a looooooooong article from the sunday new york times magazine, of all places, about sunn0))), southern lord, boris and the underground metal scene.
here's the link, but i'll paste below since it's registration required. save it for your lunch break, or something.
Heady Metal
By JOHN WRAY
Published: May 28, 2006
You might have been excused, if you were standing in the crowd at the Knitting Factory in New York on a Wednesday night in January, for thinking you were at a heavy metal show. The room was filled with smoke from two fog machines turned on full blast, the stage was an unbroken wall of speakers and amplifiers reaching almost to the ceiling and the men in front of the speakers ?? there could have been as few as two of them, or as many as five, it was impossible to tell through the fog ?? wore jet black robes with hoods that hid everything but their disquietingly goatlike beards. The audience certainly seemed to think it was at a heavy metal show: as the robed figures (druids? warlocks? inquisitors?) picked up their guitars, shouts of "Satan!" could be heard, and hands were raised in the classic devil-horns gesture everywhere you looked. The Knitting Factory is by no means a metal venue (it's known mainly for indie rock and avant-jazz ), but on that night it was clear that the head bangers had taken over. That is, until the robed men started playing.
One of the two men at the front of the stage took hold of his guitar in a businesslike way and played a single chord: a classic metal chord, a down-tuned A or C-sharp, outrageously bottom-heavy and distorted, not unlike the opening of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." That, however, was where the similarity ended. A full minute later ?? an impossible length of time by any conventional musical standard ?? the same chord was still building on itself in the packed, airless room, complicated now by a second guitar line and at least three overlapping waves of feedback. No drums had kicked in, no singer had appeared and if any heads in the crowd were banging, they were doing so in extreme slow motion. The music was unbelievably loud ?? so loud, in fact, that the sound waves made your rib cage vibrate like a stereo cabinet and your teeth literally rattle in their sockets ?? but the effect was somehow more meditative than violent. The overall experience was not unlike listening to an Indian raga in the middle of an earthquake.
On closer inspection, you would have noticed that surprisingly few people in the room had the look of genuine metal heads; big hair was in notably short supply, and the ratio of button-downs to heavy metal T-shirts was approximately one to one. What unified the two camps, disparate as they appeared, was an almost studious devotion to the music. Most people had their lips pressed together and their eyes tightly shut, as if standing in a heavy wind. At one point there might have been a voice droning somewhere behind the feedback, or possibly the squeal of a Moog synthesizer, but for the most part there were simply the guitars. For the next 70 minutes the wall of noise continued to reconfigure itself, as much a tactile phenomenon as an audible one. Time decelerated, began to wobble and eventually ceased to apply altogether. Then the music suddenly ended, seemingly in midprogression: the robed figures disappeared, the houselights came on and a Gustav Mahler symphony began to play over the club's severely traumatized P.A. system. The crowd stood still for a few moments longer, emerging from its trance, then dispersed in a quiet and orderly manner. The night's Sunn0))) performance was over.
Our first few records were met with complete indifference," Greg Anderson, one-half of Sunn0))), told me a few months after the Knitting Factory show, grinning good-naturedly. "No one cared, you know?" We were sitting in a deserted sports bar on a slightly down-at-the-heels stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the offices of the band's label, Southern Lord Recordings. "We just did it because it was our stuff, and we really believed in it. So now, to see Sunn0))) as the biggest thing on our label, really kind of freaks me out. But it's a testament, I guess, to the fact that there's been a change in the way that people are thinking about music." In his black boots, jeans and battered plaid shirt, his face all but hidden by his dark brown beard and nearly waist-length hair, Anderson certainly looked the part of a satanic-rock demigod; our conversation, however, didn't fit the bill at all. I discovered that he was a devoted fan of bebop, that the thing he valued most about his music was the improvisational freedom it allowed him and that the volume of Sunn0)))'s live shows was intended, at least partly, to relax the crowd. "I think low-frequency sound, when played above a certain volume, is very conducive to a meditative state or a trance," Anderson said. "That's how I got into playing this kind of music. I was into feeling it: not just hearing it but feeling it, all over my body. After every show we play, I feel totally exhausted ?? my brain and body are like jelly. It's a wonderful feeling." Anderson paused briefly, running his fingers thoughtfully through his beard, looking positively Thelonious Monk-ish. "And I believe that sensation can transfer to the audience as well."
At this point, I felt obliged to point out that I couldn't imagine Lars Ulrich, Metallica's drummer and promotional mastermind, extolling the soothing qualities of his band's live shows. Anderson laughed brightly. "I can't, either," he said. That fact didn't seem to bother him at all.
