The Roots of Sunn O)))
Is their Sub Pop debut music for Benadryl Eaters or the future of music?
Granted: When I was 14, I heard an ad on the radio promising me a rock and roll machine.
It was a lie, of course, a horrible shitty lie, but it planted a seed in my mind, a seed-dream of some kind of eternal chord, a perfect harmonic harmonium electric ecstatic blue/red/black blur (with a little yellow around the edges), which would sound like the sunrise, which would sound like the sin-less sin of those who knew only dawns but did not yet know sin, which would sound like the black and white and gray clouds rolling fast over low-lands before a catastrophic storm, which would sound like the ageless ghost in a fog I once saw from my bedroom window strolling down a suburban street; it would be the Shambhala Hum louder than the upper deck shaking at Shea, only it would go on and on and not just stop once Dave Kingman touched home, it would be louder than the noise the full moon made when I stared at it fish-belly blue in the sky, it would be louder than laughing gas plus drill in the Mainstreet Flushing dentist office. Why would they lie and say they had a Rock and Roll Machine when it was so easy to make one?
Granted: When I was in my twenties, an era of payphones and the incomparable romance of pork buns inhaled behind steamed windows on Doyers Street, a friend and I conceived of a band called Sabbath Played Really Really Really Slow. And though it never became a reality, well, y’know, Sunn O))). And, yes, right around that time I did end up grinding ear-pepper in the satanic mill known as the Glenn Branca Ensemble, who were, y’know, like Sunn O))) with Tourette’s and an affection for screams as opposed to the happy blue sluice/roar of, uh, Sabbath Played Really Really Really Slow. Which is, I guess, a way of saying that Sunn O))) have always been in my dreams.
Granted: Sunn O))) (self-titled, yes) is a nearly great album from one of our greatest bands who would be even greater if they realized exactly who they were (not “a band,” but the legacy holders of Feldman and Adams and Cage and Wagner and Bruckner!!); but maybe they do know that? There are some hints, y’see, which I will address shortly. But just prima facie (an expression I have never used in 47 years of using too many semi-colons while writing about rock and pop, how about that?), Sunn O)))’s eponymous tenth studio album is, well, it’s music for Benadryl Eaters, and we ought to all be Benadryl Eaters, warum nicht? We need to stumble happily in a Makers Mark & Diphenhydramine haze, warm and spiky and seeking spikes, why not see the world squishy and sideways and wise and warm, alternately dragging our cushioned minds between Graceland’s mirrored playroom and Graceland’s shag-carpeted stairs – and AH, that’s what we have here, MUSIC FOR GRACELAND’S SHAG-CARPETED STAIRS. True fact, Granted: I have never felt more at home than I did when sealed into the weirdly narrow flight of Graceland’s shag carpeted stairs to the basement, I wept, this is a true fact, at the bottom of said stairs the mirrored playroom, yellow and black bee-colored but not fuzzy (though fuzzy was implied), imagine staring up at that mirrored ceiling in Graceland’s playland cellar through a Benadryl/Makers Mark salve-haze, salve-haze, salve-haze,
…and Granted: This is classical music, can we finally call it that? My god, of this I am certain, and must be treated as such. Let it unfold/unwrap/wrap around you; like some/much classical music you lose so much if you listen “a little” or only in little nibbles; you must listen a lot, abandon yourself to the whole experience, otherwise its’ just an “idea” or a “concept,” and true, that’s valid, but it’s not SENSATIONAL EMOTIONAL; I mean, you listen to 48 seconds of Wagner’s Vorspiel from Das Rheingold, and you “get” what he’s doing, okay, yeh, but unless you listen to the whole thing, maybe even the whole damn opera, you don’t GET the experience, you don’t get the EFFECT. See, friend, one Warhol Soup Can is, uh, “conceptual,” one hundred is THE IDEA; and I said there was a “clue,” and this is it: The cover art for Sunn O))) (the album) are two paintings by Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), an artist whose sobbing, soft/hard, fugue-migraine earth-moist color fields look a great deal like Sunn O))) sound; but, see, it’s not just the “look,” right? There’s a brilliant and legendary contemporary classical composition by Morton Feldman called Rothko Chapel; and Rothko Chapel (1971) is a spiritual and literal uncle to the engaged hums of Sunn O))); it sounds an awful lot like Sunn O))) if Sunn O))) used silence and SPACE as STONEHENGE the way Sunn O))) use Sabbath Really Really Really Slow as Stonehenge. Rothko Chapel is undersea the way Sunn O))) (the album) is a sky-river reflecting a Styx River (or, more aptly, “was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?” YES, says Sunn O))), and we shall transcribe it!!), yeh, and like Sunn O))) (the album), Rothko Chapel unfolds slowly, urgently but patiently, it demands the listener understand this is a bloody experience, not a song; and anyway, I suspect that this Rothko/Rothko thingy is not coincidental, okay? I think I’ve beaten that point to death, nicht was? In fact, I’m listening to Rothko Chapel right now, and it pretty much sounds exactly like Sunn O))) without sounding anything like Sunn O))), And —
Granted: Once Sunn O))) recognize, OWN, that they are making contemporary classical music, and not just music for Benadryl Eaters (though that’s okay, too), they can really get some magical work done. Honestly (and I write this both with the pointed tongue of an asinine music journalist and as a lover of the fact that Sunn O))) have fufilled the promise made to me half a century ago of a Rock and Roll Machine): Sunn O))) need to write a fucking opera. They need to take a cue from John Adams or Philip Glass or George Benjamin and write an opera; they need to accept their place, their office, as the true scion and legacy keepers of Richard Wagner, and work in the sensational, emotional, awed and awesome holy mountain long-form that their music has always implied…in fact, fellows (I am pretending, y’see, that Sunn O))) might actually read this crazy wisdom), why don’t you try adopting René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, or maybe The Autobiography of The Great Wisdom Queen Yeshé Tsogyal? Either would be perfect for your sky-burial Los Alamos churnscapes. And —
Granted: Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) was here first and arguably better; and I strongly – and that’s Strongly with an upper-case ESSSS – suggest that any and all of you who are even vaguely intrigued by Sunn O))) listen to the “Vorspiel” (in English, that’s Prelude) from Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, which was written in 1869. (I have made a helpful/asinine playlist.) “Vorspiel”is utterly and undeniably a proto-Sunn O))) song. I mean, Wagner did this sort of thing again and again – a seismic, almost purely sensory hummmm builds into great hallelujah cloud-stack roar of chords and harmonics with the melody emerging out of the borax steam of hell and the white opium fogs of heaven, made to conjure the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of earth and our obscene time on it; but “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold is, likely, the best example of this, it IS Sunn O))) but 124-years earlier…so fucking OWN IT, Sunn O))), and don’t just FAKE holy for Benadryl Eaters, but lead us into the promised land.
