Review: Sunn O))) ‘Eternity’s Pillars B/W Raise The Chalice & Reverential’
The first collaboration between drone legends Sunn O)))and the legendary Sub Pop Records, this three-track release sees Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley doing what they do more consistently and better than almost anyone else: heavy, shuddering drone doom saturated in fuzz and sonic reverberation.
The group’s recent releases have all been very experimental and collaborative, so to see Sunn O)))come back to their minimalist, devastating roots as disciples to the mighty Earth is quite the refreshing change of pace. Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise The Chalice & Reverential is out now as a 12″ maxi single from Sub Pop, and only Sunn O)))could get away with an over thirty minute release being called a single!
The suffocating opening drone of Eternity’s Pillars takes me straight back to Black One, a record that, alongside Earth 2, was my real entry into the world of drone and drone doom. Named for an obscure 1980s TV show where jazz musician and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda espoused her beliefs in the capacity of music to attain a spiritual transcendence, you can feel that ethos reverberating throughout this track. The guitar shimmers in an obsidian haze, undulating in heaviness as the inklings of a melody fizzles out into the miasma.
this is spiritual, this is hypnotising, this is pushing the limits of music itself…
This ascension of pressure, of constant growing tension, is something that Anderson and O’Malley have become masters of over the years, and this sonic experimentation has always been fascinating to me. How you can wring so much from such a minimalist approach to music constantly surprises me. Eternity’s Pillars is the longest of the three tracks, at thirteen minutes, but the roiling fuzz and slowly unfurling ‘tune’ never loses its mesmerising charm.
Raise The Chalice is next, and while of course more of the same is expected, Sunn O)))have always been able to make subtle changes to their sound to keep you focused. Raise The Chalice has a gloomier dive into the abyss, the shifts seem deeper and more urgent almost, if you can use urgent to describe Sunn O)))‘s sound at all. The droning riffs shift more frequently, the song is shorter, the pressure increases with the odd squall of feedback and towards the end, an insistent sound appears, hovering higher in the mix, like a light above the black. Reverential closes us out in a similar fashion, with its dense black gaze fixing upon fuzzy distortion and tectonic shifts in tone, a more consistently menacing tone that drags us deeper into the abyss.
A truly unrivalled band in terms of atmosphere building, Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise The Chalice & Reverential is a simple masterclass in how to create this genre with not only real darkness and intensity, but with nuance. Records like this should, for the layman, be boring and repetitive, but Anderson and O’Malley have transcended into a place where this is spiritual, this is hypnotising, this is pushing the limits of music itself. At some point, the Sunn O)))revolved around Earth, but now drone pioneers have moved onto new musical frontiers, the universe has been corrected, and the drone world now revolves around the Sunn O))).
Label: Sub Pop Records
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Sandy Williamson
