and downtempo. There certainly are big swells and thick chunks of drone, but as time goes on a different sensibility seems to have popped up. There's a kind of airy atmosphere that has evolved, an almost Japanese aesthetic of zen like atmosphere. He branded the music itself to be "eternity drones" (later the title of a CDr from 2007), and claimed it was an attempt at making music a person could listen to repeatedly for days and days. The idea interested me.

Somewhere in there, I started to hear composers. Classical composers. How someone doesn't hear little bits of La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue, and ms Pauline Oliveros in there I'm not sure. I'm sure you have listened to those things. My friend that had heard him before still sticks with the Brian Eno comparison, which is fair, and a little less obscure that my Radigue name drop. When I finally wrote Mr. Haddon an email, he politely revealed a few of his secrets to me. Most of which, I'm happy to keep, but I think Mr. Haddon would be more than fine with revealing that he hasn't ever taken any serious music classes. So unlike all my academic name drops and pretentious touchstones, he didn't get any of these ideas in academia. So where does the drone thing come from for Warning Light? Doom metal?

Unlike the bass driven murk of a lot of other "Drone" bands, Warning Light is mostly just synthesizers. Synthesizer tones tend to be a bit different than most bass groups, separating Warning Light from your SunnO)))s and Robedoors of the underground today. The funny thing is, I could see Warning Light opening a show for bands like that, but there's still something different about the territory he's mining. There's a slight darkness in the music that could be explained as a kind of "doom" type feeling, but it's probably something else entirely outside metal.

His background seems to be in noise music. The bits and pieces of other bands he was involved in (many at the same time as doing Warning Light) seem fairly eclectic but a lot of it seems like DIY noise rock. But none of that is an easy jump to something like "forever music." It's very all over the place, something not really put into any specific box. I'm stumped.

I like to think that Warning Light is some studious guy who lives alone on the side of a mountain, cloistered away from people and endlessly looking for new droney tones in some dark workshop. He would be surrounded by synthesizers and effects pedals, their little lights flickering in the dark. My afformentioned friend met him last year and told me he did live in the foothills of the mountains just outside Asheville, North Carolina for a while. But nowadays he lives in Atlanta, Georgia somewhere, playing music and living life. So I suppose I'm not completely right about any of it, but I shouldn't complain. I like the music, I should just stick with that." - Curt Daniels

"Delays ringing in the negative expanse just over the edge of a black hole."

"Lost drones echoing through the abyss off the walls of a deep sea trench."