| sunn O))) (June.09 issue) |
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| Written by Steve Dollar | |
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Page 1 of 3  black hole sunn O)))Content is content, they say. X=Y=Z. Once you boil anything down to an MP4 and put it on an iPod, swap it on Pirate Bay, or Tweet a link to a stream on your blog, it’s just another bean in a soup that is bubbling into mush. So it is that I’m not even perversely digging the fact that the [YOUR FAVORITE SPLINTER GENRE-DEMARCATING NOUN HERE]-metal band sunn O))) made its latest opus (for indeed it is an opus) available to critics as a double-LP vinyl set, one track per side, meant to be played at either 33 or 45 rpm. Hell yeah! I’m just digging it, plain and simple. I dig it so much I will probably go pay actual money to get the CD package, because if the digital version sounds even half as good as the wax, it’s going to detonate my old DVD player like an atomizer and do all kinds of crazy magnetic shifty fluxwave derangements that nothing coming out of that box will ever sound the same again. I believe this record will radically enhance the sonic swerve of my entire CD collection even as it induces slackjawed submission. Surely, the titanic and glacial oozing of hazy leaded guitar overtones, dripping like Freon tears from the Terminator’s eyeball, has done enough to convince the squirrels on my window ledge that they are no longer safe to rape each other and scream all day long. But I fear for the children next door. How long before they start to flash devil signs and begin to cast runes? What rough beast slouches towards the Gowanus, waiting to be born? Let’s just say that sunn O)))’s new Monoliths&Dimensions (Southern Lord) is as epic and laden with forbidding portent as anyone might hope it to be, from the black hole sun album cover image (Richard Serra’s 1999 painting out-of-round X) to the mad, hall-of-mirrors infinity of sound that resonates out of some unimaginable, nearly theoretical, depth of field. “Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results” is the advice given when spinning these discs, and indeed the louder you can crank it the more gripping and hallucinogenic these slow-ripping waves of forever become. Fans of guitar-army prophets Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham will be as impressed as vintage Sabbath heads gone raving off their meds, renegade Wagnerians, trance fanciers and free-improv blurt wonks. And not because, as I joked with our beloved editor, it’s “like fucking a mutant squid in a molasses swamp while the Cookie Monster watches.” Although, it really kind of is. Just as it is also, as the band insists, “a practice in density, gravity and momentum.” No, this recording brings total destruction to your mind (lights it on fire like a Vietnamese monk, drags it to hell to party with Satan, then sets it free like a crow turning into a dove vanishing up a shaft of light to heaven) because it’s so damn beautiful. |
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