Sunn 0))) Albums (7)
'Monoliths & Dimensions'
Release Date 5/26/2009
Tracks 4
Label Southern Lord
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Sunn 0)))'s Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley began their career as an Earth cover band, and explored the extremes of the low-tuned electric's guitar's drone capability at maximum volume on The Grimmrobe Demos. Later albums, such as 2005's Black One, showed the duo expanding its sonic extremes, engaging a deep love of black metal by adding shrieking, growling vocals by Wrest, as well as additional instruments (like drums) by Oren Ambarchi. Altar, their collaboration with Japanese rockers Boris, provided them with a wider textural and ambient canvas to explore. Their vinyl-only release Dømkirke, recorded in a 100-year-old cathedral in Norway, utilized the building itself as an instrument, where its nooks and crannies echoed back microtones of the band's own high-powered drones on tape. That said, nothing could have prepared listeners for the wide-ranging adventure that is Monoliths and Dimensions. This 53-minute set contains four tracks. O'Malley and Anderson utilize more guests and collaborators than ever before, including vocalist Attila Csihar, who gives his greatest performance since Mayhem's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas; Ambarchi; Earth's Dylan Carlson; trombonists such as jazzman Julian Priester and the Deep Listening Band's Stuart Dempster; trumpeter Cuong Vu; multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore; male and female choirs; other reed and wind players; and violist Eyvind Kang as an arranger. While Sunn 0))) sound exactly like themselves, they seem to approach the music of composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Cage; they utilize the former's tintinnabuli (three bells) theory as well as engage the latter's notion of silence as a process. If all this sounds pretentious, think again about who we're talking about: the kings of wearing black hooded robes to perform. The set begins with "Aghartha," full of power drone low-tuned guitars, as one might expect. Slow and plodding for five and a half minutes, it pummels on until Csihar enters in a lower than low yet barely audible voice speaking a long poem about the creation of a new Earth. Priester later enters playing a conch shell, two acoustic double bassists come in on the low end, Ambarchi plays a second electric guitar and effects, a piano sparingly adds both chord and single-note lines, and other horns and reeds flit about the background even as the piece remains unchanging in its focus. "Big Church" is the biggest shock. Commencing with an a cappella female choir, it's soon intruded upon by four electric guitars; Csihar eventually enters in throat-singing overtone mode, as does a synth, and the tension becomes unbearable before the tune stops in dead silence. Then, bells, an organ, Kang's viola, and trombone all find their way through the immense space provided by the slow droning yet extremely heavy riffs. Feedback screams in and then the bells enter again before power riffs crush them out. A "man choir" participates on "Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)," with percussion, a huge Moog Voyager, electric tamboura, and horns amid the droning guitar mayhem slowly penetrating the listener's skull like a giant worm. By the time the set ends with "Alice," featuring a trio of trombones, woodwinds, reeds, ambient sounds, enormous guitars, and oscillators, the effect is complete. Monoliths and Dimensions succeeds because it is the sound of a new music formed from the ashen forge of drone, rock, and black metal. In its seemingly impenetrable, slow, spacious, heavy sonic darkness, this is the new way forward for not only Sunn 0))), but for extreme rock music and possibly even what's left of the avant-garde. Brilliant. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Altar is a bona fide collaboration between powersonic drone throners Sunn 0))) and Japan's experimental rockist thunderhead Boris. Outfitted by the Southern Lord label (Sunn 0)))'s vanity plate) in an oversize digipack with a four-color, 12-page booklet, with black ink on gold metallic pages, it's a handsome package to say the least. When looking through the credits one sees not only the bandmembers from Boris -- Takeshi, Wata, and Atsuo -- listed alongside the Sunn 0))) boys Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, but a surprising array of guests as well, including Joe Preston of Thrones, High on Fire, Earth, and Melvins fame; Earth's Steve Moore; Alan Dubin from O'Malley's other gig, Khanate; Rex Ritter of Jessamine; Kim Thayil (formerly of Soundgarden); and -- of all people -- Jesse Sykes and her bandmates Phil Wandscher and Bill Herzog from the Sweet Hereafter. For starters, five of these six cuts are meant to be listened to at spine-dislodging volume on a decent-to-great set of headphones, or at least a set of speakers cranked to Valhalla with your head placed firmly between them. This baby is really, really slow. All of it. Slower than any record by O'Malley and Anderson's main project. Metalheads may be outrageously bummed at how turtle-like the pace of this set is. But the point is HEAVY, not necessarily "metal." It's drenched in weight and needs volume to lift it off the ground -- and so you can hear everything in this dense mix. When joined together in all their downtuned glory, these guitars and synthesizers actually emit new microphonic tones. The low, pulsating frequencies hack out a space in the wall of drone and offer a new set of tonalities. (Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham did something akin to this with their guitar-and-bass orchestras, but they were going for the high end of the sonic spectrum and used anywhere from 15 to 100 guitars, all tuned differently and strummed in staggered chord progressions, to get those new sounds.) Remarkably, this