Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson strive for nothing less than a non-reactionary rapprochement with rock’n’roll following the decline of pure electronic music
By JENS BALZER

Ba-dumm ba-dumm; that is how this record begins; rumple-di-pumple; chrswssskr- krskrskrssssss. For five minutes, only a bass drum rumbles along quietly, threateningly. It is like a laptop someone has forgotten in a humid rehearsal room and now, in an endless self-check-up routine, calls, bum-ba-dumm, its home base: Can no one hear me? Will no one relieve me with a harmony, a melody or a rhythm? But the laptop finds reprieve only in a meltdown. Soon, from separated stereo channels, flurries of little sound snippets are swirling around – encircling the instrument for a while, still thirsty, then swarming and, cursing, fatally falling. The bass drum finally stops and the entire spectrum of sound bursts over the surface of technical reproduction. Silence.

The Shape of Rock to Come – the title not exactly modestly alluding to Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking free jazz work, The Shape of Jazz to Come – is the album on which the Norwegian rock’n’roller and electronics-tinkerer Lasse Marhaug came up with a historically conciliatory phenomenology of rock’n’roll and industrial noise. From the old conventional American rock-noise, originating from electronic feedback and the abuse of string instruments (archetypically celebrated in Lou Reed’s 1975 double album Metal Machine Music), Marhaug works toward the machine-generated sounds of early European industrial music; and beyond to the rather sonically harmless, thumping sequencer beats following the line from the experimental noise-chaos of the industrial music of the mid-’80s to the marching beat of Eeectronic body music and, in turn, from this to techno and gabba. The final track of the album then returns to salute guitar music. Here, variations are made on a guitar riff from Snorre W. Ruch, one of the black metal guitarists most beloved by Satan worshippers, who had launched his career in Burzum, the band formed by church arsonist Varg Vikernes. Marhaug is an exemplary musician of the new noise avant-garde currently reigning on European stages.

Noise reconciles pure and abstract intensity and embraces all the divergent schools of para-, non- or anti-musical generations of sound that have existed alongside each other without notice over decades. Analog and digitally produced music; jazz and minimal electronics; the free and programmed playing styles of noise-oriented music; industrial, with its interest in bodily pain, and the euphorically uninhibited techno; the Satanic music of heavy metal dating back to Black Widow and Black Sabbath, and the drone rock originating with Terry Riley and The Velvet Underground, deriving its spiritual power from Zen Buddhism. In a sudden and wonderful historical simultaneity, they have recognized what there is in common and have determined to play together.

Hardcore Electronica musicians and Breakcore DJs like Jason Forrest drive the metal out of metal; the new psychedelia/freakout scene with bands like Animal Collective, Black Dice, and Wolf Eyes combine the looseness of hippies past with the aggressive audial approach of industrial; the Californian duo Sunn0))) run the rawness of black guitar noise through the most varied of electronic manipulations and re-reduces it to a ritual minimalism. Sunn0))) are undoubtedly the most intelligent, most extreme, and – in the vein of older rock’n’roll traditions – the most historically referential band in the field of the new noise. Their aural and conceptual innovations reach far and beyond the field of the avant-garde. Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson strive for nothing less than a non-reactionary rapprochement with rock’n’roll following the decline of pure electronic music – as opposed to retro, electro-pop bands like Franz Ferdinand. Unlike them, Sunn0))) have used the electronic means of production of newer pop not to increase their music’s danceability but to increase its musical intensity – and for a driving abstraction from its own roots. O’Malley and Anderson compose their music out of ostinatos, bass guitar feedback loops and out of the electronically manipulated and looped bass amplifier feedback in the three-figure Hertz region. Their concerts are Satanic worship services that – clearly poking fun at the fantastic iconography of b black metal – are nevertheless not aimed at any particular devil but rather at the devilishly unconquerable power of pure noise. On their record covers and T-shirts and in the staging of their shows, they quote the sexually hung up sacred kitsch of older “hard” music – but only to expose the high modernist core of this false sacredness: the ritual subjugation to noise itself.

Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson always step out onto the stage dressed in a sort of combo of burka, cardinal’s robes. or Ku Klux Klan outfits: two priests of noise with curly beards looming in front of amplifiers stacked mountain-high, crouching before an altar and conjuring feedback for hours, undistracted and melody-free. It is a meditative music that, despite its brutal onslaught against the ears, is exquisitely tender. This derives from the consistent slow-motion movements of the musicians, their hands moving over the guitar strings; a wonderful feedback duet in which, manipulated by two remix assistants on laptops, Moog and an effects machine, the seemingly same sounds of resonance slowly decay again and again until the most interesting, though physically least comfortable incompatibilities emerge. They pulsate against each other; again and again, messianically relieved by a high-frequency screech beaming from the stage to the sky. You won’t find such meditative and gentle noise anywhere else in the world; a ritual consecration of pure noise that – as one can see at Sunn0)))’s concerts unite the most varied of audiences. Black metal freaks with Burzum jackets, long-haired post-hippies and electronica nerds all happily allow themselves to be droned; a wonderful image of harmony and peace. While the metal freaks sway back and forth offering their Satanic compliments, the hippies uninhibitedly shake their breasts and hair; the electronica nerds stare silently.

But even if the upper bodies move at the most diverse speeds, the feet are forever paralyzed in the tenacious mud of noise rising from the floor; and while a soft, tiny tinnitus slowly eats its way through the back of the brain, the rest of the body is drawn closer and closer to the stage by the pull of the bass. Never could such abstract music be experienced so immediately. The rest of the world will spend a long time catching up to the impossible musical synthesis of Sunn0))).