Archean Nights is a phenomenal drone project from France. With 23 albums released to date, they’ve carved a niche in some excellent long-form atonal drone music and also done collaborations with other artists as well. I first discovered them purely by accident when searching through Bandcamp’s archives, with the first album I heard being ‘Spectral Visions of Cosmic Entities’ and I was immediately hooked into their style and sound

‘Pulsar’ is an hour long space drone as I like to call them, consisting of a quite bass-heavy noise and having undulating tones appear and disappear in the background. To be quite honest, it’s not explicitly what I’d expect from an album entitled after a star that emits radiation in a pulse-like sequence. However, listening further, you start to hear deeper bass-noise pulses through the overall noise and it becomes quite fascinating to listen to, trying to discern a rhythm or a structure to the sounds you hear.

Final Thoughts

Even though it’s challenging to listen to noise drones for any length of time (as I do have a fondness for more tonal-based drones) this is quite a worthwhile listen if only to hear the faintest of tones or structure evolving far in the background. Much like trying to decipher what you can hear through the noise of interstellar space I would imagine.

Pulsar is available on Bandcamp