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Rating: EXHUMING THE MIND
It's been a while... summer throws its chaotic mix of heat and cold, randomly, and I, shuffled between a summer job as a postman, concert organizing, and the usual, overwhelming lethargy that has always tamed my spirit, wait in front of the screen and the keyboard for the day to bring advice, especially since it’s Ferragosto, and no one knows what the hell to do despite being in Ravenna, which has been newly crowned by local and non-local tabloids no less than the "new frontier of seaside fun for the year 2005!"... Well, in the meantime they've banned beach fires, law enforcement has practically doubled, and the alert level has significantly risen.
Caught in such expected concerns, I find myself here surfing the internet, bidding on eBay, and why not, writing this my -first-review...
I was saying, it's been some time since that historic Sunday in March, where I and a scant handful of friends had the honor of attending one of the various live APPARITIONS of SUNNO)))!
SUNNO))), for the record, is basically a guitar duo, formed by Steven O'Malley and Greg Anderson around 1998. These two characters had already been more than active in the underground scene for years, the first as a reviewer-founder of the extreme-doom-black sector 'zine DESCENT, as well as the guitarist of the now-defunct BURNING WITCH, while the latter dabbled with a post-Melvins sound first in ENGINE KID, then maximizing it with GOATSNAKE (and I highly recommend all these groups, although I acknowledge the difficulty in finding the original material...).
Anyway, suffice to know that after founding the stoner-doom label SOUTHERN LORD together, both O'Malley and Anderson thought it wise to further deepen the very unusual musical path they had embarked on and renamed themselves SUNNO))), in homage to their amps (the same as Jimi Hendrix, to be clear), and the dreamy-obsessive drone sound of their godfathers, the seminal EARTH of Dylan Carlson!
In short... I've felt the PHYSICAL need for some time to experience a live show of this type because I was quite frightened to see pictures scattered on the web of their live set, with 6-8 Sunn heads and matching cabinets at their maximum power... I wondered: "Damn, why must these nuts pile up so much stuff to play??!! Shit, this is crazy!!", and my friends Davide, Paolo, and Dubbo asked themselves the same question....
So Friday, March 18th, we embarked on Ravenna-Brennero-Innsbruck-Munich-Nuremberg, with a bit of ganja in tow, two backpacks, and immense curiosity... we find a place at "Let'm Sleep", a friendly B&B a stone’s throw from the station where you could even cook pasta and whatever the hell you wanted, as long as you washed the dishes afterward, lest you be violently assaulted by the reception lady, a chubby, pimply Deutsch girl, and after unloading our bags we head towards the city center searching for the K4.
To our surprise, we find it adjacent to the station, and realize that it’s even a cultural center with a theater... when we enter, we realize the building hosts many diverse things, including two bars, one more upscale-where we, as good Italians, had an aperitif-, and the K4.
Great... we read SUNNO)) + Boris at 9:30 PM Sunday 20/3, etc... confirmed? YES, great!!!
Awesome!!! Now we can explore the city in peace.
Nuremberg ROCKS... it's part Bavarian and part Saxon at the same time, it's 100% German, and the locals all speak English, they’re friendly enough that if you hear them speak among themselves, you almost grasp the sense of their conversations... beer costs 2 Euros and with 4-5 Euros, you can fill up on bread and SALSICCIONES_WUberalles, with loads of mustard and ketchup! YAAAAe mit krauten und kartoffen, better!!!
And so, stuffed and jovial, we wait... we wait... slowly, because that's how it should be... in the evening a tour up to the Nuremberg Castle, mighty, nestled on the hill, and surrounded by a deep moat where you can walk, climb and descend... at night you understand little, the lights are soft and dim, and the high has now captured us. Night at "Lett'm Sleep".
Sunday arrives and at noon we gather everyone in the hostel's kitchen and make PASTA for everyone! People blown away by the ragù, cauldrons of stuff vanished into thin air, bellies full once again, this time according to our home recipes... we meet a group of Andalusian Spaniards, improvising like mad people scrambling between English, Italian and Spanish, and coining new linguistic expressions never contemplated again... we also try to convince/corrupt someone, particularly ALEX, an Australian artist touring Europe (his link is http://phob.qgl.org/bio.htm great site!!), to join us to see SunnO)), but he ends up finding a woman to amuse himself with and doesn’t come.
Another tour of Nuremberg, it's Sunday, and there's a market. There’s mass in the cathedral, and we take the chance to go in, a taste of what's to come soon.
The smell of burning incense makes me and my companions hungry, so we head back to the usual sausage stand, and devour a good dozen + beer in abundance since it doesn’t cost a damn thing!!
