One late night a few weeks ago, a mechanical noise on the floor below my hotel room was keeping me awake — a muffled wheezing, grinding sound like a garbage truck that would rev for a few minutes and then stop for a few more before resuming, vibrating the floor just enough to be supremely irritating. It had been going on for hours; if it had been constant I could have gotten used to it, but the maddening start-stop made relaxing impossible and rendered white noise ineffective (I tried that). It was too late at night to change rooms and I had a long day ahead.
Suddenly, I hit upon a solution: I cued up an advance stream of the new Sunn O))) album on my laptop — a kind of heavy metal ambient music, to give it a reductive but basically accurate description. I slept happily for the rest of the night.
It’s was a completely counterintuitive solution: Why would an hour-plus of crushing, distorted electric guitar chords and feedback be so beautiful and calming, let alone so lulling that one could sleep to it — especially for a person who never sleeps with music on?
“Sunn O))),” the eponymous, twenty-somethingth album from the long-running Seattlian duo Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, could be categorized as jazz or classical or avant-garde much more readily than rock, even though its only instrument is that most rock of objects: electric guitars — Gibsons, no less. There’s no percussion, vocals or seemingly any single notes; there’s song structure (or at least compositions) but you’d be hard pressed to identify it. It’s just massive power chords and feedback, droning and shifting into different shapes in a way that recalls a randomly generating video image, or Mark Rothko paintings like one on this album’s cover. When you sit and stare at one of Rothko’s massive paintings in a museum for several minutes, it feels and seems like it’s moving, although that’s impossible. While that’s not a direct analogy, it’s what this album feels like. You can almost forget it’s on, as hard as it is to imagine being able to ignore 80 minutes of loud, droning guitars.
Why does it work in this way? The difference with Sunn0))) is that they’re not demanding your attention — despite the aggressiveness and volume, there’s little attack in it. You just roll with the chords like waves in the middle of the ocean.
Although the album is self-titled, Sunn O))), have been at this for more than 25 years, inspired by the geographically distant but spiritually complementary early ‘90s outfits like Seattle’s Earth and the British post-grindcore unit Godflesh — both duos, both slow-paced bands that occasionally found conventional songs and chord progressions (i.e. riffs) unnecessary.
Their approach is both tongue-in-cheek and dead serious: They perform before towering stacks of vintage amplifiers amid dense clouds of dry ice while wearing monks’ habits with hoods, yet they also say there are “hundreds” of guitar overdubs on this album. Both started out in hardcore bands in the late ‘80s and formed Sunn O))) in 1998 but have played with dozens of other acts in multiple heavy genres, ranging from doom to death metal to traditional hard rock; Anderson co-founded the influential metal label Southern Lord. Their discographies combined span around two dozen different artist names (or collaborations) and nearly a hundred different releases.
While this album is certainly one of their best, it’s hard to say why the group’s moment seems to be happening now, after all these years (although an excellent New York Times profile a few weeks ago certainly helped). Maybe it’s just the state of the world — there’s so much ugly noise, whether from the president or some machine on the floor below you, that the only way to shut it out is with louder, beautiful noise.
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