triangle of guitars with drums -- Sunn 0))) normally doesn't use them -- and synths feels natural here and, using only one or two chords, adds real tension to "Akuma No Kuma," the album's hinge piece. A single low chord, so low and droning as to offer discomfort, is joined by a vocodered voice (Preston) in that same tone (almost like a Tibetan monk chanting prayers gutturally, from the bottom of the throat), which gradually begins to unfold into a minimal modal if not melodic lyric frame. Atsuo's "lead drums," a sextet of different synthesizers, a trombone, and percussion (including a chilling gong), become an elliptical, bone-rattling, jaw-grinding drama that seeks resolution. It doesn't get it; these combined elementals are merely mutated into other phases that also remain unfinished. Elsewhere, on "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)," Sykes croons cinematically (think of a drugged-out Julee Cruise on the Blue Velvet soundtrack) to an uneasy, fractured waltz tempo -- not ushered or guided by drums, but the drone of a lone guitar chord, a series of minimal fills on piano, and Wata's space-echoing guitar that evolves into yet another chord, but returns with the same tension. She is a chanteuse here, offering a kind of hunted whispering beauty -- she'd be right at home with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti -- to the halted, faltering proceedings that seems to slip into ether as the band begins a slow but deliberate disintegration behind and on top of her singing. When her vocals are multi-tracked on the refrains, the tune moves off the map and digs deep into the consciousness of the listener; it erases every bit of the song that preceded the moment she finds herself in. It disappears in an echoey series of traces and figures, but there's no body left. "Fried Eagle Mind" allows Wata the lead vocal -- if one can even call it that, since it seems to come out of the disembodied textures of the music. Without drums, accompanied only by partially by guitars and a pair of synths that utter and stutter more than speak, it creates a ghostly ambience that has nothing to do with Eno's idea of "ambient music." This stuff is impossible to ignore; you can't go about your business when you are melting into a substanceless goo in your chair. The final cut, "Blood Swamp," a nearly 15-minute exercise that evolves from the ominous sound of a shimmering gong, a quintet of guitars, and a pair of synthesizers, is one where the "drone" is taken to its own place of erasure and disappearance entering the drone of silence -- which in and of itself, because of all that's preceded it, is heavy as well. Each series of droning tonalities and tuned-out modes wraps into each developing one, and the hot volume and sonic palette expand into something akin to oblivion. It is not blissful. It is a music of controlled excess, charged with eroticism, terror, death, and transcendence. It is the sound of a horror film unfolding as reality in the dreams of the filmmaker. But it is so utterly brutal in showing you the dark side of its true beauty, so complete in its application of violent stillness, that it cannot be resisted or captured. It can only overcome the listener with its unstated will to domination of the unforgiving nature of sound itself. [There is a mail order-only edition of the set, machine-numbered to 5,000 copies. It contains an extra disc that contains a single 28-minute drone track.] ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Although claiming that Black One is the darkest Sunn 0))) album yet may be a little overzealous on their label's part (unless, of course, its meant as a not-so-subtle play on most recent predecessors White1 and 2), there's certainly a good chance that it's their most diverse. Whether that's a simple case of there being more and shorter songs present (all of seven, and only shorter by these guys' standards, mind you), or an unprecedented volume of outside collaborators (mostly underground black metal buddies lending their vocals), Black One experiments with a number of new tricks to go with the by now expected ultra-droning aspects of Sunn 0)))'s sound. For example, both "Orthodox Caveman" and "Cry for the Weeper" drink from the same old, Earth-derived dead-water pool that inspired Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley to start melting their amps in tribute to begin with; while the improbably brief "It Took the Night to Believe" (featuring blood-curdling shrieks and croaks by Wrest) may well be Sunn 0)))'s most unapologetically black metal moment ever, taking a page from Burzum's bloody book with its spooky loop of buzz-picked guitar melodies to go with a reliably subterranean foundation. Keeping with the black metal mindset, the pair then proceed to deconstruct Immortal's "Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)" into a barely recognizable primordial soup of tonal thrumming, before calling Xasthur's Malefic down to the basement to supply additional screams for the splendidly named "Candlegoat" and megalithic closer, "Báthory Erzsébet." (For the latter, in fact, he was supposedly locked inside a coffin, microphone and all, so as to inspire a suitably suffocating feeling of horror -- proving that extreme sounds sometimes truly do demand extreme measures.) In other words, Black One is a cautious but unquestionable departure from Sunn 0)))'s pre-established m.o., and arguably their most accessible effort to date, in the bargain. But even though there'll always be those purists looking for a bone to pick, its difficult to imagine too many original fans not embracing these still remarkably blackened sounds. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
A companion piece to the previous year's White 1, White 2 once again sees bottom-frequency explorers Sunn O))) stretching their creative limits with three very distinctive, extended pieces of ambient, nearly subsonic non-doom. Indeed, like all Sunn O))) releases before it, White 2 is a pretty specialized affair; offering the sort of bowel-affecting music that would probably stump 99 percent of the planet -- unable to grasp collaborators Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley's subversive mission of sound in the first place. But for the 1 percent who get it, White 2 represents as uncompromising and usually satisfying a vision of mind-blowing adventure one is likely to find in fringe-metallic quarters. Opener "Hell-o)))-Ween" (a mere song snippet at 14 minutes!) latches onto a series of unfeasibly thick power chords that then proceed to rumble and cascade endlessly upon themselves, patiently building in intensity as they go. The 23-minute "bassAliens" takes a different, more subtle and diverse approach: swimming down to deep, impenetrably dark oceanic trenches before slowly surfacing by way of electronic bleeps and blurps, ultimately cresting in a series of loosely structured digital echoes and electronic farts. Finally, the disc's closing, 25-minute colossus "Decay2 (Nihils' Maw)," utilizes windy sheets of feedback, ghostly cries, and ghastly shrieks to assemble White 2's most haunting and compelling architecture. Further adorned with bizarre bits of synthetic noise and obscure dialogue, this movement is most notable for featuring unnaturally guttural, nearly unintelligible drone vocals recited by Mayhem legend Attila Csihar, and, in the end, his presence ensures a fittingly cathartic climax for Sunn O)))'s latest groundbreaking outing. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Doom metal isn't a huge market; you won't find an abundance of doom metallers headlining Madison Square Garden or bragging about their ability to sell more CDs than Madonna, Janet Jackson, or Pearl Jam. But it does have a small cult following, and those who are seriously into doom metal can be very passionate about it. One of the more ambitious and musical bands in the doom field is Sunn0))), whose White1 favors the sort of complexity and intricacy one expects from progressive rock. Sunn0))) has the usual doom metal elements, including dark lyrics, sludgy guitars, gloominess, and Black Sabbath-minded riffs that are incredibly slow -- no one will ever mistake Sunn0))) for a grindcore, thrash, or death metal combo. But White1 is hardly the work of your average Saint Vitus or Grief wannabes. This CD contains three extended pieces, all of which are quite involved and offer a variety of twists and turns; the overall result could almost be described as Saint Vitus by way of Pink Floyd's darker material. Sabbath minded-riffing is only part of what Sunn0))) does on White1; there are many moments when the band favors an eerie drone and becomes downright meditative (in a dark, sorrowful way). Most of the time, White1 is more reflective than heavy; in fact, some doom metal purists may argue that this release isn't really doom metal -- that the material isn't as consistently forceful as a doom album needs to be. But even though White1 isn't the work of doom metal purists, Sunn0))) doesn't abandon their Saint Vitus/Grief/Sabbath heritage. The thing is that instead of simply emulating doom metal's leaders, Sunn0))) prefers to do something expansive -- and that's certainly admirable. White1 can be overly self-indulgent at times, but overall, the CD hits its mark. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide
'Flight of the Behemoth'
Release Date 1/22/2002
Tracks 5
Label Southern Lord
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Sunn's first two discs, The Grimmrobe Demos and 00 Void, established the group's droning, bass-heavy "power ambient" doom style and showed that the bandmembers had spent plenty of time listening to and learning from their Earth records. With Flight of the Behemoth, they begin with that same basic foundation (in fact, the first two tracks are impossible to distinguish from ones on their earlier albums), but for the first time also branch out to create something new, something that goes beyond any sort of mere Earth worship. This is partially true of the last track, "F.W.T.B.T.," which employs a drummer and a vocalist for the first time on any Sunn recording, but more so on the third and fourth ones, "O))) Bow 1" and "O))) Bow 2." Given the once-over by special guest mixer/legendary noise artist Merzbow, Sunn's hypnotic, slow-as-molasses feedback drones slowly evolve into a wall of distorted, swirling (although not completely overdriven) noise on these tracks, creating the sensation of being slowly sucked into a black hole while a symphony of chain saws plays in the background. Sound like fun? Well, needless to say, this music is not for everybody, but this collaboration has yielded something truly immense and frightening, bridging the gaps between dark ambient/drone music and electronic noise, between doom metal and avant-garde electro-acoustic sound. This is a remarkable album, recommended for brave connoisseurs of any of the above genres. ~ William York, All Music Guide
'The Grimmrobe Demos'
Release Date 1/1/2000
Tracks 4
Label Double H Noise
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Sunn's first release, The Grimmrobe Demos, contains three lengthy tracks -- ranging from 15 to 21 minutes -- all in their patented, Earth-inspired low-end drone style. This is not music to sing along to, to dance to, to tap your foot to, or to do anything else but sit back and let it envelop and/or wash over you. Some listeners will find Sunn's style unbearably slow-paced and sludgy, while others will find it powerful and hypnotic (at least under the right circumstances). In terms of Sunn's overall discography this is not a bad place to start, but their next album, 00 Void, covers the same basic territory with slightly better production and is also easier to find, as this disc was issued in a limited edition of just 500 copies. ~ William York, All Music Guide
