Cold metal for the long winter, by Kurt Gottschalk

Sunn O))) – Pyroclasts (Southern Lord)

LIke Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere – Sacred Quietus (Zazen Sounds)

Every so often, a band comes along the greatness of which is beyond its own measure, a band that stands as a gateway to discovery. Miles Davis’s groups, the Yardbirds, the various incarnations of Acid Mothers Temple, all lead to multiple – and sometimes greater – rewards through their various side projects and membership changes.

The mighty Sunn O))) is another such iceberg. Not only one of the best downtempo doom bands around, they serve as a guide through the darkness by way of their collaborations and, notably, the roster found on Southern Lord, the label founded by Sunn O))) guitarist Greg Anderson. He and Sunn O))) co-conspirator Stephen O’Malley are responsible for untold gallons of worthy audio sludge. 

At their best, Sunn O))) music is like an orchestration of feedback, waves arranged into something somewhat like structure. This year’s Life Metal (their eighth release) showed them at their stripped-down best. After four years without a studio album, they’ve issued a second missive from the void this year with Pyroclasts. And where Life Metal was sort of slow variations on a grind, the new album is almost meditative, if still highly charged. 

Pyroclasts was born of ritual during the recording of Metal Life. The band began and ended their sessions recording the new tracks with improvised drones to facilitate the immersion. Those improvisations became a framework for the album and, in fact, a playlist with alternating tracks from each of the records might be the best way to listen to them. Both were recorded by producer Steve Albini and sound beautiful, if you’re not scared of the dark. 

If Sunn O))) is the tip of the iceberg, the Spanish project Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere existed somewhere deep below the frozen surface of the water. CG Santos, the band’s sole member, has been focusing on other projects in recent years, but through the Greek label Zazen Sounds has released an unearthed 2010 session of gorgeously atmospheric stillness. Santos manages to take all the rock out of his music while retaining the metal. The music has more in common with a Morton Feldman composition, or a John Carpenter score, or a record by the longstanding British free improv group AMM, than it does anything in the wake of the mighty Black Sabbath, but it retains the electricity and the fatalism of the best heavy metal. It was a remarkable project and, although seemingly over, is fortunately easily heard. All two dozen of Santos’ LDRTFS records, as well as more than three dozen Sunn O))) albums, are streaming in full on Bandcamp, which should be enough for the long winter ahead.

Share:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Comments are closed.

READ OUR FULL PRINT EDITION

Our Sister Publication

a word from our sponsors!

Latest Media Guide!

Where to find the Star-Revue

Instagram

How many have visited our site?

wordpress hit counter

Social Media

Most Popular

On Key

Related Posts

Film: “Union” documents SI union organizers vs. Amazon, by Dante A. Ciampaglia

Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten

An ode to the bar at the edge of the world, review by Oscar Fock

It smells like harbor, I thought as I walked out to the end of the pier to which the barge now known as the Waterfront Museum was docked. Unmistakable were they, even for someone like me — maybe particularly for someone like me, who’s always lived far enough from the ocean to never get used to its sensory impressions, but

Quinn on Books: In Search of Lost Time

Review of “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance,” by Kevin Brown Review by Michael Quinn “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” – Countée Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” Come Thanksgiving, thoughts naturally turn to family and the communities that shape us. Kevin Brown’s “Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance” is a collection

MUSIC: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Mothers of reinvention. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” according to writer George Eliot, who spoke from experience. Born in the UK in 1819, Mary Ann Evans found her audience using the masculine pen name in order to avoid the scrutiny of the patriarchal literati. Reinvention, of style if not self, is in the air