And in the afternoon a shocking surprise: the stash of friendly ganja is nearly depleted, and we, lost in foreign lands, have no idea how to solve this mess; we encounter a group of German punks with crests soaring and absurd faces, we ask, and they tell us the only hope is to try at the station, even though it's full of junkies and shady characters who, if you're lucky, will only rip you off for smoke.
In the evening we also take on this adventure... we descend into the station’s metro, and look around: 8 PM, shops closed, people coming and going down the escalators, shady individuals of every kind, even minors... we approach one, and he tells us he can get us some Dutch, only we need to wait for him to go to another metro stop; we tell him he's not going anywhere with our money... so he slips away... after a while, another approaches us, a skinny blond kid dressed like a wannabe rapper and offers to take us to a friend’s place nearby; there we would find what we were looking for. We start to walk, and in the meantime, he recommends local spots, including a place where, according to him, the girls dance on the floor while giving blowjobs to patrons... sounds good, and upon reaching the destination, he tells us, however, one person must go upstairs alone, and we have to wait; nothing doing, and arguing, we try to reach a compromise, but nothing... he tells us something like, "Oh, where would I run off to??You just wait down here, it’s the only entrance... what are you afraid of?? It’ll take me 5 minutes, etc...", he strings us along well and even squeezes 20 Euros out of us, then rings the bell and goes up... he never comes back down. After twenty minutes, patience collapses, and we start ringing bells at random, then dashing away into the night... running to the K4!! Damn, it's 9 PM!! The concert is about to open its doors!
We arrive in time, dripping with sweat, buy the tickets, and fill up on merchandise: there’s the O'Malley/Anderson duo at the booth, with a couple of Japanese: the merch is insane, Sunn vinyls and Ginnungagap (O'Malley drone project), John Wiese, and the Peel Session which like a damn fool I didn’t buy (now selling on eBay for about $100...), Boris records and T-shirts designed by FAngsAnalSatan, etc...
Still, an hour to go before the concert starts, we are told... so, we split up: Davide and I go to the B&B, not far away, to drop off everyone's "purchases", while Dubbo and Paolo go another round searching for the lost ganja (of which we still kept 2-3 joints safely...). Appointment at the K4, 10 PM, opening act of the supporting band: the BORIS.
The venue isn’t very big, more resembles a provincial bar, the kind with rotting barrels piled in the corners, and also somewhat cramped... we step in and in front of us looms an impressive stage covering 1/3 of the venue; the bar is sunk into the right side. Among the patrons, you spot Melvins T-shirts -rightly so- of Burning Witch, black metal bands, and so on, but also patches of God Is My Co-pilot, and Mono, and various faces, even some cute girls, WOW! A wall of sound rises at a certain point, and three Japanese emerge...
ORANGE amps and heads for guitarist Wata, the best stoner-noise guitar I've seen; another guy holds a double-neck guitar and messes with a range of absurd and deafening home-made pedals, and the highlight is the drummer, a fanatic with a gong behind him... An excellent support act, indeed a band that could easily fulfill the role of headliner, the Boris!!!! Their psych-avant-drone, slow and dampened, explodes sometimes into saturation stoner-heavy-cosmic rock, and the drummer screams and growls like a madman, tearing into the skins, to then throw the whole piece in the air, with the tombstone sound of the gong... not sure exactly what pieces they played -but who the hell cares, fundamentally- also since I listened to the two Boris CDs a little later in the following months, and hearing them on record is a different thing...
At a certain point, I find O'Malley next to me taking photos, I shake his hand and say: "What a fuckin' mess, man!!", he makes a strange face and returns to his affairs... the Japanese friends amuse themselves for a good ¾ of an hour, ending with an unspeakable mess of sulfuric drones, the guy with the double-neck goes crazy - like Makoto from Acid Mothers Temple- and Wata is too HOT!!!
The applause gives way to harvest time, so everyone, us included, already trusts in the evening’s good outcome and begins to toast with beer and wine!!! The air becomes more and more ripe, we move towards the stage, fearing getting stuck in the back where you’d see about zero... the wait becomes nerve-wracking, and as Davide goes to the bar to get more beer for all, O'Malley steps on stage to tune -or untune if you prefer- his splendid black-gray ash LesPaul; he connects a couple of amps and respective Sunn-heads and sends a deep note, loops it endlessly and stealthily leaves... for a good quarter of an hour the note remained in the air in the venue starting to resonate among those present, increasingly afflicted by the band's prolonged absence on stage, and increasingly pressed towards the stage, as if it were a primordial magnet inexorably attracting everything to itself... at one point I felt so uncomfortable with that haunting sound buzzing in my brain, that I was on the verge of giving up, thinking: "Shit... but if just one note devastates me so much... how can I face an hour of BBBBBBRRRRRRRRR!!!!!", and just when my mind was starting to detach from my body... there they are, emerging from behind the crowd, making their way to the stage amid the audience's deference...
Greg Anderson arrives first, white tunic Gandalf the White style, (O)) logo in gold on the chest, carrying an offering plate with about twenty church candles, which he places beside two speakers... then grabs a glass of red wine, sipping it as he moves towards the Sunn wall, where his maestro-drone guitar leans (another powerful LesPaul, this one fully gilded!); followed by O'Malley, red tunic like a disciple, eyes concealed by the hood, and the other 2 members, responsible for giving even more BODY to the sound itself.... one (Rex Ritter, already with Jessamine and Fontanelle - black tunic) busy with a moog, set up on stage like a pulpit for an oration, while the other is behind a table fully covered with pedals and other home-made analog contraptions of unknown shape and age (and I would discover later that it was John Wiese, mind of Man is The Bastard/Bastard Noise, and owner of Helicopter Records, an authentic crazy-person - ragged tunic like a plebeian with a red hood..). The sonic tide rises, and our neurons begin to ENJOY!!!! What followed shortly, I could narrate in a thousand different ways for thousands of years without ever grasping the deep core: in short -FINALLY!- I can assert that no music was ever conceived and performed with such religiosity... perhaps Mozart's Requiem, but we're not in the strictly "metal" realm... maybe a sacred mass in Canterbury in Stuart times, but no organ existed capable of pronouncing notes so low and doleful... maybe an Indian mantra, but they were far from the Himalayan majesties, even if what came out of that wall of amps almost teleported you there, like a dark travel spell...
I turn to the others, everyone has bulging eyes, there’s already someone in a panic making trips in and out, clutching their stomach... I look at my friends with the most glassy and wild-eyed look in the world, only to recognize nothing else in their stare but my own; finally Paolo rolls the penultimate joint, which delivers the coup de grace to all four of us, right there next to the gallows... Anderson and O'Malley keep looking at each other, repeating the same notes, as if a sorcerer were giving lessons to his disciple... one nods and bows his head, the other focuses on the dense undulations forming, almost as if ethereal presences had materialized beside us all!!!
At one point I raise my hands to the sky and thank I don't know who for having earplugs, which incidentally were handed out at the entrance for free... Paolo and Dubbo bravely go without them... crazy...
There’s no rest, everything extends for an hour and a quarter in a single, almost unbearable monolithic suite, perfectly amalgamating some pieces I already knew and manage to resurrect in this sonic mayhem: "NN)))" from 00void, "Hell-O))-Ween" from the fantastic White2, and I am told afterward, even a Bathory cover-obviously unrecognizable to me...
The rest is a damn, endless slab of pure murderous heaviness, an immense sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, seriously instilling fear regarding our post-concert mental fate... in fact, looking around we notice that half the audience has disappeared, and stepping out for a moment, I peek outside and see many outside the K4 panting and wandering the hall with scared and wan expressions... "damn!" I think "the Sunn have sucked the vital essence from all these beings... what will become of me??", and summoning courage I re-enter the dark lair from which I had emerged....
Returning to the stage, I catch someone with a Melvins shirt smirking... "all the same, these Melvins fans!" I think... meanwhile I count the survivors (about 15-20 people, reduced to a larval stage...), while on stage a FUCKING VOLCANIC ERUPTION seriously begins to unleash: the magical duo's guitars are offered to the sky, like a beastly Eucharist; the moog, and effects reinforce the already excessive dose of sonic wind, and powerfully all the Sunn heads are cranked to their maximum, making all our bodies vibrate in one last, definitive breath, which nearly bends us in half... and then, SCHHHHHHHHHHHHH... O'Malley pulls the plug! And silence falls on us all, sweet, honeyed CALM which we missed so sorely, HERE YOU ARE!! And with such a new, unexpected aroma!!! How delightful... it took us a good 10 minutes to make the first step towards the exit...
Like zombies, we go to honor the band seeking autographs and photos... they don’t seem exhausted at all, indeed they appear almost revitalized, unlike me who feels regressed to monkey stage... I can scarcely utter a word, and the only question I manage to ask O'Malley is the one I already posed at the start of this whole Odyssey: "Why so much stuff? and why such an outrageous sound??". And you know how he replied???
He goes: "...why not?!"
Meow.
ps: if you made it to read this far, know that the slowness and peremptoriness of this review were, I would say, EXPECTED... these are the same prerogatives of the SunnO)) sound, and I didn’t feel like doing otherwise... I hope you enjoyed it, also because it took me something like 4 HOURS to write it!!
Finally, if you want, write to my email for more info, for PHOTOS of the concert itself, to swap discs...
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