Why go to shows? The common presumption is that when we see bands live, we are witnessing something closer to the actual truth of music: the musicians involved, the instruments and gear used, and the experience of seeing an audience respond to the music in real-time. In our self-isolating age of Spotify and earbuds, listening to music can too often be a solitary experience.
As a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, guitarist and composer David Grubbs has written extensively about the distinctions between live and recorded music in a series of books. In his first book, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (2014), Grubbs discusses the specific tensions between recorded music and live performance.
On the one hand, vinyl records, CDs, and various streaming formats have provided an indispensable means for distributing music, with the creative inspiration drawn from such circulation being inestimable. “My own strongest, most formative experiences with culture had to do with objects set adrift, obscure recordings randomly encountered,” Grubbs writes at one point. “A primary appeal of records had to do with transcending age and geography. As a teenager in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1980s—and with few opportunities to see live music that I truly care about—I immersed myself in fanzines and punk and post-punk records pressed on tiny, often one-off labels.”
In contrast to this milieu of remote listenership was the unique and unrepeatable experience of witnessing live music. Grubbs describes how a move to Chicago for graduate school and the ready availability of seeing different performances by any number of artists changed his perception of music, especially its intensity. A performance of a “radically quiet” work by Morton Feldman at DePaul University left an especially deep impression.
As he recalls, “The Feldman piano piece had me pitched forward, straining to listen, suddenly aware of the exact physical distance between performer and listener; aware of the space of the performance, both sonically and visually; aware of the concentration exercised by individual listeners around me; and awake to the possibilities of music with profoundly quiet dynamics.”
In late November, I saw Sunn O))), the Seattle-based drone metal band, perform at Lincoln Center in New York — a band that retains the exact opposite approach to Feldman’s. Nonetheless, seeing them live brought Grubbs’ remarks to mind. This occasion was my second time seeing Sunn O))) last year, the first being in Paris last April. Both performances demonstrated Grubbs’ main argument about the differences between recorded and live material. They also illustrated the contingent nature and subtle differences that can define separate performances. Put summarily, to listen to recorded music is to gain awareness; to listen to live music is to gain understanding.
Founded in 1998, Sunn O))) are helmed by Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, two guitarists who have been part of the metal scene since the late 1990s. They have released nine studio albums, developing a cult following for the elemental quality and sheer aural volume of their music. There is a no-frills, even Zen-like aspect to their drone metal approach: just two guitars played slowly and extremely loudly.
Their show in April was my first time seeing them. Sunn O))) performed at L’Élysée Montmartre, a venue located in Paris’ historic bohemian neighborhood once known for the legendary cabaret Moulin Rouge. On this occasion, all the metalheads showed up with black hoodies, seemingly the dominant attire, a shared and unspoken cultural universal, which further reflected the aesthetic of the band.
Extending this point, there is an undeniably self-conscious camp quality to Sunn O))). Anderson and O’Malley appeared on stage in their signature Franciscan monk robes and proceeded to play amid billowing stage smoke and a slow-moving light show that cast a purple atmosphere across the audience. The amplifiers themselves seemed to be arranged as if a smaller version of Stonehenge had been assembled to enhance the mood. The small red lights designating that they were on looked like evil eyes.
It is simple and difficult to describe what it is like to listen to drone metal for 80 or so minutes. Or even the appeal of doing so. There is the novelty of listening to music that is so loud that it stops becoming music. Sunn O))) fundamentally tests the limits of what a song is: its contours, its duration, its need for rhythm, its need for change, its need for narrative. The elimination of these core elements is arguably what defines drone music.
Accompanying these musical qualities and their absence, though, is the physicality of drone metal. Sound consists of waves, and you feel those waves rocking you, entering your body and vibrating a different energy into place. It holds the potential to shake off complacency, spiritual and otherwise.
A kind of warmth can set in, but also at times a fear, even a claustrophobia. The space of drone metal is not necessarily a friendly one. Perhaps by definition, it is not, given the pummeling sound. Yet, there is a pleasure, too, in temporarily inhabiting such staged conditions of uncertainty and trepidation, which are unusual for a musical performance. They call for a letting go of expectation and even time itself.
This same set-up was present for their Lincoln Center performance in David Geffen Hall on 17 November, which was part of Unsound New York, a concert series curated by Mat Schulz. Given the more austere establishment context of Lincoln Center, a different side of Sunn O))) materialized. The experimental Guatemalan musician Mabe Fratti opened, which seemed perfect in retrospect. Though her music is very different, she shares a similar ethos of questioning what a song is. She also made her cello sound uncannily metal.
Lincoln Center appeared to both legitimate and constrain Sunn O))). Though the audience resembled the one in Montmartre, the performance was seated and more formal. It had the atmosphere of a performance piece – a work of installation art – rather than fundamentally a rock show, which the Paris appearance maintained. By definition, it can be difficult to know what Sunn O))) songs are being played, given their slow pacing and extreme volume. It seemed especially hard on this occasion, with little variation during their performance.
Does this mean Sunn O)))’s Lincoln Center performance was the lesser of the two? Not necessarily. The show in Paris was looser and more comfortable with an audience that knew what to expect. In New York, there were several instances of audience members leaving the auditorium before the performance was finished, knowingly or unknowingly keeping up a tradition first established by Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913.
Returning to Grubbs, it is clear that Sunn O))) had separate stage presences and impacts on these two occasions. Their music conveyed different qualities and meanings, with the audiences shaping each event. As Grubbs notes, performances are not only fashioned by the musicians but by context, audience, and similar contingencies.
In his recent book, Good Night, The Pleasure Was Ours (2022), Grubbs puts this perpetual, dialectical scenario more obliquely, writing, “The musicians see an opening and pounce. They produce a jagged, deafening sound, the most lacerating attack of which they’re collectively capable. All the howling voices in the room are enveloped, voices recast as unheard music.”
In a similar spirit, it can be difficult to determine when a Sunn O))) performance might end, given their deconstruction of music. One tell-tale sign is that Anderson and O’Malley stop playing and raise their hands to the sky, with knowledgeable audience members doing the same. Only a few did this at Lincoln Center. Many did so in Paris. There is a communal moment amid the deafening noise and reverberations, which still continue after their instruments have been put down, and then a coup de grace: a sudden, thundering silence.