The Drone Cycle 2000 was a series of concerts in which dreamSTATE visited one note of the chromatic scale each month of the year as a foundation for ambient improvisations with a rotating cast of special guests. The drone note was not omnipresent and was only implied at times, but was a home and harbour while venturing into unrehearsed experimental ambient improvisations with each guest before a live audience. They began in C and ended in B.

The series was hosted by THE AMBiENT PiNG - Toronto's then-weekly live ambient performance event.

In 2012, on the "Chromatic Anniversary" of The Drone Cycle 2000, dreamSTATE launched The Drone Cycle 2012, with new special guests performing with them on a wide variety of instruments, as they traversed the scale back downward.

In 2024, to celebrate the second "Chromatic Anniversary" dreamSTATE are releasing music from each month of the Drone Cycle 2000 on the dates of the original concerts, until a 12-track album, The Drone Cycle is completed on December 5th. The first track The Man from Callisto is with special guest Wally Jericho and was released on on January 25th, 2024. All the current tracks can be found (for free until the end of 2024) at Bandcamp.

Below you'll find copies of the original street posters, designed by Jamie Todd and Mario Georgiou, the individual track images - hand embroidered by Lynn Harrigan, and more information about the guest artists.

Wally Jericho helped us launch the Drone Cycle in an evening of improvisations around the note C.

Knowing Wally's abilities on trumpet, bass, minidisks, loops and treatments, his good nature and his feel for ambient music meant we had a high confidence level for the night ahead. Wally had re-tuned his bass to all Cs and Gs which lead to some extra low bass drones and lovely harmonics. He told me later that he left the bass tuned that way for months after the show as he enjoyed the new possibilities.

Wally is best known, however, for his trumpet playing, so we ensured than his Drone Cycle album track, The Man from Callisto featured his spacy trumpet prominently. The track's cover image is an impression of Jupiter's moon Callisto by fiber-artist Lynn Harrigan and is a nod to Wally's beautiful piece Callisto 1.0 which is available on Bandcamp and the streamers on his EP Preface.

Find Wally's music on Bandcamp, and also the streamers like Spotify and Apple Music.

February's drone was C# and our special guest was Kurt Swinghammer.

Kurt is well known around Toronto as a visual artist (murals, paintings, set design, CD covers, etc...), a unique pop singer, a guitar ace (Sarah Slean and Ani DiFranco are two gigs) or a video art director (Maestro Fresh Wes, Colin James, etc...) but few would suspect he's also a creative electronic musician/experimentalist with a wicked arsenal of devices and a good feel for ambient.

I've worked with Kurt on a number of musical projects, however, and knew he would be an excellent ally in our attack on C#. This night he brought along his new Steinberger guitar, Omnichord, Moogerfoogers and a variety of other processors and loopers. The night started simply and beautifully and seemed to get darker and more chaotic as it evolved. Highlights for me were sections where Kurt employed slide or E-bow on his guitar and some strange computer data noises coaxed from his Omnichord. We chose a beautiful, spacy selection with guitar and looping for The Drone Cycle album. ~ Scott M2

March's drone was D and our special guest was Michael Rockwood.

Michael Joseph Rockwood has moved his focus from musical to visual art, so we're very happy to share some beautiful music created with him in his musical prime.

Michael's mixed media artwork can be viewed online at his Instagram page.

I first crossed paths with Mike when we both played at a Planet Of The Loops event (a long-running, live-looping based event which preceded even THE AMBiENT PiNG). I loved his musical vibe and later invited him to join us for a Drone Cycle concert. He kindly invited dreamSTATE to open for his band Zoebliss a few days before and joined our set - which gave us a taste of the good things to come.

Mike's very electric rock-guitar playing can be found snaking throughout the 2004 Memory Bank album Litany and Lethargy at Spotify. I think that's the most recent online evidence of his guitar playing.
~ Scott M2

April's drone was D# and our special guest was Mark Thibideau.

Mark Thibideau (aka Sedative aka Crave) is a crack electronic musician, best known for his techno and house music but who also delves into the ambient realms, minimal techno and dub.