The members of Sunn0))) ?? pronounced "sun" and named after a rare brand of vintage amplifier ?? are not an isolated group of obscure heavy metal dissidents. Like many forms of popular music, metal has a family tree that began to branch virtually at the root. After Black Sabbath's self-titled 1970 debut, which more or less single-handedly defined the genre by marrying the heavy blues of bands like Cream and Iron Butterfly to apocalyptic, darkly Christian lyrics, a brief period of stability ensued; soon, however, competing strains began to emerge. Black Sabbath's most orthodox disciples, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, essentially established heavy metal as a movement, codifying the sound (monolithic guitar riffs, aggressive, bass-pedal-heavy drumming and strident, operatic vocals) that we associate with the term "heavy metal." At roughly the same time, bands like Motorhead were developing the faster, punk-influenced sound that would eventually lead to "thrash metal," "death metal," "grindcore" and a dozen other subgenres and make bands like Metallica millionaires. By the 90's, there were arguably as many rival sects in the international metal scene as there are in the Protestant Church, with the dominant paradigm tending toward faster, harder and generally as frightening as possible. Parallel to all of this was a dissenting tendency ?? too loose-knit to be called a style ?? toward slower, darker, more melancholy tempos and a greater interest in melody and mood: bands like Trouble, Witchfinder General and Cathedral. This alternative tradition came, largely after the fact, to be referred to as "doom metal" and is as close as Sunn0))) comes to a pedigree.
As metal was integrated into the cultural mainstream, it was perhaps inevitable that a full-fledged, card-carrying avant-garde would come into being. The experimental metal community that began to emerge in the mid-90's, centered in major cosmopolitan centers like Tokyo and Los Angeles and Oslo, set its sights not on MTV or commercial radio but on the limits of the genre itself. In the process, bands like Sunn0))) won themselves an audience as far removed from the old-school stadium metal crowd as possible. This is music played in small urban venues for sophisticated crowds with anything but orthodox tastes: the sort of clubs Glenn Branca, not Glenn Danzig, would have played in. And the bands themselves are more likely to discuss Satan as a social construct than bite the head off a bat onstage, like Ozzy in his prime.
When I asked Anderson about Sunn0)))'s stage theatrics, his response was almost Warholian in its mastery of spin, laying claim to absolute sincerity while playfully allowing that a certain degree of camp might be involved. What about the robes? I asked. Anderson frowned. "The robe makes it easier for me, personally, just to forget about the audience and concentrate on what's going on onstage ?? the chemistry, the tones, the sounds." What about the fog machines? "The idea is that this is a ritual, somehow: not a 'gig,' not a concert, but a sort of invocation. That shifts the expectations of the audience." What about the final track on "Black One," the band's breakout 2005 album, for which one guest vocalist, the legendary "suicidal metal" recluse known only as Malefic, supposedly recorded his vocals while sealed inside a coffin? This, finally, prompted Anderson to smile.
"That was about capturing a certain kind of claustrophobic, isolated tone. There was actually a hearse parked outside the studio ?? a Cadillac hearse, painted purple ?? that belonged to the studio owner. So, we're like, well of course we have to put the coffin in the hearse! So we actually put contact mikes inside the hearse, and inside the coffin and on top of it, and shut the lid. Malefic's a tall, lanky guy, and he didn't really fit inside too well. Eventually he started feeling claustrophobic, and that's how we got the tone we wanted. There are outtakes of him knocking on the lid, saying: 'O.K., I'm done! Let me out!' " Might that not qualify as tongue-in-cheek? I asked. "Tone first," Anderson said, holding up a finger. "What this group's about is tone." He watched me closely for a moment, then his smile suddenly widened. "I love metal," he said, as if confessing a closely guarded secret.
Stephen O'Malley, the other half of Sunn0))), explained things to me in a slightly different way. "We're really serious about what we do, and I think it's completely honest, but a part of that honesty is the fact that Greg and I have a good sense of humor about the whole thing. We're having fun with these clichés and stereotypes of metal." With his long, center-parted hair and Mephistophelean goatee, O'Malley could pass for his bandmate's twin brother; if anything, however, his tastes are even more unorthodox than Anderson's. In the course of our first meeting, O'Malley cited no less than 43 direct influences, including Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Japan's hard-rock pioneers Flower Travellin' Band, the Seattle heavy-music icons the Melvins, La Monte Young, Celtic Frost, the Indian santoor player Shivkumar Sharma and a black metal band from Sweden called Dissection.
