Kannon
Sunn O))) is forbidding in any dose. Stripping away the strings, brass, and choirs that textured 2009’s expansive *Monoliths and Dimensions*, *Kannon* reduces the black metal titans to their Paleolithic best: Three glacial tracks spanning 30 minutes of rumbles, growls, and chasms of feedback so dense and so black it feels like the music might collapse into itself.
Marketing text 110915 Kannon is an album which was composed in the aftershadow of SUNN O)))’s most recent successes in immersive collaboration (the group worked with Scott Walker on Soused, Ulver on Terrestrials in 2013 and 2014) and also from the broad and influential wake of their epitimous Monolith’s & Dimensions . Kannon emerged both independently as a conceptual entity and with roots in the legacies of those projects, yet was fully realised years later, in 2015. The album is 36 minutes in length and consists of three pieces of a triadic whole : Kannon 1, 2 and 3. The album celebrates many SUNN O))) traditions ; Kannon was recorded and mixed with SUNN O)))’s close colleague and coproducer Randall Dunn in Seattle, in Studio Litho, Aleph and Avast! ; and the LP includes performances by long term allies and collaborators Attila Csihar, Oren Ambarchi, Rex Ritter, Steve Moore and others. And at the core the composition centers around the dynamic and intense guitar and bass interplay of SUNN O)))’s founders : Stephen O’Malley & Greg Anderson. It’s possibly the most figurative album SUNN O))) has created, which is unusual as they usually dwell in layers of abstraction and subjectivity. On the other hand the album is the most outright “metal” in years, drawing personal associations and memories of cherished albums like Panzerfaust and Twilight of the Gods again to the forefront of consciousness. At the third time it is very close to the cyclical character of mantra which the band has evolved into as a living creature, the enormity of intense sensate detail and manifestation of the live in concert face of SUNN O))), the organism that has flourished, metamorphosed and transcended tremendously over the past ten years. The literal representation of Kannon is as an aspect of Buddha : specifically “goddess of mercy” or “Perceiving the Sounds (or Cries) of the World”. She is also sometimes commonly known as the Guanyin Bodhisattva (Chinese: 觀音菩薩) amongst a plurality of other forms. There is a rich lineage behind this idea tracing back through many asian belief systems, with as many names and cultural personifications of the idea . SUNN O))) commissioned critical theorist Aliza Shvartz to write a text / liner notes around these ideas and topics. She also explores the relations and perceptions to their approach to these ideas via the metonym of music and SUNN O)))’s place/approach within the framework of music and metal overall. SUNN O))) also commissioned Swiss designer/artist Angela LaFont Bollinger to create the cover artwork, an abstracted sculpture of vision of Kannon, and the French photographer Estelle Hanania to capture portraits of the core trio (Csihar, Anderson, O’Malley) in the impressive and obscurant Emanuel Vingeland mausoleum in Oslo. The LP is packaged in immaculate tip on gatefold sleeve by our long time comrades Stoughton Printing, and pressed at Cascade in Portland, Oregon. CD, download and coloured vinyl versions are also available. – Stephen O’Malley & Greg Anderson / SUNN O))), 11 September 2015
Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) album in six years, and it documents a return to the elements for Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley.
Sunn O)))’s latest is an existential mirror covered in hoarfrost. Each of the LP’s three tracks is vast and indifferent, beckoning the mind to project its own imagery onto the aural canvas. Via Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s hopeless droning, these images are then reflected back in horrifically mutated forms.
The Seattle drone metal duo are back with their seventh album, and some surprisingly accessible tracks. Just don't expect any Christmas number ones.
Kannon, Sunn O)))'s first "solo" project since 2009's Monoliths & Dimensions, poses these questions sonically.
After going off the deep end with Scott Walker on 2014's bleak and experimental Soused, long-running drone metal project Sunn O))) have scal...
It'll be a damn shame if Kannon gets regarded as one of Sunn O)))'s minor works simply for taking up less vinyl real estate and possessing fewer aesthetic points of interest than its predecessors (burying guest vocalist Malefic alive in a coffin to get a
Play it loud enough and the Seattle-based duo’s latest album offers thrills with the disorientation
A review of Kannon by Sunn O))), available December 4th worldwide via Southern Lord Records.
O’Malley and Anderson’s blunt singlemindedness on stage is often counterbalanced by formalist nuance on record.
Ambient metalheads drop the collaborators and lay down some raw and doomy soundscapes. New music review by Guy Oddy