Annual Drone Day Mini-Retreat Playlist (2026)
MAY 28TH, 2026
For our FBSS Drone Day mini-dark-retreat (30 May 2026) taking place in Portland this year, I selected nine calm, low-key tracks with no sudden changes in tempo or other musical elements that might interrupt meditation or creative flow states.
Compared to last year's Drone Day playlist, it's a notch or two lower in intensity.
Tracks 1, 2, 8, and 9 are all about an hour in length.
After the retreats I usually return and edit these posts to add any insights or other notable occurrences from the retreat time, so feel free to bookmark this post and return to it later on.
Far be it from me to miss a chance to rhapsodize at length about Annuminas Part IV by Arctica, which is on my top 10 most-played drone tracks of all time. I love playing it for other drone music aficionados who aren't yet familiar with it, and comparing notes.
In the meantime, if you're craving further reading about drone music (who isn't?), I recommend taking time to read How To Become a Hum: An Elongated Note on Drone, an essay from 2019 by Eric Baus. Here's a taste:
"...rather than flattening out or becoming monotonous, (the pejorative way the word “drone” is often used in popular speech), drone can finely retune awareness and lead to striking transformations. Often, this arrives in the form of stretching the listener’s attention from clock time into a more mystic, mythic experience of duration."
Notes
- You must be logged into your Bandcamp account to listen (fan accounts are free).
- Each artist sets the number of free listens they allow (default is 3). Many drone artists allow unlimited free plays.
- Read more about Bandcamp's playlist feature here.
Tracklist (track name + artist name)
- Cwm Bochlwyd - Llyn y Cwn
- Satori (Part 2) - Arctica
- Geothermik - Stephen Parsick
- Spiritual Monuments - Torus Dome
- Unperceived (Single) - Alphaxone
- Cold Matter - Symphocat
- So Many Colours In The Ascent - Kraun
- Annuminas Part IV - Arctica
- Circumference (4 hz theta) - Iron Chthulu Apocalypse
Total time: 5 hrs 18 min
Listen HERE.
For the record: there were two tracks on the original version of this playlist that I ended up removing because of the warning Bandcamp gave me while editing the playlist that "this track is not visible to others if you share this playlist."
Presumably that's because the artist disabled the playlist option, but I don't know for sure.
For the curious, those two tracks were:
- A Beginner's Guide to Doombient (Part One) - Stephen Parsick
- Dreamful Oneness - Wings of an Angel (my #1 favorite track out of everything I've heard from this artist's enormous catalogue)
Image: "Reflection" - pastel drawing by Odilon Redon (1905) - public domain
