Last night I attended the spectacle of Sunn 0))).
Three normal men walked up to their respective instruments and proceeded to play doom laden with psychadelia, chants and the occasional tambourine, this was OM. Their first two songs were less psychadelic and more traditional doom, utilizing the gargantuan stack of Sunn 0))) and Orange amps to further boost their bass driven deity. during the mid part of the set things took a softer, slower approach which had many of the aged 50+ members of the crowd stood next to me in absolute amazement, the only problem I had at this point was the sterile nature of the group, everything they wanted was precise and took away from the overall warmth of their set. Coming up to 9 o' clock they played their set closer, finishing up with a quiet to loud number that went down brilliantly.
After half an hour of backing music that wouldnt have been out of place in some 1950's movie, dry ice filled up the stage as expected and after what seemed like an eternity of waiting, three robed figures appeared. The first wave of drones hit like a heavy tide, first my head started to vibrate and little by little my whole body joined it. After twenty minutes of this, a fourth figure crept slowly from behind the veil of artificial fog and started to chant, Atilla Csihar had now become present in all of this and a new dimension had opened up in this "show" the drones of O' Malley and Anderson had softened to a hush and Moore also started creating whirls of his own noise from his Korg, soon to pull out a trombone and scare the wits out of some onlookers, Csihar by this point, had become a swirl of fog still invoking unatural forces through strange dance, death growls, black metal screams and intensely deep montone chants.
By this point some of the crowd were leaving half an hour into the performance, soon after Atilla left the stage and then the second wave of drones came, each time they changed my body wanted to do something different, at one point it felt like I was being hit by the sound, breathing became slightly difficult at this point, suddenly I felt like sleeping and my body was moving in slight increments like a pendulum while I closed my eyes, I really cant explain how this was happening, but all the while the three menacing cloaked figures, two with instrument held high were causing all this with such little effort it seemed.
The noise started to gradually die down and it looked to be ending, until Csihar resumed his place now garbed in mirror robe, laser hands and glass spike crown, for an extremely elongated, free form version of 'Big Church (Megszentségtelenيthetetlenségeskedéseitekért)'. Dredging their way through this with Csihar reciting the title over and over into a clear glass head, running lasers over his face, crown and the all of the stunned onlookers, as this by definable terms "glass creature" mesmerised for a second time and then it was done, no big endings just a simple stop and a resounding amount of applause and the robed ones revealing themselves with arms held high.
This was one of the greatest experiences of my life and I shall never forget it.
