Sunn 0))) are the kings of avant garde drone. Their 2009 album Monoliths & Dimensions found them pushing back the boundaries even further, with help from members of Mayhem and Earth.
“Not necessarily in a new age way, but maybe every musician is channelling something outside of them- selves,” muses Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, sitting in an Old Street studio. “Someone once said that the overtones – like all the extra sounds you get when you hit a chord and let it resonate – are the sound of the big bang, the resonance of the big bang. That’s an interesting way of thinking about that type of thing. It’s the result of the environ- ment. We’re channelling literally electricity through devices to create sound, and it’s the result of focusing energy into sound. Transmutation is perhaps a better word.”
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Anyone listening to Sunn O)))’s 2005 album, Black One – a harrowing work that came across like the river Styx reduced down to radioactive sediment – could be forgiven for wondering where the core duo, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, could go next. After all, many of their predecessors in low- end-driven, body-crushing noise had found themselves at a sonic impasse and in need of reassessment.
Swans, once the holy grail of heavy, went acoustic, Godflesh imploded and gave birth to the indie-tinged reveries of Jesu, and even Earth – the guitar drone outfit Sunn O))) were formed in homage to – changed tack, as mainman Dylan Carlson found redemption from his previous heroin addiction in country and gospel-tinged cadences. Sunn O))), however, have never been tied into such human dynamics; for all the near-unendurable gravity of their sound, their driving impulse has never been about testing personal limits, waging internal psychological battles or giving vent to existential woe.
Rather, their music sounds like the gateway to a vast, ageless continuum. Over the course of seven studio albums and various collaborations, offshoots and live documents, they’ve drilled down through the crust of any received notion of rock’n’ roll, and tapped into convulsive, brooding, fathomless realms below, at once alien in its amorphous, primordial ooze, and body-shockingly immediate in the way it hijacks and squirms its way throughout your nervous system, resonates at frequencies our modern, compartmentalised minds have lost the means to contain.
Even if Sunn O)))’s signature tone – all layers of distorted, frayed-edged, glacially rumbling guitar – is instantly recognisable, their forthcoming new opus, Monoliths & Dimensions, proves beyond doubt that their capacity for revelation is limitless. Their most ambitious outing to date, it marries long-time collaborator, Mayhem frontman and possessor of a voice so deep it could be a carrier signal for the dead, Attila Cshihar, with, amongst others, a Viennese choir, a former member of the cosmically conscious free jazz ensemble Sun Ra Arkestra, Julian Priester, the aforementioned Dylan Carlson of Earth alongside his keyboard player Steve Moore, and wide-ranging composer, Eyvind Kang.
The result is a work of mind-bogglingly immersive range and detail, so orchestral in its intricately emerging dynamics and gradual osmosis of mood that one writer at the album’s playback felt it wouldn’t be inappropriate to pitch it to Gramaphone magazine. Where Black One, for all its power, was Sunn O))) at their most withdrawn, Monoliths… feels like the crossing over of a new threshold for the band.
“It’s definitely that,” agrees Stephen, “but it’s a threshold even deeper into the guitar sound. All the arrangements are inspired by the sounds of guitars, and it’s arranged to the detail of the guitar. Eyvind Kang, who arranged a lot of the acoustic instruments, did the arrangements based on our original tracking of our guitars and bass. Besides being an arranger, he’s a translator in a way.”
“It started,” offers Greg, “as with all the Sunn O))) albums, with Steve and me in a recording studio, exchanging ideas and bouncing riffs off of each other, creating the foundation for the songs. Eyvind listened to that and composed arrangements based on that. There was constant conversation about instrumentation, where to focus on, mood, reference points, like how to approach it as far as the arrangements, so it was integrated in a way we were searching for. And it was really important to integrate it too. Like yesterday, we saw a video of a rock band with string players, which is cool, but we wanted to expand the sound to include more timbre, more detail and focus, and as a whole, not as additional elements stuck on. We didn’t want it to be Sunn O))) with strings – that’s happened before with rock or metal bands. Nothing against those bands, but that’s not what we were going for.”
“We’re creating pieces of music, not elements of music,” says Stephen. “It’s kind of a result of all the rest of the stuff we’ve done, and it’s all come to this point in terms of developing the concepts and ideas at the foundational level over 10 years, to doing enough work and background stuff to just to be physically able, and have the capacity and resources to try something like this.”
Although Sunn O)))’s gargantuan trawls were first claimed by the doom community, a classification Stephen and Greg have never been comfortable with (“That’s more a product of… marketing,” reckons Greg. “For me, that’s restrictive, but I understand why people use those terms. They’re just trying to understand the music better. I’m fine with that”), they’ve managed to soak up and distil a range of disciplines. From sludge, to black metal, jazz and now modern classical, all have been pulled across their event horizon – in the process seeping out over the rim of cult status to be embraced by an unlikely audience.
