May 30, 2026 marked the 12th annual Drone Day: a celebration of drone music, community and experimental sound art. Waterloo’s concert was one of 109 gatherings that occurred across 28 countries.
In Waterloo, Drone Day took place at the top of the uptown parkade, where over 200 people gathered throughout the evening with folding chairs and picnic blankets to listen and watch the sunset. There were synthesizers, bagpipes, looped guitars, a clown and absolutely no flying machines allowed.
The line-up this year included sets by six local performers, including Opals, danasonic and Bastian Perez. The evening concluded with a huge droning jam, where the audience was encouraged to work together to create their own collaborative set of ambient music. Participants came armed to the teeth with instruments ranging from cigar-box banjos to homemade drums and the whirling noise makers often found in grade school music classes and sports stadiums.
Although Waterloo’s past Drone Days have most recently been held in the Waterloo Park band shell, taking advantage of the often-empty roof of the parkade was a successful change. The ambient drones, setting sun, and noise from the city below all made for an appropriately calming atmosphere.
“I had more than one person say to me that one of the stars of the show was the sky,” Andrew Jakob Rinehart, KW Drone Day’s Lead Organizer, said.
They remarked on how the slow-changing music seemed to be in sync with the skyscape, imperceptibly shifting as the light waned from day, to dawn, to nighttime.
“You couldn’t perceive every single gradation of change, but it definitely was changing from gold to this deep, beautiful blue,” Rinehart said.
Holding Drone Day on a rooftop also harkened back to the festival’s early days. Drone Day was originally conceived by former Waterloo resident Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan in 2014. The first ever Drone Day in Waterloo happened on the roof of her apartment building, with only two DJs.
The creative and collaborative part of the evening is what really differentiates Drone Day from other ambient and experimental music festivals. It is about celebrating ambient music. The star of the show is the droning itself and the community around it, not any one individual artist.
“Drone Day is functionally an annual holiday for experimental musicians,” Rinehart said. “It’s a good time to make friends and explore different pockets of sound and play with different people.”
Drone Day’s mission to decentralize the concert-going experience seems to be successful. Throughout the night, people were able to flow in and out of the event, drawing with chalk on the ground, catching up with friends and meeting new people. Many audience members were refreshed by the unpretentious, welcoming atmosphere.
“Anything that’s connecting people through art, that’s beautiful,” Gabriel Meisner, an audience member, said.
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