"We're really interested in Tony Conrad, Steve Reich, all those minimalist composers," O'Malley said. "They took a point ?? one point in a possible progression, or series of notes ?? and elaborated all of the possibilities that were latent there. The microcosmic approach ?? Sunn0))) does that a lot." When I asked whether it was good P.R. for a metal band to name-check someone like Philip Glass in a national magazine, O'Malley shot me a deadpan look and shrugged his shoulders. "In the last four or five years, heavy music has progressed a lot. It's opened up to non-guitar-based types of music, nontraditional structures." He took a slow, thoughtful sip of his tea. "That said, there's a bunch of bands, who consider themselves 'true doom metal,' who do have a problem with us. They object to the fact that we don't have melody, harmony, song structures ?? all the traditional rock elements. We're just like, 'Why do you even care?' " When I suggested that professional envy might be involved, O'Malley smiled the same shy smile I'd seen on Anderson. "I'm really into Ethiopian blues right now," he said. "Ever heard any?"
Sunn0))) isn't the first band O'Malley and Anderson have played in together. O'Malley, 31, met Anderson, 35, in Seattle in the fall of 1991, when O'Malley was in high school and just before Anderson dropped out of Seattle Central Community College. Anderson's first girlfriend had a little brother, whom Anderson converted from effete post-New Wave ?? Love and Rockets and Bauhaus ?? to the glories of hard-core punk; the brother was friends with O'Malley, who returned the favor by giving Anderson a crash course in heavy metal. "I remember meeting this kid with superlong hair and sideburns, and I'm like, Who the hell is this guy?!" Anderson told me, laughing. "My girlfriend's brother introduced him to me as Metal Steve. I didn't really know about the underground stuff at that time ?? Steve was into all this fresh, new, extreme metal, and he basically said, 'Check this out, and this, and this.' Later, I turned him onto stuff I'd discovered, like post-rock and jazz."
A series of fairly straightforward metal bands followed, with names like Thorr's Hammer, Burning Witch and Goatsnake. The bands were fun for a while, and reasonably successful, but over time each of them grew confining ?? like any pop-music subculture (and perhaps more so than most), metal has a clearly defined sensibility, with a surprisingly strict set of rules governing everything from songwriting to the cut of your leather pants. After an extended musical hiatus, in which O'Malley tried his luck in England as a graphic designer and Anderson drifted south to Los Angeles, the Sunn0))) project took shape. The only rule for the new band ?? other than "heaviness," which, given its members' tastes, was likely to take care of itself ?? was that there should be no rules at all.
From the beginning, the Sunn0))) sound was connected to prevailing notions of heavy music by only the slimmest of threads. "We wanted absolute freedom," Anderson told me repeatedly. "Freedom to improvise, freedom to try stuff out, freedom not to worry about being entertaining." The first track on the band's 1999 debut, "The Grimm Robe Demos," makes the band's philosophy clear. Clocking in at just under 20 minutes, "Black Wedding" is immediately recognizable as a kind of manifesto, a declaration of radical intent, boiling down the traditional metal riff to its aural and conceptual essence. If Deep Purple had released an album showcasing the moments of pure bottom-end feedback between actual songs on "Deep Purple Live," it might have sounded something like "The Grimm Robe Demos." It's hard to imagine any music being heavier or, for that matter, very much slower ?? the first chord change happens four minutes and four seconds into the song. One fan wrote in an online chat room that the band waits for glaciers to roll by and then flags one down and hitches a ride.
In 1998, Anderson and O'Malley founded Southern Lord, largely in order to find a home for their own music; no metal label, no matter how "underground," seemed to know what to do with Sunn0))). "The Grimm Robe Demos" had sold less than 700 copies, and the follow-up in 2001, "0/0/ Void," had sold just over 2,000. Even for the embryonic experimental metal scene ?? a subculture within a subculture ?? those were discouraging numbers. Anderson and O'Malley's response was surprisingly pragmatic: they found an affordable office space on Hollywood Boulevard, printed up some T-shirts, pressed a reasonable amount of records, then quietly built a following.
