Subsonics transcending times

The heaviest band in the world came to Belgium for two gigs in early april. On the first night I hooked up with Steve O'Malley and Greg Anderson and had a little talk with them.

The gig that followed turned out to be one hell of a crushing experience. Two days later I was begging for more an went to the other gig. A Sunn concert is a one in a lifetime experience you just can't afford to miss... Drone power!
Their albums are excellent too, check out the review of the new one White 1 (here). Picked by us as the album of the month...

m[m]: You’re touring to promote your new album. Could you tell us a bit about the recording of White1 ?

g: It was recorded with Rex Ritter and Joe Preston who are here tonight. Steven and I had the idea to collaborate with different people and Rex offered to have it recorded in his studio. It’s in Portland Oregon, North West of the US, and that was close to where Joe lives (Olimpia). We all got together and tended to let it all happen, there wasn’t much rehearsal. We’d just sort of let the tape roll or the computers roll so to speak, they weren’t really any tapes (laughs). And we just went for it...

m[m]: So you have nothing composed when you get in the studio?

g: Sometimes we have a few riffs, to use as skeletons. We let things happen naturally.

m[m]: What about White2?

g: White was meant to be a double album, but we couldn’t get everything together in time so we decided to let the first come out, so it has its own life, and then have the second one come out. It will be a little different but in the same vein because a lot of it was recorded from that same session. One track, about half the record is done. We had some vocal contribution, a collaboration with Attila Csihar (Aborym, of Mayhem-fame -m[m]). It’s awesome, it’s really epic he does this kind of chanting, this mantra kind of stuff. It’s my favourite thing we’ve ever done, I’m so excited, I can’t wait. I’m dying to put it out... We actually played a couple of shows with Attila on this tour.

m[m]: On 00 Void you can hear all the guitar strings being pulled, Flight of the Behemoth is much more massive, crushing and White 1 seems to bring even more things. That would surprise many people: it is actually possible to take drones quite far...

g: That was the whole thing! The main thing about Sunn is evolution. We don’t want to make the same record twice, so every record we want to do something different. We even talked about making a record with a full band, singer, drums... Which might be something we will do in the future. That is something I’m proud about Sunn. It’s still Sunn, it has got elements of drone and lots of subsonics but we try to make things different every time.
s: White 1 is really the most progressive album we’ve done. A lot of people think that our first three albums are very similar but that’s not true. Those albums are very different from each other: in textures, compositions, sound quality, all these things. It’s quite a hard puzzle to deconstruct for the listener

m[m]: Is there any aim behind Sunn? At least Steve seemed to say so in some interviews.

g:  Steve is a little more philosophical about it... To me, it’s a very free, open thing. It’s about letting go any preconceived notions. Even every shows that we play have a very free structure. We use a skeleton but we let the chemistry of the people involved take it and try to guide it. It’s very different from doing Goatsnake, Khanate or Burning Witch. It’s just so free... There is no game plan, no written set of rules, no leaders, it’s just letting our chemistry create the sounds.
s: It’s all about the chemistry of the players and creating a mental state. Sunn is very much about improvisation, every gig is very different. We’re doing this music that makes time very flexible, if there is one aim, it’s transcending time... Whether we’ve been playing for half-an-hour or an hour, you can’t tell.

m[m]: When did you guys meet up?

g: We went to the same highschool. He is a little younger than I am, but we had mutual friends. I was in a band called Engine Kid that was heavy but really melodic and I wanted to do a full-on metal band. So me and Steve started Thorr’s Hammer together.

m[m]: What did get you into that kind of heavy music?

g: I’ve always been a huge fan of The Melvins and Sabbath, stuff like that. Actually when Steve and I ran into each other in 1994 after having not seen each other for a couple of years, I was like  “hey, I’m getting really interested in some underground metal stuff, could you put me in the right direction?” and he said “check out Disenbowlment, check out Winter” and shit like that. So he turned me on to stuff that I didn’t know about... But heavy music has always been important to me. When I was like 16 I was in an hardcore band, and that’s heavy shit too (laughs)... I’ve always been attracted to the intensity of heavy music. But the first band that really changed that way I thought about music was Melvins.

