1955: "Louie Louie" is penned and originally performed by Richard Berry, songwriter and frontman for R&B; outfit Richard Berry and the Dreamers.
1963: "Louie Louie," as interpreted by Portland, Oregon garage-band the Kingsmen, causes a sensation, due in no small part to the unintelligible lyrical rendition by lead singer Jack Ely. While on the road, bassist Norm Sundholm, appalled by the lack of volume available from his bass cabinet, contacts brother Conrad Sundholm to help him with a solution.
1964: While the state of Indiana bans the Kingsmens' hit "Louie Louie" from the radio, citing suspected obscenities in the aforementioned "unintelligible lyrical rendition" (a case which FBI head J. Edgar Hoover himself would take up and not drop until 1965), Conrad Sundholm creates the world's first high-powered concert bass amplifier.
1965: An increased interest in the amplifiers leads to increased orders from guitarists and bassists alike, prompting Conrad to move the operation out of his Father's garage. The Sunn amplifier company is born.
1969: Sunn amplifiers are used for the famed monstrous sound system at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in upstate New York.
"The SUNNO))) mission is to create trance like soundscapes with the ultimate low end/bottom frequencies intended to massage the listeners intestines into an act of defecation."
Before forming this band in honor of Earth, the powerful drone/doom outfit who somehow released four albums on Sub Pop while maintaining a higher doom:drone ration than any other band from the Northwest, Steve O'Malley and Greg Anderson did time in Burning Witch and Goatsnake, respectively. But SUNNO))) is a different beast entirely, a dual homage to the two things that count: bravado and volume.
Flight of the Behemoth is fifty minutes of well-calculated doomdrone that, in one swift take, manages to sound slower than Sleep, more hypnotic than Sabbath, and ten times more powerful than any early 60s NYC drone music (John Cale, Tony Conrad, etc.), and for one simple reason: it's based on metal.
The opening track, "Death Becomes You," does not fade in. It kicks the fucking door open and does not stop riffing every so slightly until the end of its thirteen minutes when it crackles out with the sound of a chorus of crackling, speakerkilling malfunctions. "Mocking Solemnity" follows, employing similar tactics, save for some extra feedback and a bit more high-end.
"SunnO)))BOW 1" and "SunnO)))BOW 2" are extremely well-fortified remixes of SUNN O))) tracks by Masami Akita, who you might know better by his alias, Merzbow. Merzbow steps in on top of these tracks, and, his match met the by low-end sludgemasters present in the mix, decides to liven the tracks up with some plunking piano in the left channel, accompanied by signature high-end noise bursts in the right. The second remix ends in a terrifying swirl of noise and bass which comes pretty close to the SUNNO))) mission referenced above. Needless to say, the addition of Merzbow to these tracks is very welcome.
The final track, entitled "FWTBT: (I dream of Lars Ulrich being thrown the bus window instead of my master Mystikall Kliff Burton)," starts out with what sounds like a detuned 808 kickdrum hit, before it melts savagely into a furious and panting repetition of the previous track's nicely executed M.O. Add some faint drumming and some overtly breathy "singing" and you have what sounds like a Sabbath song with all the tricks focused in one place, stretched out over ten minutes, without the imagery necessary to propel you straight downward.
When I first heard Sleep's "Jerusalem," I thought that the ultimate in slowness and deliberation had been reached, that it would not be possible to transcend the completely stoned realm of Nazareth that the hour-long concept album champions. Obviously, I wasn't looking hard enough.
This album sounds like it could have been recorded ten miles away from Woodstock while it was happening, with special microphones buried ten miles below the surface of the earth to only catch the vibrations of the bass on stage and the pounding of all those hippies doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. The trajectory that begins with Richard Berry and ends with Merzbow leaves me wondering what J. Edgar Hoover would have thought of this album. And then I remember that he was a crossdresser.