"Three basic types of people come to see us play," O'Malley told me. "First, the people who are really into experimental music or metal ?? the passionate music lovers; then you've got the spectacle crowd, who come for the robes and the smoke machines; last, you have a group of people who are more interested in the physical aspect of it. Those are the people who are just like, I'm going to stand at the front of the stage for an hour and a half ?? can I take it? Will I wet my pants? Will I puke? I'm going to be at the very front, in front of these amps for 75 minutes, and then when it's done I'll feel liberated, or I'll feel like I've beaten the band or whatever, no matter how tortuous it is." I pointed out that it's fairly uncommon for a band to divide its fan base into the aural, the visual and the tactile: I'd expected him to make a distinction between metal and experimental-music fans. O'Malley nodded politely, then did his best to bring me up to date. "In the past three or four years, since the point when the Internet started becoming the primary source for discovering music, the lines between different styles have really begun to blur." He spread his arms as he said this, looking at me almost slyly, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. "There's so much access to so many different types of music now, it's no wonder that people aren't categorizing themselves so sharply. It's pretty awesome, really."
Southern Lord Recordings had no particular ideology or purpose at the beginning, other than to advance the cause of music that its founders made or liked ?? but there was no question, ultimately, what genre of music that would be. "I like heavy music," Anderson told me simply. "That's where I come from." When I asked O'Malley to explain the label's name, he looked down at his fingers with something verging on embarrassment. "You know that Slayer album from the 80's?" he mumbled. "'South of Heaven?"' I was beginning to understand. "I see," I said. "So, then, Southern Lord would be another name for??" "That's right," O'Malley said quickly, clearly grateful that I hadn't made him spell it out.
Over the last five years, Southern Lord has become something of an independent-music success story. As awareness of "drone metal" ?? as Sunn0)))'s take on doom metal has been labeled ?? and of other forms of unconventional heavy music has grown, both on purist metal Web sites and on college campuses, record sales for the label have risen exponentially. Eight years after its founding, Southern Lord has arguably become as closely associated with the experimental metal scene as Blue Note was with the hard bop movement of the 50's.
"They've got a good thing going with that label," says Ian Christe, author of "Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal." "It's become a known brand, the way that Sub Pop was in the early 90's ?? people will check out a record they've never heard of just because it's out on Southern Lord." The label's discography is diverse, as you might expect of Anderson and O'Malley: two Saint Vitus reissues; a much-acclaimed comeback album by the minimalist post-grunge band Earth (which once briefly featured Kurt Cobain on vocals); and a strangely beautiful suite of songs called "Triste," by the Australian experimentalist Oren Ambarchi, largely made up of single guitar notes played over gentle static. One band more than any other, however, has helped to put Southern Lord on the map: a well-mannered three-piece from Tokyo with the slightly improbable name Boris.
If Sunn0))) is the ZZ Top of experimental metal, with matching beards and Gibson Les Paul guitars, Boris might be the Kraftwerk, or the Ramones, or even the Jimi Hendrix Experience, depending on the album. The members of Boris, each of whom goes by only his or her given name ?? Wata on lead guitar and vocals, Atsuo on drums and Chinese gong and Takeshi on Cheap Trick-style, double-neck guitar and bass ?? approach heavy metal with the seriousness of theoretical physicists. Like Sunn0))), they have the requisite long hair and black tour T-shirts; unlike Sunn0))), they are clearly and undeniably a rock band, with identifiable song structures, singable lyrics and a charming and welcome willingness to pay tribute at the altar of Black Sabbath. The fact that Boris's lead guitarist is a graceful, soft-spoken woman who occasionally wears Victorian blouses onstage is unusual, certainly, but in no way outside the realm of your run-of-the-mill head banger's fantasy.
At first glance, therefore, you might wonder where the common ground with a band like Sunn0))) would lie. The answer, of course, is simple: Boris is omnivorous in its taste, obsessed with surprising its audience and, in the words of Greg Anderson, makes "beautifully ominous" music. Not only that, but the kids seem to like it. Boris is currently second only to Sunn0))) in total record sales for Southern Lord artists, and the band's new album, "Pink," has been winning ecstatic reviews from 20-something metal heads and middle-aged critics alike.
Boris's success in America ?? which, though still fairly modest, is building up a remarkable head of steam ?? seems at once unlikely and inevitable. It seems unlikely not only because its members are relatively old (all of them are well past 30) and speak very little English but also because the band's identity shifts drastically from album to album: so much so, in fact, that a visual code has been developed for its record sleeves, the aesthetic equivalent of a parental advisory sticker. From CD's on which "Boris" is printed in uppercase letters (as in the case of "BORIS:Pink"), fans can expect Black Sabbath-by-way-of-the-Melvins heavy rock; if the CD in question features the band's name in lowercase lettering, they may need to check their expectations at the door. A recent lowercase Boris album, "Sun Baked Snow Cave," featured an hourlong collaboration with the Japanese experimental "noise" pioneer Merzbow, in which softly plucked acoustic guitar chords alternated with ear-piercing cascades of, well, noise.
