In the flawed 1997 space-horror trip Event Horizon, an experimental craft achieves fabulous feats of locomotion via a mechanism that displaces time and space. Sweet! See you at Uranus. Unfortunately, this spontaneous generation of black holes is like requesting gold circle seats in Hell, and a torrent of horrifying shit befalls the ship's crew. While ultimately an unrewarding genre exercise, there's a kernel of spooky genius in the film's concept: It imagines a future where humanity's technological itch finally scratches open a purely metaphysical wound, an evil-bleeding gash in reality that neither David Bowman nor The Oracle can help sew up. It suggests that IT and machines are only stacking our teetering tower of sanity higher. Innovation doesn't destroy our collectively freaky history-- it just pays it to go away for a while. And when similarly dangerous black holes are conjured from psycho sonic depths, our sick, dark, peanut-brain past comes forward to complete the real circle of life.
Earth knew this; so does Sunn 0))). The former's 1990s Sub Pop releases were long-form experiments in monolithic tone that tweaked our brain pans and smudged the margin between metal riff and irritable bowel. Naturally, they were incredible. For a few years now, Sunn 0))) has been paying tribute at Earth's altar with a series of mostly guitar-based releases that flow from a similar vein of doomy trance and sickly noise. But while Earth eventually settled on imagining what would happen if a muscle car's energy was harnessed, flattened and pounded into the shape of a bong, Sunn's sonic signature has drifted from post-stoner rock thrum into uncharted regions of stalagmite drone. 2003's White1 genuflected to the black arts while deconstructing doom metal and sludgy trance; even when there were vocals, its sonic power tried to cut a hole in the world.
The resulting White2 is defined by its cover art. On the front, faceless, cloaked peasants gather bounty as a lookout stands watch up a tree. Are they boldly stealing the fruits of their evil master's garden? Or are they feudal discards, their souls broken, content to wait out death working for the whims of another? The answer might lie somewhere in the circular diameter of the grid on its back cover, or in its cryptic statement, "Optimized for blackened sub-bass systems." Likewise, though the artwork may depict the Old World, it's an inside-out version, the result of serfs falling, limbs flailing, into that metric black hole.
Sunn offer salve for the hole walls with White2's three lengthy pieces. There's a kind of bliss in the folds of "Helloween"'s distorted bass and tensile, wavering electric guitars-- its thick, repetitive chord changes might be the steadily gaining footfalls of a giant whose friends have already left you beaten and bloodied. Appropriately, the song's second half descends into droning death knells of tonal squall, a requiem for humanity. On its surface, "Helloween" are riffs made miles long by sustain. But that length is like a timeline, or a trajectory from the simple fears of man's formative years through the powerfully unsettling simplicity of two distorted guitars and an enormous bass cabinet. On White2, Sunn set their amps on "primeval."
If "Helloween" is human history distilled, "Bass Aliens" is a 23 minute-plus representation of queasy creeping death, filled with the echoing plinks of guitar strings and giant, sea monster swells of bass noise. 'Noise', because after a few minutes the low rumbles are matched and intensified by a processed feedback rattle, its insistent clapping and rattling a tense preamble like the clatter of an unlatched storm door before a F5 twister. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the track doesn't quite deliver on its foreboding run-up-- with a final flurry of chop, the storm blows over. But the world isn't getting off that easy.
Sunn end White2 with "Decay 2 [Nihils' Maw]", and a guest appearance from Mayhem affiliate vocalist Attila Cishar. Clocking in at nearly half an hour, it's a hissing, howling piece of ambient death that suggests angry souls escaping from a manmade tomb. Guitar notes and basslines shudder and eventually buckle, reassembling into unrecognizable strings of sound. Melody falls away as atonal sediment sifts into a gaping black maw. Faraway echoes could be manic laughter, but they also sound like that incessant, humid drip that persists inside the reptile houses of zoos. The high-pitched whisper of disembodied choral groups rise in crescendo as peels of breathy screams course beneath Attila's wordless throat singing. And when he finally begins to make words, it's in a terrifying dead language scarier than Sam Neil's eyebrows. "Decay 2" might be ol' crazy humanity's last hope for redemption, but Sunn 0))) leave us no indication of survival or death.
