Sunday, December 14, 2008

Stephen O'Malley & Attila Csihar: 6°FSkyquake

The only time I’ve ever fallen asleep during a show, funnily enough, was at a Sunn)))O show in Melbourne several years ago. They were playing deep in the night, and most people had gone home, wearied by all the noises that had been going on, more or less non-stop, since that afternoon. A few of us stayed, watching these strange bearded men in pagan outfits play monolithic one-note riffs; riffs so big, it seemed, they had to be played slowly, to bear out in volume and space what they forsook in melody. The show was all the more affecting for its meagre audience, lending it an air of esotericism the other acts, for all their wilful weirdness, couldn’t muster.

The stage had been transformed into an almost comical wall-like assemblage of amps, a swinging keyboard adorned with what seemed to be foliage hung from the venue’s faux-Roman sky. The noise was immense, the kind perfect for people who enjoy music as a more bodily sensation, the kind that bypasses the heart and heads straight for the organs. I felt it in my bowels, in my spine, vibrating through my whole body. At some point, I staggered over to a booth and lay down, curled up in a ball, awash in a drone whose size only my body could comprehend.

I haven’t had much to do with Sunn O))) since then, preferring, for the most part, the tamer, warmer, more soothing end of the drone spectrum. That was until last week, when my venerable editor thrust upon me 6°FSkyquake, a collaboration between Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley and Attila Csihar, the latest from Mego’s experimental offshoot Mego Editions. Released in a limited run of 500, 6°FSkyquake was created for a gallery exhibition by Banks Violette, the American sculptor whose dark minimalism seems a perfect fit for O’Malley and Csihar’s more spacious exploration here.

The original composition, played at two galleries simultaneously, ran for eight hours and thirty minutes through three separate systems. This piece, presented here as a room recording of a part of that work, clocks in at just over half an hour, but gives us enough a sense of what original might have been like: a piece, it seems, created very clearly with the sonics and context of a gallery in mind — stretches of quiet, almost remote electronics, what sounds like processed TV static and a cold, distant wind giving way to O’Malley’s droning, sub-Gregorian voice of the ancients intoning from somewhere below you, a thin, almost sharp pulse underlying it all.

Originally published here.

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