Mark and his twin brother Matt (also a crack electronic musician - who joined us for The Drone Cycle in November 2000) have an amazing collection of vintage and modern synths and samplers and are skilled programmers. For this show, Mark brought out a Prophet 5 synthesizer with a Boss BF1 flanger and a Yamaha analog delay. ~ Scott M2

May's drone was E and we had two special guest guitarists: Eric Hopper and Arnold Sprogis.

Arnold Sprogis (Sprogis Audio) is one of the founders of THE AMBiENT PiNG and is an electronic musician, guitarist and visual artist. We loved his use of a very large vintage hard-drive ring to bow his guitar and made sure to include a selection featuring this technique for The Drone Cycle album.

Eric Hopper (Sylken) is an old musical friend of Scott and Jamie and they used to play together, pre-dreamSTATE, in an electronic project called Radio Silence. He'll be appearing as a guest on several upcoming dreamSTATE albums on synthesizers - but on Stringology he's adding his clean guitar tones to the mix. Eric's main musical project, Sylken, was originally called Random Act and featured Arnold, Wally Jericho, Steven Sauve and other dreamSTATE friends as early crew members.~ Scott M2

June's drone was F and dreamSTATE's special guest was looping cellist Cheryl Ockrant (aka cheryl o).

We first encountered Cheryl performing at a Planet of the Loops show at THE AMBiENT PiNG and were happy to discover a cellist with f/x pedals and an enthusiasm for improvisation and looping. Besides participating in The Drone Cycle, Cheryl was a regular PiNG performer in a variety of musical situations and helped to organise our Summer Ambient Parties.

Cheryl continues to work in the improv scenes throughout the city and with her unQuartet and Toronto musical institutions like DanceWorks and CCMC.

For her Drone Cycle set, besides her own cello treatments and live-looping, she was being further processed by a mutual friend, Steven Sauvé (aka karmafarm), stationed in the audience. (Steven will be appearing as our musical guest next month.) Cheryl is also a Tiny Houser which inspired the title and image for this drifting ambient piece.~ Scott M2

July's drone was F# and dreamSTATE's special guest was electronic artist Steven Sauvé.

The July 25th, 2000 Drone Cycle show was the first time that we synced our sound stations with a guest artist as all three of us had Nord Modular synthesizers and wanted to explore interconnecting grooves across the drones. Another first for the 2000 Drone Cycle is that while all the other shows were free-improvised without rehearsals, we had a prep session to test syncing our synths together and to ensure that our different sequencer patterns interlocked in a satisfying "clockwork" fashion.

Another first was having projections, provided by Steven Sauvé's good friend Calvin Grant (CVG Visuals). I obtained white Tyvek "clean-room" suits for us to wear so that we could be screens for the projections ourselves. As the movie-parody title for this show's posters was "A Clockwork Drone", Steven suggested we all wear boots to enhance the "droogs" look of the outfits. To surprise the audience, we changed into the suits at PiNG founder Arnold Sprogis' apartment, a few doors down from the venue, Po Boys Club (now Handlebar), just before the first set, then walked through the downstairs restaurant to the rear stairwell so we could walk from the back through the upstairs crowd to take the stage and begin. That all went quite well, until we were informed by the Po Boys Restaurant owner the next week that his patrons thought we were exterminators! You can find a few more photos from the night here.

Another first was that none of our recordings of the show turned out! We were very disappointed as the show felt good and a number of folks called it the best of the series so far. Therefore, a couple of years later at a later venue (Club Nia at C'est What!) we donned our suits again, loaded up any patches and sequences we had saved and re-entered that soundworld. Clockwork Heart was extracted from that revisited show on July 9th, 2002 and I feel that it captures the vibes from 2000 quite well.

Steven's sonic passion these days continues to be the exploration of virtual modular synthesis and he's posted the results of many of his experiments on soundcloud, plus a beautiful older full-length karmafarm album of Nord Modular soundscapes titled Out Of The System. ~ Scott M2

Andrew Aldridge has a strong reputation as a favourite touring guitarist. Here's an older link that has a list of many of the Canadian and International artists he has performed with.