m[m]: Julian Cope appears on White 1. What can you tell us about him?

g: He has this website, and he reviewed 00 Void. A friend of mine told me that Julian was raving about our album. I checked it out and it was the most incredible review of music I’ve ever read...  So I wrote him and said “hey we got a new album coming out, Flight of the Behemoth, I’d like to send it to you”. And he really liked it, and he liked Khanate and Teeth of lions rule the divine too. He really latched on to what we were doing so I asked him if he would like to collaborate with us sometimes and he was like  “yeah yeah, I’d love to”. We sent him some music that we had recorded with Rex and Joe. He sent it back with his thing and it is awesome. So it became the basis of the new album (laughs).

m[m]: Runhild (ex-Thorr's Hammer also appears on the album. What has she been doing lately?

g: She is very serious about school, biology major I think... She actually came to the States for some kind of program and that’s how we hooked up for the White 1 record. She was actually on the east coast and she came to Portland to work on the stuff for the record.

m[m]: What is it like too meet all those people you like? Joe Preston, Julian Cope, I guess you met the guys from The Melvins...

g: It’s awesome, really cool. It’s an honour. With Joe, it’s really great... I mean, everything he has ever been involved in, I’ve been a fan: Earth, Melvins, Thrones. So I’m really flattered that people are wanting to work with us. And they are not just guests, when these people come and work within Sunn, everyone’s voice as its own space. I’m really enjoying having different collaborations, it makes it much more interesting.

m[m]: Southern Lord is the label you’re running. I guess its purpose is to release music you like... But do you manage to make a living out of it?

g: It’s doing well enough but it’s really tight. But I live pretty simply, I don’t have a lot of outside expenses. I put a lot of work into it but it’s so worth it, because it’s doing what I want to do... I’m putting out this music, these bands that are friends and it means a lot. And people seem to like it, so it’s cool.

m[m]: Any ambitions with the label?

g: Yeah, I’d definitely would like to expand it, make it a bigger label. I don’t want to turn it into Nuclear Blast or Century Media. I wanna keep it a little bit more down to earth, you know, focused. Not so “all over the place”. I just want to put out bands that, no matter the genre, are intense. I don’t want to put out something to make out money.

m[m]: You have other projects beside Sunn. Can we expect some new stuff from Teeth of lions rule the divine?

g: I don’t think Teeth is gonna do anything else. I would love to, and maybe in the future we will. But it doesn’t seem like it at the moment... There is a new Khanate coming out, it’s being finished at the moment, should be out in September, I’m pretty excited about that. And there will probably be some Goatsnake coming out, including some new songs.

m[m]: So can we expect Goatsnake to resume its activities?

g: No, we all have our own things going on, it’s hard for Goatsnake to be a existing band.

m[m]: In interviews I read of you, besides the obvious influences in your guitar playing, I was surprised to see the names of John McLaughlin, Miles Davis and John Coltrane...

g: I’m not a technical player but I’m really enjoying those people. I would say, as far as guitar influences, the most direct is Buzz from The Melvins. I really enjoy McLauglin, Davis and Coltrane, their music is inspiring, not so much in a technical way. What they’ve done with their sound is almost other-wordly. If I could get just 1% of that, I’d be happy.
s: (Shows the Coltrane button on his jacket) If there is anything that we all agree on with Greg, Joe and Rex, it’s Jazz. John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra. Maybe it’s regressive or something but I’m obsessed with early seventies Miles Davis. You can listen to these records every day for a whole year and they’d still be fresh.

m[m]: Rex Ritter appears on White1. What do you think of  Rex music and other post-rock bands?

g: I like Jessamine, it’s one of my favourite bands and his new band Fontanelle is pretty cool. Another band I really like is Troum.

m[m]: How did it feel to feature in The Wire?

g: I think it made sense. I hope they will like our new album. A cool thing about Sunn is that it’s so open, different people are going to appreciate it.
s: That was a major accomplishment which I didn’t even think about happening. I realised that my own interpretation of what I was doing was actually too limited. I think that, indirectly, it led to us being invited to the ATP, a huge achievement for any of us personally, it’s really great.

