Sunn O)))
Life Metal

What's that siren?

Is it coming from your phone?

That's my mother's comment while I listen to the latest Sunn O))) album, slumped on the couch in a comatose state. And unintentionally, dear mom grasped what I believe is the most interesting trait of this music.

In its more established forms, the song form seems to make sense not because it actually does, but as a "mathematical" structure that plays on variations and repetitions. It's a deception given by habit.

Stuff like that of Sunn seems pointless, boring, murky, but only because it allows itself to brazenly and irreverently stretch the most consolidated forms of music. Reiterations of notes that go far beyond the "allowed," variations that are not much appreciated due to their extreme dilation, and the haze that blurs the scene, makes the notes barely distinguishable, immerses them in a viscous noise. But what is noise? Aren't these perhaps other notes, just not coded?

Well, besides the intellectual (and self-serving) enjoyment of these listens, there is real, tangible pleasure. A mental pleasure that develops along with the wandering of the music. It's as if the thought, our "background" cerebral activity, follows the progression of the music. And where the music is rigorous, the thought is caged, follows the tracks. Here the music derails, and so does the thought. And sweet is the wreck in this sea.

Brainwaves cling to the few niches of sense on a wall of dizzying horror, almost horror vacui. And it is our task to fill that frightening void with the richness of our unconscious, and at the same time discover that this senselessness actually has a full sense, we just don't know its "grammar" well yet.

This applies in general to Sunn, I'm not an expert and I only listen to them occasionally as a mental experience. I've listened to this new album only once and immediately loved it because it's less ostentatiously dark, like the beautiful Monoliths & Dimensions, but more exquisitely abstract, dense, with sound glimmers and symphonic turns. Distortions that roaringly unfurl but also smooth, turn, go back, and then start again. The sound is a thick magma, impenetrable, yet luminous.

Recorded and mixed in analog by Steve Albini.