//I draw circles and sacred boundaries about me; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains.—I am building a mountain chain out of ever-holier mountains. – Nietzsche// //Drone music excels in creating and maintaining tension. It aestheticizes doom, opening a door onto once and future catastrophe […] Drone music is a music for when the markers of time such as clocks, metronomes, alarms have stopped. It is an acoustic foundation from which other sounds emerged, and to which all sounds will eventually return. – Joanna Demers// Sustain/Decay is a philoscillosophical mantralith a technaural chronicle 0f art, audio, and essays on and on and around and around drone music and its relation to such things as extreme slowness deceleration extension futility/nihilism/withdrawal/renunciation/suspension/emptiness mantra/repetition/meditation/ritual/endurance hermetics and occultism holy mountains and arduous tasks pilgrimage/isolation/intoxication …as well as… conceptual droning: thinking like:as:with drone repetitive philosophical/tonal/rhythmic oscillations around a central “pedal point.” drone music theory/topology: xenharmonics/xenrhythmics vibration/waveforms/noise anthropological approaches to, and the physics of, art that engages stylistic elements such as heavy repetition and iteration, vastness, endless echoes, symmetry, resonation and humming, thrumming, threnody – cascading, en-trancing, enveloping art that rewards patience and attention : art that demands endurance to complete or understand.