Drommon begins in a clearing, but Smote does not let the listener mistake stillness for safety. Birdsong and a low drone create the impression of open air before percussion begins gathering beneath them, at first distant and then increasingly physical. Guitar, bass and sustained tones accumulate without a conventional verse or chorus arriving to explain their purpose. Daniel Foggin builds the piece through repetition until the clearing seems to have closed around us. Nature has not become peaceful background; it has become the entrance to a ritual whose rules were established before we arrived.
Smote began as Foggin’s solitary recording project during the first pandemic year, when he was working in bedrooms and rehearsal rooms with limited equipment and little expectation that the music would travel far. Drommon preserves that homemade concentration. Foggin performs everything on the studio recording, but the result never feels like one person carefully stacking parts to impersonate a band. The instruments behave like separate forces discovered inside one imagination: hand percussion pushing from below, strings and guitars widening the horizon, organ holding dark weather in place, and occasional winds appearing like voices beyond the visible circle.
The two long title pieces were originally released together as a roughly half-hour cassette through Base Materialism. Rocket Recordings expanded them into a four-part album by placing “Hauberk” and “Poleyn” between them. That restructuring changes the music significantly. Instead of two facing monoliths, Drommon becomes a passage through chambers. The title invocation begins, the listener crosses two shorter spaces named after pieces of medieval armor, and the larger ritual resumes on the other side.
“Drommon (Part 1)” depends upon the strange emotional power of a pattern that refuses to satisfy our expectation of arrival. Its percussion and bass imply that something enormous is approaching, while the guitar builds a mountainous surface above them. Smote repeatedly approaches the explosive release familiar from heavy psychedelic rock, then chooses sustained pressure instead. The climax is not a doorway into another section. It is the discovery that we have already been standing inside the event.
This is repetition used as altered perspective. A riff heard once is information; heard for several minutes, it becomes landscape. Small changes matter because the larger structure remains fixed. A drum accent shifts the apparent ground, a higher tone changes the imagined height of the room, or a guitar layer thickens until the same pattern suddenly feels dangerous. Foggin trusts the listener to remain long enough for attention to become one of the instruments.
“Hauberk” is named for a coat of chain mail, armor made from hundreds of small linked rings. The title offers a useful image for the music. Hand drums, flute and string-like sounds interlock into a surface that is flexible despite being constructed from repetition. No single gesture carries the full weight. Strength comes from the way many small actions connect. The track feels brighter and more mobile than the title pieces, but its buoyancy retains an edge, as though a procession has begun moving faster than intended.
“Poleyn,” named for armor protecting the knee, is lower, slower and more enclosed. A persistent bass figure and basement-prog organ create the album’s clearest sense of underground architecture. Where “Hauberk” moves through air, “Poleyn” seems to descend by torchlight. The rhythm becomes physical almost immediately, but keyboard haze prevents the groove from settling into uncomplicated rock pleasure. Smote allows enjoyment and foreboding to occupy the same pulse.
The medieval titles suit music that feels ancient without reproducing an identifiable historical tradition. Drommon contains acid folk, raga-like drone, krautrock repetition and heavy psychedelic guitar, yet those references are treated as working materials rather than costumes. Foggin has identified Pärson Sound, Träd, Gräs och Stenar, International Harvester, Irish traditional music and various drone practices among the project’s foundations. What he takes from them is permission to let repetition become communal, physical and mysterious.
“Drommon (Part 2)” returns with greater heaviness, as though the two central tracks have equipped the listener before reentry. The tonic drone bears down upon the arrangement while fragments step forward and sink back into it. Jazz-like cries briefly lift above the mass, but the piece repeatedly absorbs them. Individual expression is permitted, then returned to the larger body. This gives the track its ritual character: the purpose is not to reveal a heroic soloist but to maintain collective force.
That collective quality is especially intriguing because Drommon was made alone. The record imagines a gathering before Smote had become a live band. Foggin later assembled musicians to translate the material for the stage, where the songs became louder and more communal, but this version preserves the original private summoning. One person repeats enough gestures to create the impression of many bodies moving together. Solitude manufactures its own congregation.
Foggin has described the early Smote albums as embracing intentional imperfection rather than obsessing over drum compression, equalization or technical correction. Drommon benefits from that decision. The percussion breathes unevenly, layers blur, and the recording retains evidence that a human being had to continue playing through the duration we hear. The roughness does not imitate an antique artifact. It protects the music from becoming a clean simulation of ritual.
The album also resists the modern expectation that meditation should be comfortable. Drommon can produce trance, but its trance is muddy, muscular and intimidating. Staying with one idea longer than convenience allows can expose impatience before it produces calm. Foggin makes that resistance part of the experience. The listener may wait for the change, become frustrated, stop waiting and finally hear that the sound has been changing all along.
Rocket issued the expanded album as LAUNCH247 on green-and-black splatter vinyl, giving physical form to music whose textures already resemble vegetation, stone and smoke entangled with electrical current. Yet its deepest effect does not depend upon the collectible object. It begins whenever the first birds and drone enter a room and ordinary time starts losing authority.
Drommon established Smote’s central method with remarkable completeness: pastoral space becoming heavy, repetition turning into movement, and fantasy functioning not as escape but as a way of intensifying the physical world. The record does not describe an ancient ceremony. It constructs the conditions under which one might be imagined. By the end, the listener has not reached a destination or received a revelation. The circle has simply held long enough for the room outside it to feel less certain.
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