Sunn O))) Exclusive Interview Transcripts: Stephen O'Malley

As an album title, Monoliths & Dimensions seems like a fairly straightforward summation of Sunn O)))'s central concept. However, given that the material itself is probably your most complex to date, was it partly designed to mislead those who think they know what to expect from a Sunn O))) album?

“I envision the title as being symbolic of the complexity that can exist in something that's seemingly quite... not simple, but straightforward. I think Sunn O)))'s music has always had that quality but this is the first time that we've actually been able to really focus on that specifically. Like any title of an album, there were a lot of different names thrown around. But I have to say that at least the 'Dimensions' part of the title has been in place the entire time. That was always the working title. It's a very literal explanation of our concept, like, take this piece of music and analyse it”

Can you disclose some of the other potential titles?

“I'd rather not disclose the process of coming to a final title. It took a while. And some of the people involved are still suggesting titles but... I put my foot down [laughs].”

You mentioned earlier that there was a lot of material left over from the Monoliths sessions. How did you decide what to include and what to omit?

“Well, basically what happened, in the first session that happened in Seattle in October '07, we did about two weeks of tracking ideas, some of which were pretty fleshed out before we even got there, some of which were written in the studio. Actually, all of the music on the album was written in the studio. We had to come to the decision, are we gonna make a double CD or are we gonna make an album? We decided it's wiser to make an album rather than try and make a... I mean, this material's so strong on its own, I think having too much of it might be a bit overkill for this direction. Plus, conceptually, a lot of the material fits together in a certain way too. The feeling on this album is more open, and... I mean, it's strong, it does have its aggressive qualities, through the guitars of course, but it's not so claustrophobic, which was our main concept with Black One; it was claustrophobic and overpowering. This one is like, 'Okay, how do we expose the other side of that?' We went through our period of personal darkness at the time, at least for myself, and it's like we kinda came out of that wiser. That's kind of the feeling of these tracks. There's another set of tracks called Kannon, with a 'k', the Hindu version, that may or may not be tied into an album, but that had more of a conceptual link to those pieces.”

They stood separately from the Monoliths pieces?

“I guess from the beginning those things were all ready, in this place, but then the other material which turned into this album, was the stuff that was developed more, inside itself.”

Let's talk about Sunn O)))'s previous album, Black One. Obviously I don't want to intrude on the area of personal darkness...

“Good [laughs]. A lot of people do.”

How do you respond when people try to probe?

“I say, 'You wanna talk about my music?' Which is Catch 22. I mean, that kind of thing is always much clearer in retrospect, those periods of your life. It's pretty amazing, looking back at that time, for me, like, what was happening. Now I can see clearly. It makes a lot of sense, stuff like that... a lot of fucked up things happened on tour after Black One. We did a lot of touring at the time, and speaking for myself, I behaved like a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, that's how I was trying to deal with whatever I had going on at the time, but luckily, my main collaborative partner, Greg, and the other people involved, stuck through it. Sunn O))) was strong enough not to flip that way. It's kind of funny, that record's got a pretty obvious atmosphere. Moodwise, I think it's a pretty stark exploration of some of the emotional qualities Sunn O))) has. The thing that always blows my mind with Sunn O))) is that each time we have a new period of work, it personifies itself with the album. It's always amazing me how multifaceted the emotional feeling can be. All the records to me are very, very different in that way, I don't know if that's a sophistication or an actual continuation of the music, the chemistry, the fire involved.”

I think it's possible that after Black One, many had Sunn O))) pegged as a Black Metal band, as though you'd settled on that as your genre of choice.

“Uh-huh. Black One was interesting, because there were a couple of things that happened to the band at that time. One, we got a lot of recognition outside of musical spheres even, even in the art world, stuff started happening, and there were things like the New York Times article. And the other thing that happened with that record was, rather than being a new direction, it was actually more of a culmination of a longer interest than any of the other influences of Sunn O))) except for maybe Earth and the Melvins. Personally, I'd been doing fanzines in the early '90s focusing on Black Metal, I'd been designing records, working with record labels, all this stuff. So it's not like a new concept to me. Looking backwards, maybe it was finally a release, a purging – part of a longer purging [laughs]. But musically, I think that might be where it came from.

“It was also the peak of Greg's and my parallel interest in Black Metal. I mean, it's still there for me, I don't know how important it is, but there's definitely a peak in its importance in the palette of music we're listening to, and maybe in a broader scale too, it seems like Black Metal has waned again for the next period. So, somehow, rather than being like a direction at the time, maybe it was more of an aesthetic, or a purging, that may have come off as a direction. To me, I think there's more in common musically with a lot of that material to the first two tracks of Flight Of The Behemoth than there is to Burzum, or Emperor, or Immortal or stuff like that. You can exercise a lot of aesthetics on an abstract music and get a lot of different results. We could have tried to exercise a different aesthetic on that record and come across not Black Metal at all. We had black robes at that point. But that's something we were resisting from the beginning, when we decided to do that. That was the first idea that came up, like, 'We can't do that, it's too obvious!' But at that point, at the time, Black One came out and it seemed appropriate or whatever.”

And if you're going to employ a signifier, an obvious one can be highly effective...

“Well if we wanna play with the ceremonial aesthetic, the ritual aesthetic, y'know, like any aesthetic, it's a tool to guide people's impressions but it's also revealing a lot of truth, and a lot of hope, in what something can be. So as part of that ceremonial aesthetic, I thought it was very appropriate for Black One, considering the traditional Satanic or occult links that Black Metal always has had, and certainly heavy metal has had. But Sunn O))) obviously doesn't fall into that.”