There’s a line in the Scott Walker documentary 30th Century Man where Mark Warman, the conductor with the credit of ‘sound treatment’ for his imperious work on The Drift, asks an orchestra to play a piece of music like they are World War II bombers coming from 50 miles away. As a point of comparison, on their debut album for the legendary Sub Pop label, Sunn O))) sound like the aircraft is headed right for your skull, and it’s just five feet away.
Aesthetic feel (the vibe, kids!) takes precedence over conventional song structure for the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, bringing into play conversations about what exactly constitutes a song, and what doesn’t. The pair align with the tradition of musique concrète, and there are moments on the album where the natural world – a stream, birds, rainfall – can be heard if you listen closely enough. What at first sounds like just a wall of trashy old guitar noise has layers beneath it. Lots of them, too.
Like being able to draw horses anatomically correctly or successfully editing a film to an inaudible natural beat, people either ‘get’ Sunn O))) or they don’t. There’s rarely any middle ground. Anyone who suggests they “like their early work, but they’ve lost it recently…” is just lying, and there are few things in life worse than a hipster liar.
A curio in many ways, the band have been creating slabs of slow, detuned sonic majesty for 28 years, taking the template created by Dylan Carlson’s band Earth on Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version and melding it into a colossal maelstrom of rapturous, beautiful noise. To understand Sunn O))) is to move away from the need to require structure, formula, and melody. Often likened to the most terrifying elements of nature; their sound is simultaneously bewitching and bewildering.
Sunn O))) is the pair’s 10th studio album, excluding their collaborations with Boris, Ulver, and the aforementioned godlike genius Scott Walker. Here, they’re stripped back to the ‘Shoshin duo’ of two guitars, but that only results in more seismic, glacial shifts of loud minimalism as less, for once, is much more.
“XXANN” opens proceedings and it’s clear that there’s no reinvention here, no shifting of the template. The move to Sub Pop (who also released Earth 2 back in 1993) hasn’t dimmed their vision one iota, and the clarity of the twin guitars as they crash together in unison after a couple of minutes of wailing feedback is simply glorious. There’s a ritualistic element to a Sunn O))) live performance – robes, communal wine, and amplifier worship – which is impossible not to visualise when you surrender yourself to the drone. The contorted, bended notes towards the track’s 18-minute runtime are transcendental, sounding more energetic than anything they’ve ever produced before. Same but different doesn’t make sense, but that’s how this feels.
After the gloriously quasi-absurd opener, “Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?” opens with a low rumble that feels like the PTSD twitches after the assault of “XXANN”. Its first note drawls and swirls like the start of “Richard” from their 2000 debut album ØØ Void. The separation on this track between the guitar and bass is more pronounced than usual, and the lines interweave almost like atoms colliding. The visceral element of Sunn O))) is all-encompassing, and this record is the heaviest in their catalogue (with the exception of the mountainous live album Нежить). The absence of vocals, often the standout element of albums such as Black One or Monoliths and Dimensions, is a welcome one as it allows for fewer distractions, and for a more immersive experience in the washes of euphoric guitar.
There are some moments of respite in the eye of the noise storm. “Butch’s Guns” and “Glory Black” both have brief interludes from the onslaught with the former using intermittent moments of silence, the latter a gentle and meandering piano refrain. The relative silence really is quite startling, especially as they happen so early on in the track. You can still hear the gentle hum of the amps, but the disparity between feeling engulfed and then the subsequent lack of noise makes you a little bereft as an air of absence takes over.
The intense production workfrom Brad Wood (alongside the band themselves) brings a sense of intimacy to the work as it feels as though you can feel each tube valve vibrating. The opening of “Everett Moses” is the most personal that Sunn O))) have ever sounded. For the initial wall of noise, there’s a sense of a lack of control which is entirely against their usual stoic nature. There’s a sense of wild abandon here before the duo manage to take their rightful places as the controllers and conductors of the squall. Then, right at the end, there’s another burst of frenetic noise – this time, a high frequency that’s startling and unsettling. Despite the template remaining the same, they can still surprise.
Sunn O))) rewards repeat listens as there’s so much going on under the surface. It’s majestic, euphoric, but also clearly not for everybody. But then you should never really trust the majority, anyway.
