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Sunn0))): Monoliths & dimensions
09/07/09 || Khlysty
Yep, it’s the time of the year again, when the dynamic duo of despicable, destitute drone is back, carrying with it a fuckload of contributors, friends, foes and anyone who happened to be within a radius of one mile from the studio, when “Monoliths & Dimensions” was being laid to tape, to spread happiness and merriment to the great unwashed. Yes, Sunn’s back and this time around they are spicing their trademark droning tectonic plates of sound with a couple of twists and turns that will either: a) make you shit from spaced out bliss, or b) make you froth in the mouth and curse them for all eternity.
I know that Anderson and O’Malley’s previous works have been generally polarizing within the metal community, with lots of people lauding them with praise for incalculable heavitude and unwavering experimentation within a framework that seemed more constricted than an S&M aficionado’s corset; and others calling them pretentious and one-trick-ponies and blasphemers of the holiest of the metal holies. Me, I like their work, fuck you very much, whether they’re slavishly aping Earth’s seminal drone-athons, or moving towards bizarre reconfigurations of drone/doom, as they did in their “White” and “Black” records.
Now, with “Monoliths & Dimensions” (a virtual E.P. by these guys’ standards, clocking under 54 minutes…) the boys further explore the possibilities of their sound, combining guitar-and-bass-created drones with keyboards, chorals (!), horns, female vocalisings, lots of Attila Csihar’s deep, rumbling belchings and a shitload of other things, that make the music even more unapproachable, but, at the same time, more melodic and atmospheric than usual. And it’s exactly this bipolarity that makes the record more interesting than one would normally expect from Sunn.
I’ve been hearing a lot of name-checking following this record like a shit-cloud: from LaMonte Young to Krzysztof Penderecki and from Earth v. 2.0 to Miles Davies (this probably due to the first song of the record, “Agartha”, name-checking the 1975 Davies’ work of the same name. Go figure…). To clear things up a little bit, yes, there’s a certain experimentation with tonalities and textures here, more than in any other Sunn album, and the boys themselves have been throwing around such names as important influences, but to go the whole way and call this directly influenced by the above artists is a pretty fucking big logical step and I won’t buy it.
Instead, I’ll tell you that, while retaining their basic subterranean droning power, Sunn move towards a more experimental vein, adding to their basic m.o. elements from classical music, minimalism, noise, americana and world religious music (Csihar’s incantative mode of performing vocals clearly refers to Bhutan or Tibet monkish chants). Also, the production is clearer than that of past efforts, giving breathing space to all the instruments, instead of burying the details under millions of fathoms of amp-generated buzz and crackle.
So, is this a departure of sorts for Sunn? Well, no. See, after their iconic first record (“The Grimm Robe Demos”), the band started slowly moving away from Earth’s gravitational drone-power, adding elements of noise, ambient, avant-garde, psychedelia, even black metal, to reconfigure their music into something more intricate than, you know, downtuning a guitar, plugging it into a stack of amps and stretching power-chords into infinity. “Monoliths & Dimensions” continues this evolutionary path and is a great addition to an already impressive oeuvre. So, fuck the pretentiousness accusations, fuck the obsolete name-checking, fuck the cries of “sell-out” and enjoy “Monoliths & Dimensions” for what it is: a really cool record, that expands the scope of what drone/doom can be.
8,5 tonally fucked-up drones out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Southern Lord
- Website: www.ideologic.org
- Band
- Greg Anderson: guitar, bass
- Stephen O’Malley: guitar
- Attila Csihar: vocals
- Oren Ambarchi: guitar, oscillator, effects, gong, wolf log, motorized cymbal
- A shitload of other musicians, vocalists, choruses and whatnot…
- Tracklist
- 01. Agartha
- 02. Big church
- 03. Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)
- 04. Alice