m[m]: The ATP is curated by Autechre this year. Do you know what they think about your music?

s: I haven’t talked to them about it. I assume they’re familiar with us as they invited us at a festival a lot of people want to play but only a few get the chance to. I’m looking forward to meet them.

m[m]: How did the tour go so far?

s: Really great. I predicted that over the course of the tour the music would evolve and that the last gig would turn out to be very progressive for the band. And it’s happening.

m[m]: At first you were quite known for your Descent ‘zine and your artworks for Misanthropy or bands like Emperor. Now people know you for your music. How did that change come about?

s: I was doing bands before. My first band to release records was Thorr’s Hammer in ’95 which gets a lot of respect now. And Burning Witch actually broke up because I moved to England to work for Misanthropy because I thought it was better for  my life and my career. When I moved to New York in ’99 I decided that I was tired of writing about other people’s music because my own understanding of music was so non-global, non-linear. I keep on doing record covers, I do all the Southern Lord lay-outs, I did Troum, the new Emperor, the new Zyklon and other stuff, but not as much as I used to.  I decided to concentrate on my own music, because I think it’s more honest and expressive.

m[m]: You worked on a lot of artworks for Norwegian bands. Are you still in touch with all those people? I saw on Ulver’s Jester records guestbook that you posted a happy new year message last december...

s: I knew Garm a little bit, I wanted to acknowledge what he is doing, send a little sign. I know all those people from the Descent time, we were younger and we evolved. And Ulver, they have that remix album out... I buy all their albums so I guess you can say I like what they are doing now. I definitely appreciate it.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much my good friends from Norway lately. I mean, how realistic is it to have a close relationship with someone who lives in Bergen while you live in New York?

m[m]:  I was quite surprised to hear you were a fan of Galina Utsvolskaya work...

s: I’m a big fan, we used some samples of her music on Flight of the Behemoth.

m[m]:  Funny you mention it because I was listening to the CD today and my father told me “oh that piano bit sounds like Utsvolskaya”.

s: So he is into that mystique kind of things...

m[m]: Well he likes Utsvolskaya but also stuff like Diamanda Galas...

s: He likes Galas? Wow... Well my dad likes Ulver anyway, Nattens Madrigal.

m[m]: What about your other projects, Khanate and Lotus Eaters?

s: Khanate has a 12 inch coming out in June on Load records. It has a remix of No joy and the b-side is a song called Dead, from the new album sessions. The new album, still untitled will be released next september. It sounds pretty different sonically. I think it has a similar spirit but you could imagine the first album as being trapped in a basement by a psychopath while this one is much more open. Greg told me it sounded like those 1990-1995 Albini-produced Chicago kinda bands but at 1 bpm. It’s much slower and the tones are much cleaner. There will be 3 tracks on it.

m[m]: You’re working with James Plotkin. Next step, John Zorn?

s: Well if he wanted to do a guitar Cobra and asked me to play with him I’d say yes. To me he just seems untouchable... As a person who listened to his music when I was 13, I can’t see it happen. But who knows? I had the same feeling listening to OLD when I was 13, you know...

m[m]: What about Lotus Eaters?

s: We have a new album coming out later in the year on Alien8. Probably we will be doing a picture 12 inch on a Conspiracy sub-label. Stephen from Drone was asking about a second edition of the 7 inch on his label, so that might happen too...

m[m]: You’re a busy man...

s: Well, for Lotus Eaters, I go to Aaron Turner’s studio for one week-end and do half-an-hour of music so it’s not as if it takes us a lot of time.

m[m]: You’re playing with Aaron Turner’s band, Isis, in two days...

s: Yeah, he is one of my best friends. Khanate played with Isis a few times. I think it’s really awesome that me and Joe, who are both good friends of them, are going to meet up with them here in Belgium... That is what’s really good with this tour: we crossed path with all those people, it’s all about friendship.

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Thanks to all the people who took photos at various gigs and posted them on the net.