"Boris makes both commercial and uncommercial rock," Atsuo, the band's drummer, told me proudly. "To make only one kind is not interesting." We were sitting in the corner booth of an immaculate Denny's in the depths of Tokyo's seemingly infinite western suburbs, a few blocks from the band's bare-bones rehearsal space. In Europe and America, Takeshi chimed in, people seem to want the lowercase boris, at least at the live shows; in Japan, the fans want to be rocked. "But the uppercase BORIS always sells more records," Atsuo observed between mouthfuls of cheesecake. Later, the conversation turned, perhaps inevitably, to the once-almighty Metallica and the fact it seems to be making only one type of music, especially lately. "They should try making both kinds," Takeshi said earnestly. "That would be very much more cool."
Like Sunn0))), Boris is almost startlingly cosmopolitan in person. The band members first met at art school, so I asked whether visual art had influenced their music. Atsuo considered this for a moment. "The Dada movement, and the neo-Dada movement, did not have very much influence in Japan," he said finally, bringing his fingers thoughtfully to his chin. "But what Dada did is like what Boris does. Our goal is to make people think ?? to bring about a change in their consciousness, to create a new way of listening, of hearing. Something like the music of John Cage." Atsuo has become an ideologue of sorts for the experimental-metal movement, famous for statements like the one he made during an interview with the Web zine RadCompany.net: "The moment when a person changes ?? that is the devil.. . .It's simple to talk about Satan as a symbol. But it's important to consider the deeper meaning of the symbol."
A little over a month ago, on a humid Sunday evening, Boris performed at a club called Shelter, in the Shimokitazawa district of Tokyo. Shimokitazawa is well known for its legion of "live houses," clubs where bands in every popular genre from hard-core punk to country and western perform each night of the week, occasionally on the same bill. That night's show ?? which had been listed, somewhat alarmingly, as "fangsanalsatan extra" on the club's Web site ?? was an intimate affair, a last-minute party for the band's inner circle. Shelter was jammed to the gills, as it must be virtually every night: the performance space is no bigger than your average suburban basement. At least a quarter of the audience, which looked surprisingly conservative, were Westerners. "I can't wait to tell my ex-boyfriend that I saw Boris play," said Ariel Acosta, a 24-year-old cultural-studies major from Virginia. "He'll be so jealous!" The crowd waited politely for the opening act ?? a pretty four-piece with a waifish lead singer who might best be described as a Pacific Rim Julee Cruise ?? to finish its set, clapping dutifully as it left the stage. Then a fog machine was turned on somewhere behind the amplifiers, the U.K. metal band Venom began to play over the P.A. and the atmosphere in the cramped room changed perceptibly. "Here we go," the extremely drunken Englishman next to me whispered to himself, closing his eyes and grinning.
The hour that followed had a lot in common with the Sunn0))) show at the Knitting Factory ?? the fog, the volume, the hypnotic flow of uninterrupted sound, the occasional devil-horns gesture ?? but the differences were easily as striking. The Boris show was symphonic where Sunn0)))'s had been ?? for want of a better word ?? tectonic: progressions were explored and returned to in unexpected ways, but the architecture of the music remained clear from start to finish. What's more, the personalities of the musicians, though occasionally obscured by the fog, were absolutely key to the event: Takeshi's metal flourishes, Atsuo's fanatical grin, Wata's beatific presence at the front left corner of the stage. For much of its 45-minute set the band was starkly backlit, and Takeshi's silhouette might have been lifted out of an early video clip from MTV's "Headbangers Ball." There were other moments when I was put in mind of a classic rock opera, like the Who's "Tommy" or even "Kilroy Was Here," by the 70's stadium rockers Styx, except that Boris's performance was both more feverish and more elegant.