Amidst this swirling, ever-increasing stew, followers are starting to discover and appreciate other forms of music outside their own boundaries, whether it’s hipsters gawking at the corpse- painted Xasthur mainman Malefic screeching the last rites or the deformed-mystic figure of Attila Cshihar, highbrow types enveloped in the sheer visceral power of the music or extreme fans rocking out to the sharp, veil-piercing power of choral arrangements.
“Yeah, what an honour,” beams Greg. “It’s like a gateway drug. To me, that’s a huge part of who I am. I’m really into turning people onto music, that’s why I’m running my record label, Southern Lord. I love turning people on to music that I like, and I like being turned on to music. So if Sunn O))) can be that for people who are very interested in following trends, that’s fine. Maybe they’ll reconsider Black Sabbath or Celtic Frost. That’s a great honour.”
“We were talking about this before,” adds Stephen, “because we touched on this thing, like ‘fusion music’. It’s cool when some of our favourite kinds of music are a collision of different styles. It produces a lot of really interesting results, and it’s also the way the music develops; it’s assimilated into new forms based on elements of history, the legacy of inspiration that comes to those particular musicians or groups.”
“The first thing people think of when you talk about fusion is jazz,” admits Greg, “but I think thrash metal is a fusion music as well. It’s punk and metal colliding. The Melvins basically brought together Black Sabbath and Black Flag, and there’s fusion there too. I just made this realisation that we’re really into fusion, and that’s a huge part of what Sunn O))) is – a fusion of different styles and elements of different genres of music. It’s music that’s been important to us and our history of playing and listening, stuff that’s inspired us too.”
As much as Sunn O))) manage to make a totality of their musical sources, so their sense of presentation builds up into a whole. Each album finds its truest form on heavy, semi-abstract, talismanically packaged vinyl, the cowls worn onstage and elaborate gestures of Stephen and Greg giving the impression of an arcane order invoking ancient, Chthulhu-esque entities, cloaked even more amidst eye-watering volumes of dry ice, and, of course, the ear-canal flooding, chest cavity-commandeering intoxicating VOLUME are all transmitters for a unified aesthetic of aura.
Sunn O))) have even started to create performances uniquely catered to the venue, such as Bergen, Norway’s Dømkirke cathedral – a masterpiece of gothic architecture. A 2007 performance was released on vinyl only a year later. How did the custodians feel about having the singer for one of the country’s most notorious black metal bands, once implicated in the early 90s church-burning, performing in their house of God?
“Some of them were really cool about it,” says Stephen, surprisingly, “and some of them were hesitant about going forward with the project. But ultimately we wanted to do it for the right reasons, and the guy who invited us to do it, he articulated that very well to them. And in the end, everyone was happy because we filled the church, which is what they wanted.”
“They said there hadn’t been that many young people in church for 40 years,” laughs Greg. “They were really pleased about that.”
“It’s funny that they had an angle of ‘they’re back in the fold’,” Stephen continues, “but they came for the same reason the band did, which is the building, the organ, and the experience of getting to be in this sacred place – and maybe bringing that element that’s in our music out, by putting them in that space.”
The ‘sacred’ is perhaps the core concern of the Sunn O))) experience, their mediation of other dimensions as though they belong to a bloodline of devout, diabolic midwives. But what do Sunn O))) believe in?
“We believe in the music,” Greg states bluntly. “That’s what’s sacred to us: the music, not any ideology.”
“Each player that’s been involved,” says Stephen, “has a tremendous breadth of personality. It’d be detrimental to single out a certain thing or way of thinking to put as a requirement to participate. Music’s bigger than that, it’s bigger than any of those personalities. Some of the people have really strong views, but the music exists above that, or encompasses all of it in a way, but it’s its own thing as well. It’s an assimilation of our influences, but Sunn O))) is not about the individual.
“Music is viewed by a lot of artists and writers and philosophers as one of the highest art forms, if not the highest artform because it is able to be spiritual and sacred, and it’s possible for all sorts of people to be able to reach that. Whether it’s in a church with a choir or the baker or the fishmonger, or guys who are just day to day, living in this town, singing in this choir in Sunday mass and having this spiritual experience. I hold music to be sacred, and an opportunity to have that connection with the universe in some way. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a spiritual experience.”
Does Attila bring some perspective on that?
“He kinda embodies it in a certain way, for sure,” Stephen concludes. “He focuses on it as one of his core topics, too. I respect that a lot. His angle, of course, is kind of peculiar and unique, and sometimes a little bizarre. That’s great, though. That angle helps you realise that just because it’s sacred, doesn’t mean it has to be cherished as this object that needs to be preserved and fawned upon. Music’s pretty rough and ugly sometimes too.”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 192, August 2009
