lift with your mind...

Speaking of Sunn0))), I met the two of them and one of the members of Boris recently while they were mixing a new record at Avast! Studios in Seattle. (I'm still unclear if it's a Sunn0))) record or a "split" Boris/Sunn0)))... - or given that the guitar player of the late, lamented Soundgarden contributed roccoco feedbacking, it will be something else entirely...)

(The record is known as "Altar")


It was an interesting experience. I don't listen to much heavy metal music. I'm only familiar with the most well-known of the metal groups. I mostly listen to experimental and electronic music and some lo-fi style indie rock. So I can't really address how Sunn0))) fits in to the metal world. I have to hear them and see them from the outside and try to place my observations into a broader, less specific musical perspective. I came to Sunn0)))'s music via this path: David Bowie>Brian Eno>No Wave/Ambient/Bauhaus>Throbbing Gristle/The Residents/John Cage/Glenn Branca>Oval>Merzbow>Boris>Sunn0)))...


To hear them talk I notice that they are interested in the physicality and the transportation of energy from performer to audience of their music and of the psychoacoustic effects upon the listener. Their intentions seem to be with how the listener responds physically and psychically to large, long, slow, gradual sonic change at extreme volume in an almost scientific way - what is perceived and inferred via this excruciating (and once sensitized, exquisite) music and what its physical and mental effects are. They drew pictures to help them come to grips with the scale of the sounds (and perhaps also to help overcome the language barrier with the man from Boris who is Japanese). The pictures work for me too - there is simply no normal way of contextualizing what they're doing - its too big, too loud, too slow, to long-form for caffienated, squirrel ears raised on 3 minute pop songs, like mine. Words to describe it right don't exist and I don't think standard musical notation works well either. Their musical intent seems to be something of a combination of the centuries-long aims of the Clock of the Long Now and the psychoacoustic effects of the multi-guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca with explicit and garish overtones of the irrational and superstition in the form of the occult and its obverse - religion, and pervasive undercurrents of mortal dread, that all surrenders ultimately in a celebration of the triumph of chaos.

Amazing to me is that they can actually think like this at all! Both men in Sunn0))), Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, were raised in the very ordinary suburbs of Seattle. How they've managed to rise above those uninspiring rain and ennui drenched impediments is testament to the resilience of the human spirit. I have seen the place they're from and know what it consists of. Think of overactive, sugar-saturated imaginations pent up in the toxic-cloud of our manufactured indoors while the accessible world consists only of a mostly damp and cool place where everything you touch is wet, where mold and mildew are the most obvious life forms. It is a place where nearly perpetual looming grey skies wallow down upon a hostile, faceless environment of rectangles - grey roads, vast grey parking lots, boxy chain stores and bland identical tract houses, and absent any history and culture aside from the ersatz ones on television - a really not too uncommon situation for many of us - and you have to wonder that they were able to wring any inspiration and creativity out of such a dismal origin.





In any case, its been a horizon-expanding experience to be confronted by music that doesn't hold the door open for you, so to speak. I don't even really know what to properly call this music - there is little cultural or musical vocabulary available to describe their works. There is simply nothing in Western musical history that has dealt with music this extreme - everything that has gone before is pale and small and inadequate - its like trying to describe Godzilla by holding up a stuttering little Woody Allen as an example. This sound would instantly kill Mozart historians. It would collapse the craniums of anyone who has ever contributed to the LaRousse. The London Philharmonic would spontaneously combust with the opening salvo of tones of any of Sunn0)))'s pieces. Pavoratti would soil himself just prior to messily exploding when bodily exposed to a short blast of this sound. Naturally, this kind of language has been used in the past to describe heavy metal music. There is a certain truth in describing power with destructive hyperbole - our language and experience has no way to describe things like this except as destructive - storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, monsters, etc. But raw power does not necessarily mean "bad". Its a mistake to automatically equate force with destruction and negativity.