So, like, write an Opera.
Granted, an’ maybe this one’s just for context: I believe that Soused, the album Sunn O))) made with the bodhisattva/magician Scott Walker in 2014, is the best album of this century (I really actually do believe this); it is one of the very few recent pop/rock albums (a classification I use to distinguish it from classical, contemporary classical, or pure avant garde music) that equaled/honored the promise of similar achievements in the late 20th century, like PiL’s Metal Box/Second Edition, Pet Sounds, Sleep’s Dopesmoker, or Neu!’s first three albums (wow, what a line-up). Like, say, PiL’s Metal Box, Soused was true Art Rock; it did not merely put on the clothes or the dressing of “art rock” (loathsome ELP or those indecipherable King Crimson or Radiohead albums can do that!), but Soused actually tried to use rock and pop’s tool to create ART. More relevantly, it harnessed the power of Sunn O)))’s indescribably red, black, blue (an’ yellow at the edges) roar (perhaps best described as the sound of the 20-ton sarsen stones of Stonehenge being dragged over the rolling Wiltshire plain, imagine that sound!), and used it to frame a story, to frame tales of white-hot (and, again, blue) angst and guilt and ambition and sin and colonialism and godliness and godlessness, OUR ENTIRE POST-ROMAN WORLD TRANSCRIBED! Now, I am not advocating that Sunn O))) collaborate again with an established singer or lyricist — plus, there’s only one Scott Walker, no one, not even Bowie, came close to what he was manifesting in the last twenty five years of his creative life (Walker passed in 2019 – and we note that Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, was significantly influenced by late-period Walker, but my god that’s another story, isn’t it?); it’s just to say that, uh, some form of frame is good, even if it’s just an attitude, even if it’s just a determination to bring some angel wings out of the sky and into the Saracen-scarred land of the Wiltshire plain (imagine! Imagine the sound of the Saracen being dragged across the rolling lands of Wiltshire, the sounds of the men twisting and sweating and breaking under the ropes, the sounds of the women stirring the great iron cauldrons of mead and soup!! Sunn O)))!!! Sunn O)))!!!), which is to say, I like the idea that Sunn O))) may be listening to/studying Morton Feldman, in case ya didn’t get that point, which you probably didn’t;
Which is not at all to say that the new eponymous Sunn O))) album is dissolute or un-framed, though I will absolutely note that it doesn’t really begin to take effective shape until about 35 minutes in (with track 4, “Mindrolling”) and it reaches it’s real promise with the album’s final track, “Glory Black,” which breathes as well as gasps and wheezes, and invites SPACE in; it opens the door to the gift and grace of the emptiness inherent in the perfect drone conjured by Sunn O))); and there’s a piano on “Mindrolling” — now we’re really entering this into Feldman or Cage territory, or maybe even Ned Rorem — single notes, harmonic and dissonant, cast like sticks to tell a fortune, thrown in the shag-less hallway under the mirrored ceiling; and then the masterpiece reveals, space is their Palestine, not space is their Palestine, not space is not their Palestine, we punctured space with our flags and left us on earth staring skyward and basement-ward with mouthfuls of Benadryl and Makers Mark, and it makes me consider this, from the very opening of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
“The sea reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint…a haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark over Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and greatest town on earth.”
VIDEO: Sunn O))) “Eternity’s Pillars”
First of all, that’s a fairly great description of Sunn O))), and Sunn O))). Secondly, That “greatest town” is the promise of infinite rock ‘n’ roll, freed from the 11th-grade dreams of grasping under swEaters and first-caller contests and a generation who were taught that meaning had to be spelled out to them, as opposed to felt; my greatest town is the infinite machine I was promised and denied by Marlboro-voiced FM DJ’s selling Toto and Pollock-splattered toilets disguised as youth culture, hah, y’say y’see,
Tim has made a playlist to accompany this crazy wisdom. It features multiple versions of Wagner’s “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold with songs from future fellow travelers, like Sunn O))), Morton Feldman, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros and Daniela Mars. It is the Greatest Playlist of All Time.
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