Unhelpful

I listen to a fair amount of noise music every now and then. I like “isolationist” (Lull, JK Broadrick), some of the early noise-based industrial (Throbbing Gristle), minimalist textural music (Pan Sonic being the best example), and of course, so-called power electronics of Merzbow and Whitehouse.

Having said that, Sunn O))) was new to me. I was aware of them, their legendary status and their very vocal fanbase, but after seeing that they were coming to Pontiac at the Crowfoot, I decided to listen to a couple of the better clips on YouTube of their live performances. What I heard, even considering YouTube limitations, was amazing ambient drone metal at a devastatingly slow tempo and crushing volume.

This was clearly a concert I would regret missing. I arrived a little after the opening time, but the club was not yet open, and was still finishing their setup. I looked around at the rest of the people waiting, and it’s largely an extreme metal crowd with lots of tattoos and piercings, and concert t-shirts that tend toward Norweigan black metal, death metal, noise, and grindcore. The first thought that I had was “holy fucking shit, it’s going to be a melee”. I’d been to some rough concerts before. KMFDM’s Beat by Beat tour earned me a boot in the face. Black Dice, a noise band, toured a year or two ago, and the crowd was so geared up and brutal it felt like I left with an asskicking and actually had to retreat from the front halfway through; they didn’t even have a barrier between the band and the audience, or a stage, or anything preventing the crowd from pushing itself right into the instruments. I’m amazed that it didn’t actually come to that. Pretty much any show I’ve been to that’s involved industrial dance or industrial metal has had a mosh pit.

I can hardly express how little use I have for mosh pit idiocy. My general opinion is that when I pay to see a performance, any time I have to take my eyes off the stage to brace myself against a charge by a sweaty, shirtless 300 pound guy, it’s a waste of my time and money. The same applies to crowd surfing; I’ve helped people up when asked, but I’d prefer it not happen. While we were waiting for the Crowfooot to open, I was just trying to mentally prepare myself for the fact that it was probably going to be one of the roughest shows I’ve ever been to, and that I was probably going to last about ten minutes up front before I had to retreat to the back so I didn’t have to spend any time defending the compact camera I borrowed from my sister. Babysitting an SLR all night with a high f-stop lens—a lot more trouble for worse pictures—wasn’t even thinkable.

I had already been forewarned that this band plays live at about 128 decibels and wearing ear protection would be pretty important.

The first band, Eagle Twin, were a two-person doom metal band. This isn’t really the sort of thing usually I listen to, but for what it is, they were very good, and don’t use the sort of histrionics I associate with the subgenres of metal I actively dislike, black metal and death metal.

After a wait that probably felt a lot longer than it actually was, Sunn O))) took the stage. It has been said that Black Sabbath is what happens when you play Zeppelin albums at half the speed. And that early Swans albums are what happen when you play Black Sabbath albums at half the speed. This made Swans sound like speed metal in comparison. Forget 120 BPM. Forget beats. Bring on 1 minute notes, and longer. At an excruciating volume, 128 decibels is like trying to have a conversation with a jet engine 25 feet away. It was so loud that the vibration it made my jeans feel like they were going to tear themselves off. This is music meant to be experienced and felt as much as heard.

All four musicians were dressed in black robes, with enough fog on the stage that there a third of the time, I couldn’t even see them, despite being the second person from the front. The stage remained lit in green light throughout all but the last few minutes of the show. The vocals, deep, slow and indecipherable, were delivered with the seriousness that the rest of the performance required. This was an absolutely hypnotic, vital experience. With the robes, from head to toe, it was fairly cultish feeling, and probably the most sinister musical performance I’ve ever experienced. It was difficult taking pictures, as often as soon as I had the shot I wanted, the fog machines would kick in, and they were placed in front of the musicians for an effect not unlike a wet winter morning. I managed to get a few shots I wanted, and I was close enough that the vocalist was near enough to the camera to have touched it.

Despite the intensely somber delivery, it was, ironically, an absolute exultation. One of the best aspects of enjoying this performance was the melee I was expecting, and was sure was imminent, never happened. In fact it was easily the most civil concert I’ve been to in a crowded venue. There was a complete lack of mosh pit stupidity. The fist-pumping audience affectation typical of harder music was absent, in no small part due to a lack of a beat structure, and had been replaced by the outstretched hand, palms out, the better to feel what can only be described as a sonic onslaught. Finally, one of my least favorite aspects of musical performance was also absent: the encore that the audience is expected to ask for and the band is expected to pretend to give in to, even though it’s a set piece. In place of that, we instead were given a performance that was about two hours long and never held back.

The audience was a lot different than I expected. Usually at a concert, I like to buy a few CDs, and typically I’m very well-informed about the band. This was the exception, for me. Talking to other people at the merchandise table about which albums were representative and which were only of interest to completists, I was very glad that the dozen or so people I spoke with were well-informed and willing to steer me in the right direction. Finally, even the t-shirt designs for sale took me by surprise. Rather than the distressed blackletter typefaces and scraggly spidery logos typical to a lot of extreme music, Sunn O))) had the good judgment to ignore those pretensions. Say it with me: Helvetica.

Yes. Helvetica.

This was an excellent night out.