Sunn0)))'s music is not simply about power and volume, and not necessarily about destruction and doom. I've come to see their music as a very natural evocation of our universal unconscious responses to the way our world really is - it's mostly dull and chaotic, often hostile, punctuated by moments of startling beauty and poignance and insight, and overall, deeply frightening because of our limited vision and understanding. But its not all about our fear of the unknown - its really all about our fear of uncontrollable changes that bring us to the unknown. Any sensible person can feel all of that, and any sensible person ought to admit it and accept it. Their music is an entry to the idea that uncontrollable change is the only real constant in the universe. It is cathartic to accept chaos as normal, and a relief to abandon the illusions of permanent order and give up on the idea that we are able to keep our fingers in all the holes in all the dikes forever, so to speak. In those respects, their music is actually a positive force - liberating and life-affirming. Amen.


Live, their "songs" are long, mostly improvised pieces played at extreme volume mostly with guitars, that explore shifting sets of musical ideas to their conclusion with little use of traditional song-structure. They present themselves anonymously; black-robed, backlit, fog shrouded, mysterious. Their shows are not about them - their faces, their personalities, as much as the performances are about the music and the atmosphere it evokes, which, its been said, is surprisingly ritualistic, without a trace of the formalism of religious ceremony, Wiccan, Catholic, or otherwise. On their records they explore the furthest limits of what metal music can be - seldom using drums and then only to very unconventional effect, only occasionally using a guest vocalist, and frequently collaborating with other noise, metal, or experimental music musicians. These apparently equal partnerships have a very obvious benefit: They add tremendous variety in structure, texture and tone, and flavor to Sunn0)))'s recordings. The collaborations make it plain that Sunn0))) is capable of nearly anything because they are clearly always ready and able to experiment and go in any number of directions with each and every record. That openness is all too rare - often artists find a couple of things that "work" and ride them for all they're worth. Sunn0))) takes the high road into the unknown with each release. For me, this makes their music unpredictable and challenging, and for all that, ultimately more rewarding than a lot of other music.


To my ears what Sunn0))) is up to seems far more ambitious than mere metal music. Many of Sunn0)))'s methods of working and apparent aesthetic goals remind me of things that were and are said and done by jazz players (those who actually said anything about what they did/do, that is): Free structure, limitless improvisation, unconventional playing, etc. Sun Ra and Albert Ayler would probably have understood. Sunn0)))'s music is way too loud and assertive to be "ambient music" - although it does share the implicit and explicit aims of summoning visions of other places and perhaps through the music achieve a trance-like and egoless transportative state to create in the listener an altered state of reality. Sunn0))) amplifies on that goal (literally) and achieves those results using repetition, complex layering of sound, slowness, and high volume (the zen and peace of extremely loud machine noise - the relaxing music for the robots in the mine to set explosive charges by?)


The guitars and the volume and the gothic visuals are trophies or talismans that Sunn0))) has put up around themselves - stuck there in much the same way that we Europeans used to put our enemies heads on poles at our city gates not so long ago. These superficial ornaments collide with the actual music being made, and the juxtaposition forces us to re-look at the stale and stereotyped cultural reference point of heavy metal. The heavy symbologies of metal they brandish really are powerful reminders and lessons that should be seen as tools, not as fortifications or weapons. Sunn0))) is forging tools that you ought to use to re-listen to music and re-examine your calcified ideas about music. Perhaps that harsh, aesthetic grinding-away of inflexibility will allow you to flex your mind about a lot of other things too - so you can see and hear things of high quality that you overlooked or forgot. With Sunn0))) and a few others like Earth and Boris, metal has become a fresh and unexpected launching point for further musical exploration.

These are some of the interesting kernels of aesthetic challenge and reward laid out on the path by these noisemongers, unwittingly or not, that are too attractive for musical starlings like me to dismiss lightly and pass up. Sunn0)))'s game is bigger than metal, or jazz, or electronic - I get the feeling that their sights are set way beyond those known and safe harbors. In fact, what they lay down is so vast and so heavy, I can barely comprehend how to lift it!