A Seattle drone-metal band working since 1998: ultra-slow, ultra-heavy guitar drone at overwhelming volume, filed at the edge of the archive for its drone lineage and its work with Merzbow and Nurse With Wound.
Sunn O))) is the American drone-metal band formed in Seattle in 1998 around the core duo of Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, and the Bureau files it at Tier II, at the edge of the archive, on the strength of its drone lineage and its direct ties to the noise and experimental traditions documented here. The name is pronounced simply "sun", after the amplifier brand whose logo the band adopted, and everything about the project follows from a commitment to volume, density and weight.
The sound is drone reduced to its heaviest essentials: extremely slow tempos, heavily distorted and very low-tuned guitars, an avoidance of rhythm and melody, and a physical, overwhelming volume in performance. It descends as much from drone-minimalism as from doom and metal, and it is openly built on the innovations of the Seattle pioneers Earth, with a track on the debut named in honour of Earth's Dylan Carlson. The early records, The Grimmrobe Demos (1999) and ØØ Void, established the template; most of the catalogue since has appeared on Anderson's Southern Lord label.
What makes Sunn O))) belong in this archive rather than merely adjacent to it is the company they keep. Their second album, Flight of the Behemoth (2002), carries two collaborations with Merzbow, the clearest single bridge between the band and the Japanese-noise tradition. A few years later The Iron Soul of Nothing, a full collaboration with Nurse With Wound, reworked the ØØ Void material and tied the band to the British experimental lineage and to Steven Stapleton. Around those sit a vast collaborative roster, Boris on Altar, Scott Walker on Soused, Ulver, the black-metal vocalist Attila Csihar, the jazz trombonist Julian Priester and John Wiese among many others.
Live, the band performs robed and hooded with the stage lost in fog, at a volume meant to be felt in the body, a ritual rather than a rock show, and it is this aspect as much as the records that carried Sunn O))) far beyond the metal audience into the worlds of contemporary composition, minimalism and sound art. O'Malley's own Ideologic Organ label has extended that reach further.
A note on scope is owed. Sunn O))) is a metal band, and lies at the edge of this archive's industrial-noise-and-avant-garde remit rather than at its centre. The Bureau files it at Tier II not as a core industrial act but as the heaviest outpost of the drone tradition and a genuine collaborator with the noise and experimental figures this archive is built on, Merzbow and Nurse With Wound chief among them.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene