ni.chol.as

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been, ooh, seven months since I posted. Winter is brutal to the desire to write or photograph or indeed do anything at all other than ensconce oneself in a warm bed and talk bollocks at IRC.

I did end up going to all those concerts mentioned in the last post. By far the most noteworthy was Sunn O))) whose concert was too unique to transfer to any other medium than, perhaps, writing. Photographs wouldn’t tell you about the sound and no microphone could capture the sheer breadth of the sound they produce. The genre is, ostensibly, their own. Drone Metal takes instruments, guitars, keyboards, electronic eclectica with many knobs and foreign logos on them, and turns it into a wall of intense noise, feeding back, crescendoing and falling away over the course of minutes. One song can be an hour long. Taking something like this to stage led Sunn O))) at least to don stage personae. Black hooded robes, a la grim reaper, on each of the performers hides their faces and keeps the onus on the mystery; mainly the mystery of what twisted people invented something like this.
For “Drone Metal”, I thought there’d be a lot more black-clad long-haired types at the venue than actually turned up. Instead it attracted a quite indecipherable range of people. It felt like word of mouth drove people to this gig than any adherence to stereotype, subculture or fandom. The result was that people-watching, the only entertainment you have when you’re alone at a gig, was even more fun. There was a man with a foot long beard and a beret who was smiling incoherently at nothing. I have no idea if he knew what was about to happen to his ears or if he knew, had plans to survive, and was grinning in the way a master criminal knows he’s outwitted everyone. Another man, a fat, balding geek whose only excuse for his neoprene bumbag was that he was probably from the continent was wondering around with glasses on retainer strings in a way which isn’t legal in the UK until you have been teaching for 25 years.

Before Sunn O))) was a Japanese trio called Boris. The first strum on the combined bass and lead guitar was so impossibly loud and baritone that I couldn’t swallow. I moved forward to see what was going on and watch them play for an hour, mellow rock tunes complete with drum breaks slowed down tenfold, like you’re listening underwater, on drugs, near a black hole. Boris’s guitar, double necked, was missing the head end as if his neighbour had taken offense to the awful noise their practice sessions made and sawn it off in protest. It was used expertly to feedback and overlap its own notes in ways I ceased to understand. I just kicked back and absorbed it all with the rest of the crowd. They all looked mesmerised and swayed slowly, like manboobs on an exercise bike. Time passed and endless crescendo after crescendo were playing out on stage in ever more intense waves. A porky-eyed nerd pushed past me and blocked my view in order to assess the girl on guitar. He prodded his friend and gave his enthusiastic assessment of the girl. They nodded in agreement, cementing her place as his next masturbatory fantasy. When the the cacophony finally ended, I missed it. It was like someone turned off a machine whose noise you’d long since gotten used to. It’s a weird experience, this genre. The absence of a regular beat gives you nothing to hang your brain on and with nothing to latch your attention on to, you don’t really listen to it at all, you just absorb it.

Sunn O))) come next. I watch them setting up. An array of sinister electronics on stage as if HR Giger fucked Korg and squeezed out little alien machines born exclusively to fuck with your ears. The drum kit had its own amps. Faced with the concept of aural armageddon, someone played “Surfin’ USA” over the PA. Just to fuck with us. More and more amps take the stage until there back of the stage is made entirely from speakers. This looks like it’s going to be seriously loud. I have a sudden recollection of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and a concert held on a planet’s surface only safely observed from bunkers hundreds of miles away. I want a bunker, now.

The band take the stage. The lead singer looks like the progeny of Rob Zombie and a tree. He only had one visible arm which appeared to be evidence he’d recently been fisting a Hawthorn bush, covered in wiry, woody protuberances. Sunn O))) hit their first, astounding, chord. The porky-eyed nerd screamed as his eyeballs exploded over the neck of the hipster girl stood in front of him. She screamed and her ears exploded in bloody fountains as if someone had stuck a carnation in each ear. The annoying squeaky-voiced girl behind me stopped talking and seemed to be collecting her prolapsed guts from the floor where she’d deposited them shortly after the sound hit. In the toilets, two inexplicably suited men were taking a piss as the crescendo hit. Their groins exploded in their hands and I see them later, crawling around in the shit and the piss, quite insane now.

I take a seat on the floor next to a tired-legged emo girl amongst the lost eyeballs and missing entrails. I can’t see the band performing, but it’s irrelevant. They are a band to hear, and besides, if I stand up I’ll be subjected to the full force of that wall of sound and be liable to lose my hearing. Or eyeballs. My glass of beer, on the floor in front of me, looks like that cup of coffee from Jurassic Park warning of the impending dinosaur, with concentric rings wobbling about on the surface. I look down at it seconds later and see it moving across the floor with the vibrations. I put it between my feet to keep it from escaping. There’s stage diving going on in front of me, everyone’s arms are raised up and there’s applause and cheering but you can’t hear a thing of it. The sound turns to mush, falls apart and collapses to the ground and all that’s left is screaming tinitus that stays for three days.