Stephen O'Malley first heard Boris in England and quickly passed its demo on to his bandmate. "The first stuff I heard of theirs was amazing," Greg Anderson says. "It was really, really heavy. I could relate to it completely, because it was inspired by the same bands that inspired us ?? particularly the Melvins and Earth. After that, they started experimenting, and I couldn't always follow where they were going ?? every record sounded different than the one before. But I respected that completely." It's clear that Southern Lord expects great things from "Pink," the latest Boris album, which had its U.S. release this month. "The new record is a combination of all the Borises of the past," Anderson says. "They're keeping that heavy element alive, but they've really developed their sense of melody ?? this new album is the most tuneful thing they've ever done." When I expressed surprise at hearing "tunefulness" praised by a member of Sunn0))), Anderson seemed almost hurt. "I am totally into melody," he says quietly. "Stevie Wonder is one of my all-time favorites."
Of all the parallels between Sunn0))) and Boris, none are more essential than their shared belief in collaboration. Partnership with like-minded musicians, however far-flung the genre, has emerged as a hallmark of the new metal avant-garde. Starting with "0/0/ Void," Sunn0)))'s second full-length release, each of the band's albums has made use of guest vocalists, ranging from the Hungarian "black metal" singer Attila Csihar to England's Julian Cope, whose band the Teardrop Explodes rode the British New Wave to brief fame in the 80's. Boris, in turn, has collaborated with Merzbow and Keiji Haino (two of the legends of Japanese experimental music), with a member of the psychedelic folk band Ghost and, most recently, with Anderson and O'Malley themselves. A Boris/Sunn0))) album, titled "Altar," is scheduled to be released in October. "Altar" is not a split LP ?? something quite common in the indie-music world ?? but an actual merger of the two bands, with musicians from each contributing to every song on the album.
Perhaps no collaboration better illustrates Sunn0)))'s distance from traditional metal, and its proximity to the avant-garde, than the band's current project with a 32-year-old metal fanatic named Banks Violette. Violette is not, strictly speaking, a musician at all (though he's covered in tattoos, keeps a drum kit in his apartment and claims that metal is more important to him than art), but a sculptor and an installation artist. O'Malley, who now lives in New York, has written music for two of Violette's pieces, the first of which, "Bleed," is now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum.
"Bleed" consists of a mound of lacquered wood fragments, reminiscent of Robert Smithson's broken-glass sculptures of the 60's, across which low-frequency sound is pumped at extremely high volume by a loose ring of speakers. "Greg and I have always been into the idea of sound as a sculptural element, something that you feel as much as hear," O'Malley told me. "So the project made sense to us." Violette, who has collaborated with other metal bands in the past, including Norway's Thorns, explained his interest in Sunn0))) in similar terms: "For me, what Steve and Greg are doing bears comparison to Donald Judd's work, particularly his boxes of the 60's and 70's. Their sound is serial, repetitive, plays off of mass and is as much a physiological phenomenon as an acoustic one. It stops being an aesthetic experience and becomes a body experience. There are exact, direct parallels there."
Visual artists have allied themselves with heavy metal before ?? Mike Kelley's most recent exhibition, "Day Is Done," referenced 70's metal iconography, and Matthew Barney's film "Cremaster 2" famously featured Dave Lombardo, formerly of Slayer, playing a drum solo ?? but Violette's investment in the genre borders on the obsessive. For his latest project, a one-man show at the Maureen Paley gallery in London, the artist has cast the entire Sunn0))) back line ?? the Moogs, the guitars, the towering wall of amplifiers and speakers ?? in industrial salt. "Salt's a little tricky as a medium," he confessed, smiling boyishly. "It's hydrophilic, which means that it attracts moisture. A puddle tends to form along the bottom. Some galleries don't appreciate that." The band will perform at the opening, playing at its customary bone-rattling volume, but the audience won't be able to see the musicians: they'll be in a closed-off room one floor below the exhibition space. "The idea is absence, nonparticipation, missing the event," O'Malley told me, clearly excited by the concept. "On the second floor, where the piece is showing, you'll just have the residual sound, the ghost of the actual performance."
The day after we spoke, Sunn0))) was scheduled to fly to Brussels for the Domino Festival, in what was yet another first for the band: a guitar-free show, performed entirely on Moog synthesizers and oscillators. I should have known better by this point, but I couldn't resist: I felt dutybound to mention that most people wouldn't consider a band without guitars to be a metal band at all. "That's exactly why we're doing it," O'Malley said, as patiently as possible. When I asked Anderson about the coming gigs, he sat back in his chair and gave a quiet laugh, looking something like a well-intentioned pirate. "Steve's the arty guy in the band," he said. "I'm the guy that likes to stay home and watch 'Seinfeld."' But an instant later he was as serious as the grave. "I totally respect Steve's interests," he said. "I may just be a metal head, but I'm definitely always up for something new."