Andrew is the founder and leader of Planet of the Loops,(POTLs) an open, improvising, live-looping ensemble established in 1998 - before THE AMBiENT PiNG was born. Over half of the artists featured in "The Drone Cycle" are Planet Of The Loops "alumni": Wally Jericho, Kurt Swinghammer, Michael Rockwood, Cheryl Ockrant, Steven Sauvé, Richard Underhill, Joe G, Jamie Todd and Scott M2, and, of course, Andrew himself.

The Planet's current host is The Casbah in Hamilton, Ontario and Andrew improvises there with fresh loopy guests each month. You can follow the Planet on FB to catch a show there.

At THE AMBiENT PiNG's 25th Anniversary Show on August 19th, 2024, dreamSTATE was able to join in with Andrew again for a Planet of the Loops set, along with Wally Jericho and Kurt Swinghammer, with everyone still actively creating and exploring. The show was at Handlebar in Toronto - in the same building where "The Drone Cycle" took place in 2000 and "Planet A" was recorded. That's one loooong loop!

We found a "vintage" blog post from 2012 where some of the Planet of the Loops history is revealed.

You can find current Andrew Aldridge musical activities on his FB page.

Richard Underhill is best known for his alto-sax playing, as a founder of bop/rap/jazz-fusion ensemble The Shuffle Demons, in his Juno award winning solo work and with his various ensembles playing across the city and the world. His improvising electronic-groove ensemble Astrogroove (active at the time of this recording) inspired the title of this piece. Rich is also an activist, championing cycling and better-transit in Toronto and ran for mayor in 2014 against incumbent Rob Ford.

Rich was a regular performer in the early years of THE AMBiENT PiNG, playing solo and with various folks and exploring strange sounds with his sax and delay pedal and an Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler. Some of that is exhibited in "Astrodrone" as it evolves from strangeness to charm.

Discover Richard's music and more information on his many activities.

Jakob Thiesen would always surprise us in his early AMBiENT PiNG shows: playing "obsolete" (even in 2000) electronic instruments through a massive spring reverb in one show, playing rock-solid acoustic kit drums in another and setting up a multi-speaker surround system around the club for another. These days he's known not only for his ambient and electronic music but also for his foley work in films/tv and his field recordings (which can be found interspersed with his music albums on his Bandcamp).

Stuart Clark was always fond of the dark side and his 'Creepy' Stuart Clark Halloween Specials with Michael 'Igor' Olsen at THE AMBiENT PiNG are remembered reverently. While he's experienced in many soft and hardware synths, he's moved strongly into modular synthesizers and would sometimes bring a huge case to DRONE:KLUB Gatherings, where he was an early regular. FInd his music at soundcloud.

dreamSTATE's special guest for November, Matt Thibideau, played a vintage 1986 Prophet VS synth through a vintage 1978 Roland DC-10 analog echo while Jamie played his now-vintage 1998 Nord Modular and 2000 Korg MS-2000R synths. This is the last track in The Drone Cycle to include guitar and this time dreamSTATE's Scott M2 is to blame - playing a vintage 1972 Fender Stratocaster with a vintage 1958 Canadian Tire Mastercraft green Robertson #1 screwdriver, inherited from his father.

Electronic wizard Matt Thibideau has a number of solo projects like Altitude and Coordinates featuring techno and house music but he also delves into ambient, minimal techno and dub. Matt and his twin brother Mark (also an electronic wiz - who joined us for The Drone Cycle in April 2000) have an amazing collection of vintage and modern synths and samplers and are skilled programmers. They work together on many, many projects and are popular live performers in Berlin and beyond.

Matt and Mark are also two of the ringleaders of the Obsolete Components record label and that's a good place to start discovering Matt's music.

Joe G was an AMBiENT PiNG regular performer in the early years, playing synthesizers and/or guitar in many projects and with Planet of the Loops. In this track with dreamSTATE he's playing synths and the combined electronics of the trio gust and swirl until they finally settle to the ground to close the album.

Hear music from Joe's Styrohead project at Soundclick and Myspace.