Here's how our approach works: Anyone can announce a session, wherever they're happy to host one. We generally play in peoples' homes, sometimes hire a church or community space. In the summer we sometimes play outdoors. Whoever turns up, with whatever instruments, consitutes "Children of the Drone" on that occasion. Sometimes there are three of us, sometimes fourteen. Usually it's somewhere in between. We get set up, and just sort of drift into it - it's hard to describe. Someone might start playing some little motif or phrase whilst other people are still tuning up...Before we know it, we're in the midst of an improvisation. The only real directive is to listen, respect the totality of the "musical atmosphere" generated by those present, and not to do anything overtly premeditated. We play until it feels right to stop. It's suprising how often we all "know" when to stop - there have been some beautifully coordinated endings. Sometime the pieces last for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour or more.

Almost everything gets recorded by Matthew W (obsessive archivist) on MiniDisc. The protocol we seem to have settled on is to fill up most of an 80 minute disc, stop for tea, then fill up most of another disc.

In the following days, the discs receive a cursory listening, with the more worthy passages being noted down and converted to WAV files. These get burned to CD, with copies being made for everyone who was present (and anyone else who wants one). This "feedback process" helps to accelerate the evolution of our music, as playing the "good bits" back to the musicians involved acts as a kind of positive reinforcement, cultivating the aspects of our musical interaction that tend to work best.

These WAV excerpts also get compressed to MP3's and kept in a carefully-labelled folder. Track names encode exactly where and on which MiniDisc the excerpt in question appears, i.e. "140705-d2t1x3-1345to1650" would be the the third excerpt from track 1 on disc 2 recorded at the session on 14th July 2005. The MP3s get added to an "everything" playlist, as well as (since this spring) uploaded to the IAA. The playlist is then listened to periodically on "shuffle", and particularly worthy excerpts are moved to another playlist. This process of distillation results in the compilations we have put together, and as all the MiniDiscs are kept, the original recordings can be speedily recovered for this purpose (MP3 being a "lossy" format). A certain amount of subtle equalisation, compression and reverb are used in the compilations, as these can generally improve the overall quality of the sound.