Lumen Drones is the debut of a Norwegian trio formed by the Hardanger fiddle player Nils Økland with the guitarist Per Steinar Lie and the drummer Ørjan Haaland. Lie and Haaland come from the post-rock group The Low Frequency in Stereo, and the three call their project a "psychedelic drone band". The fiddle's drone harmonics and folk tonality meet amplified guitar and rock drumming in long pieces grown out of improvisation, a rougher sound than ECM usually releases.

Økland first played with the other two on Solar System, a track from their band's 2009 album Futuro. All three lived in Haugesund, and in February 2010 they played a joint set at a local benefit concert for victims of the Haiti earthquake. Lie phoned Økland the next day to propose a band. Rehearsals in an old church hall followed, with long sessions of improvised demos built on a riff, a melody or a rhythmic pattern. The album was recorded in November 2011 at ABC Studio in Etne, with Kjetil Ulland as engineer, and mastered by Christoph Stickel and Manfred Eicher.

Six of the eight pieces are credited to the trio, with Lux by Lie and Keelwater by Økland. The band say their themes can be fixed but are never played the same way twice, "like folk tunes", and that much of the music rests on drones. Ira Furore, over twelve minutes long, draws a single cymbal line out of distorted guitar while the fiddle sings above it. Echo Plexus is the most melodic and folk-like track, and Husky is a short duet for fiddle and guitar. The players cite The Doors, Sonic Youth, The Velvet Underground, Durutti Column and "the jazz of the Dave Pike Set" among their influences.

Thom Jurek at AllMusic described the sound as "raw, live, slightly distorted, and heavily reverbed", noting that the record might seem a curious choice for ECM. Writing in Prog in 2015, Sid Smith found it "both contemplative and visceral". Tim Owen of Dalston Sound and Andrew Male in Mojo both compared the trio to Dirty Three. Listeners who know Økland from his ECM solo album Monograph, his Lysøen tribute to Ole Bull or the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble will find a different side of him here.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2434, first released on 24 October 2014.