As ascending to heaven has clouds, descending into hell has smoke.
The space started filling with this humid dense smoke as Sunn O))) appeared on stage, four tunics hiding mysterious rites yet to be summoned. The Devil’s chamber music was about to be experienced by a full venue in Kreuzberg.
The roaring started after the dark souls in the crowd stop yelling to welcome the musicians.
A vibrating wall of amplifiers can be seen behind the tunics before the distorted mantras started playing. The stage could hardly be seen, just a big wall of white puffy clouds full of red and blue colors were seen trough the concert.
Sunn O)))’s music is a great hundred metre wave of lava chasing your soul. It trembles under your feet as if the world was gonna break apart beneath you but this never happens – the pushing and roaring stays, chasing your thoughts. For one hour and a half the ritual went through.
The venue started to get hot, the never-ending pulsating sounds combined with the mystery kept on stage behind the clouds of smoke brought tension to the scene. The venue got hotter, the sweating increased as the wall of noisy roars kept its pace, steady, slow, deep, dark and scary.
Immersed in the lava sea of a star, you can only listen to an O))), a never ending O))) that makes think in the why and the how of this sounds.
Why are they creating this “music”? How did they manage to achieve this sound? Every possible outcome for this questions came to my mind while under the lava – and all of them seem more amazing than the other one.
Sunn O)))’s music is a great hundred metre wave of lava chasing your soul
To break the standards in so many ways is not only intriguing but brave. Their music and their presentations is clearly a manifesto about what they think music is, is a treaty on waves and guitars and amplifiers.
As I sit through this amazingly tough experience, I can’t help but think that I’ve never, ever experienced something quite like it. Never I have heard this sound for this long – these tempos, these sounds come from a place not yet studied.
To say Sunn O))) is Drone as genre is to try to describe an indescribable experience.
As the concert finished, relief was found, but the feeling remained in me for hours, as if I had been given the disease. Silence was never so silent and unsettling, I heard the guitars roar again, taking me back to this lava sea, where waves summon beasts which speak languages never meant to be heard by humans.
