Sunn O)))

The release of Sunn O)))’s new album, Monoliths & Dimensions, is a great event in the drone-doom style, a style that has in this band it’s greatest (by far) representant. If the band’s initial releases focused on guitar and bass, with occasional noises, here, acoustic double basses, a few brass instruments and choir are incorporated to their sound. The expansion of Sunn O)))’s sonic palette is not exactly recent: on albums like White 1 and 2, they already started broadening their sound. Stephen O’Malley, perhaps the greatest mind in the drone-doom style, has been involved in a series of other projects as well, such as KTL, in which he created music with many electronic characteristics. All of this culminates in Sunn O)))’s most wide ranging album to date.

The curious thing, however, is: why did this music evolved this way? Why did it expand from it’s initial minimalism of guitar and bass to a much broader instrumentation, and not the other way around? Why did drone-doom start out minimal and then grew? I ask this question because Monoliths & Dimensions seems like SunnO)))’s most realised work to date, not to mention their most thoroughly composed and acessible (as far as it’s possible in this style of music), which made me think that this is where drone metal should have begun. What I mean is: most styles of music establish themselves and are then led to minimalism by the hands of a few bright minds. Why is it different with this particular style?

Tracing the style back to it’s roots, the most obvious band we’ll come across is Earth. In Earth, the drones are extremely minimal. If we accept Earth as the creators of drone-doom, then the style did start out in an extremely stripped-down fashion. But why?

If we were to backtrack as far as possible, I believe that all forms of heavy droning music can be traced back to one SONG: that’s Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath, from the album Black Sabbath. The fact that it is the first song on the album that many consider to be the first heavy metal album of all time is an argument that point towards the fact that maybe drone, doom, sludge and stoner metal (styles which can be traced back to this song) were the first styles of metal to emerge. The atmosphere of impending doom created by the band on that song was miles away from the direction metal took in it’s initial stages, and it would be at least 10 years before another band took a similar aproach to heavy metal. This song, however, the father of all those metal styles, is not minimallistic. Of course, there is a minimal characteristic to the way the guitar sets an ambience against Ozzy’s disturbed vocals, but, in an overall way, it’s not minimallistic. If this song, being the father of drone metal, is not minimalistic, then where did a band like Earth find it’s minimalism?

I believe there is a social answer to this question. Rather than any music pushing the members of Earth towards minimalism, I think that a certain social mentality, brought about by the punk explosion in the early 80s (such as the DIY attitude and the disregard for technical proficiency) is responsible for drone metal’s initial form, more than any direct musical influence. For this reason, drone metal, an already extreme style of music, starts it’s story on it’s darkest, most extreme side: that of minimal drones, created only by guitar, bass, and occasional analog synths. It gathered a faithful but small cult following, which became wider through the years not only because the style grew older, but also because, since it was impossible (or at least very hard) to progress towards greater minimalism without eventually reaching either silence or white noise, it grew towards acessibility. The evolution of drone metal is so twisted, because of it’s strange birth, that it is a style that, different from possibly all the other styles of music, grows not towards extremes, but towards a more acessible “center”.

In Sunn O)))’s latest album, song structures are more apparent than they’d ever been, the compositions are more conventionally paced, in the sense that the compositions grow steadily, which also serves to better define the song structures, and the overall sound is less extreme than the band’s other albums. All of this reinforces the idea that this is a style of music that is growing towards (an always relative) acessibility, and that should greatly expand it’s fan base, as well as become closer with other metal styles and “cross-polinate” with them, resulting in new forms of music. Certainly, great things can be expected from the future of this musical style!

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