Sunn O)))
Black One

The paradoxical feat of Sunn O))) is to have subverted the common concept of extreme. That concept, in fact, especially in the metal field, is usually associated with speed of execution, which, evidently, does not apply to our artists, who seek and find the concept of extreme at the antipodes of all that, namely in the most absolute staticity.

Post doom, avant metal, power ambient, trance drones music, call them whatever the hell you want, the substance remains that we are faced with something truly annihilating, so much so that the doubt arises whether it's anything other than a loud joke. A doubt, moreover, that arises every time we are faced with immense monstrosities capable of pushing the boundaries of the extreme. Just recall the reactions of disgust and mockery that followed the release of Napalm Death's seminal "Scum".

The idea of guitarists Anderson and O'Malley is to push to the extreme the intuition of Earth, which is to isolate and exaggerate to the extreme the funeral riffs of Black Sabbath, stripping them of the drums, voice, and song format. What emerges is a journey into the blackest anguish and despair, a slow ritual marked by the elephantine step of monotonous and obsessive guitar loops, which drag on solo for tens and tens of minutes, until they finally dissolve and collapse in the annoying buzz of an environmental catharsis. A true essay aimed at investigating the void, the sense of the abyss, written with the deadly language of insupportable walls of guitar and funeral rivers of feedback. An alienating and excessive music, capable of taking on metaphysical connotations, precisely because it can question the concepts of space and time.

Over the years, let's say freely, the Sunn O))) game has revealed itself in its disarming simplicity. Having laid the foundation of their sound with the monolithic "Zero Zero Void" (also reiterating what Earth had already said in the seminal "Earth 2", which I highly recommend), they find a follow-up to their debut first by resorting to Merzbow's noise experimentalism ("The Flight of the Behemoth"), then to the mystical narratives of Julian Cope ("White 1"), finally to the apocalyptic visions of the great Attila Csihar ("White 2").

With this "Black One" they turn to the icy atmospheres of Norwegian black metal, and whatever direction they may want to take in the future (I haven’t had the displeasure yet of listening to the latest "Altar", released in these days), Anderson and O'Malley will just have to jot down two riffs and choose the guest who will make the difference. The combinations between their drumless doom (a brutal but effective denomination) and the superstructure chosen each time are potentially endless and lend themselves to multiple evolutionary pathways: from jazz to classical music, from ethnic to electronic to smooth, to the mazurka and practically anything else.

So these Sunn O))) are not geniuses, they haven’t invented anything new and, if you think about it, they are also crafty. But their work must be judged for what it is, that is, a process of transfiguration of other genres, working on what others have done, an act that has the same meaning as taking a barrel full of black mire and dumping it on a chick. And precisely for their intransigence, for their rigor, and for being flashy and excessive in everything and everything that we like them so much. It's unclear for what insane reason, but it is so. What can we do if we are masochistic fools?

As we were saying, "Black One" sounds like an explicit tribute to Norwegian black metal, and with it, our musicians aim to elevate the typical intensity of this genre to the abstract dimension of drones music. With results, it must be said, in no way inferior, in terms of intransigence and wickedness, to those of their pounding colleagues. It is our darkest work, but we shouldn't be overly scared, as paradoxically, either due to the duration of the tracks, which is generally resized, or due to the vocal element, more present than in the past, the listening gains in variety and fluidity (if it's appropriate to speak of variety and fluidity in such a context).

There are also some novelties and pleasant surprises. "It Took the Night to Believe", for instance, features a buzzing riff in true Norwegian style, while further on we will run into an unrecognizable cover of "Cursed Realms (of the Winterdemons)" by Immortal (from "Battles in the North"), which under the Sunn O))) treatment becomes ten minutes of desperate screams, guitar swells, and insane noise-making. With "Candle Goat", they invoke Dead himself, reworking the opening verse of "Freezing Moon". But in my opinion, the best episodes are those where Sunn O))) decide to be Sunn O))), like in "Ortodox Caveman" and "Cry for the Weeper", massive blocks of uncompromising black doom.

Animated by the grating and disturbing voices of Wrest and Malefic (from Xasthur), which in the concluding and intense "Bathory Erzsébet" (something that comes very close to Burzum's works - a Burzum on acid, to be precise) they even lock themselves in a coffin (this is the tale) to add an extra touch of claustrophobia. As if it were needed...

Sure, there is some frustration in listening, every now and then one thinks "damn, give me a four-four!", but this four-four is already known, it will never start, and perhaps this is precisely the beauty of Sunn O))): if that damned four-four started, in a certain way we would feel more satisfied, but at the same time we would feel sad because we would have the awareness of facing nothing more than a dozen doom band. For this reason, we just have to resign ourselves to our fate and heed what the back cover suggests, which is to turn the volume up to the maximum. Only by stunning our neurons in this way will we be able to transcend reality and achieve happiness.

Amen.