Listen Up, Nerds 2: The End Of The Earth
Recapping Sunn O)))'s 12/17/22 Performance at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, USA
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Red Hook might as well be the end of the earth. The G Train can take me to Smith and 9th but I’m still walking a mile from that train to my final destination. Pioneer Works is a large art space near the pier where I took a ferry to Dumbo and ate underwhelming vegan food under the Manhattan Bridge in October 2020. That night, my girlfriend told me that everyone in Dumbo works in Manhattan and pays Manhattan prices to live a short train ride from Manhattan. The neighborhood was loud from the B, D, N, and Q lines going over the bridge at a steady pace, but was sterile. Sure, this was in the middle of the pandemic, but there wasn’t a soul around us, save for some rats that tried to eat a bite of my vegan chopped cheese. I don’t remember seeing anyone on the streets. Maybe a couple of people in the small park where we dined, but that was it. Just us, some rats, and the din of the train interrupting us every four to eight minutes. I lived in Denver at the time and could often bask in complete silence if I went out to the park at night or went on a walk in the early morning. There was still a low hum but, as the saying goes, that’s life in the big city.
As we walked back to Red Hook that night, the borough came back to life. We saw people playing volleyball and basketball on the pier and we walked within six feet of more people as we walked through Brooklyn Bridge park. Silver Toyotas and Citi Bikes turned into weirder, older cars and odder, folksier home decorations. It got quiet. Not that Red Hook is dirty, but it’s the opposite of Dumbo. It’s not convenient to commute by train, it’s historically working class, but most importantly, it’s quiet. A kind of quiet reserved for places outside of New York. On my walk to Pioneer Works in December 2022, I walked through Coffey Park and realized there was no one around. This time, truly not a soul. I could hear someone a few blocks away coughing the way that someone coughs when it’s their first time smoking a joint. I thought I heard “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” by Whitney Houston coming from a car in the same direction.
I was walking to Pioneer Works to see Sunn O))), the drone/doom metal band that you might know from memes or that one really off-putting guy from your freshman english class in 2009. The thing about Sunn O))) that I would love to put into your head, dear reader, is that while there are plenty of dorks who love Sunn O))) and want to find community in drone metal, I don’t find seeing Sunn O))) live in concert to be a community experience. There will undoubtedly be people there, but the experience is your own. You get what you want out of it, in the same way that you would at an art museum.
The last time I went to MoMA, I stood in front of Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome (1961) for about five to 10 minutes. It’s a mesmerizing piece. It’s all one color (of Klein’s own creation, as much as one can “create” a hue that has always existed) but it doesn’t look like a painting. Sure, it’s pigment on canvas but there aren’t any visible brushstrokes. There aren’t any pools where there is more or less pigment than other spaces on the canvas. It is one color. True monochrome. It looks like a big version of a swatch from Home Depot. It’s the deepest blue you’ve ever seen. You can see yourself staring back in the ultramarine abyss. This doesn’t feel like a painting, it feels printed. It feels created. It doesn’t feel like art as much as it feels like a found object, as old as time, that is the perfect representation of that color.
I spent a lot more time looking at the various Rothkos at MoMA. Mark Rothko is my favorite painter. I cannot get enough of his work. Sure, the scale is impressive, but so is the simplicity. Just a few lines, some thicker than others, large expanses of one color, maybe a sliver of another. Staring at them from a couple of feet away, you get lost in them. Some are a pleasant trip through the countryside, some are hellscapes that Bosch would be proud of. It’s not for everyone. These are not pretty pictures, for the most part. Rothko was once commissioned for a set of murals at the Four Seasons in NYC. He knew it was an upscale restaurant and refused to give these people something beautiful."I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room... [I will] Make those rich bastards feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall." Before finishing, he took his wife to the restaurant for a meal. He hated it. He called a friend to say that he was sending the money back and wouldn’t be giving the paintings to the restaurant. "Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he said.
Sunn O)))’s live show is like Blue Monochrome (1961) or Rothko’s No. 3/No. 13 (1951). You have to sink into it. You have to want to get something out of it. The first time I saw them, back in 2019, the entire venue filled up with so much fog that I couldn’t see anyone within three feet of me, let alone the performers on stage. I want to say there were four or five of them, all shrouded in robes. Now and then, the fog would die down and I would see them holding their aluminum-necked guitars aloft like Moses parting the Red Sea with his staff. Sometimes they handed the guitars to each other gingerly as notes rang out, so as to not disturb the sound. I felt the whole show reverberating through my hollow chest. I felt trapped and thought my only salvation was through the priests on stage.
In 2022, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley were the only priests on stage. Sunn O))) refers to this as their “Shoshin Duo.” The word “shoshin” refers to the Japanese Buddhist concept of “beginner’s mind,” a healthy attitude of openness and eagerness to learn. It’s about throwing preconceptions out the window and entering every new environment with a blank slate in your brain.
The venue itself didn’t provide for the religious experience I had in Denver in 2019. Pioneer Works is too deep and too tall for the fog to sit and envelop you. It’s too open to feel each chord ring through your body and shake your organs. It’s less of a religious experience but more of a mystery. I still couldn’t see the duo through the fog. Every now and again, I’d see one of them in a black robe, lit with blue light, and then a cloud of fog would appear, turn the figure into a silhouette, and that silhouette would become a wisp of smoke and assimilate into the rest of the cloud.
I had to leave a little early and it’s not like I was missing out on a ton. At the end of the day, it’s two guys in robes making loud noises. I got what I wanted from the experience that night. I stepped outside to call a lyft. $43 before tip. No chance. As I began my mile walk back to Smith and 9th, I listened to the roar of the band from outside the venue. I got to the end of the street and could still hear them. Then I got another block away and I could still hear them. Finally, I got far enough away that I could no longer hear them. I think. The sounds of Sunn O))) faded into the dull roar of the city. I’m not sure where they stopped and the city itself started, or if they ever stopped. I’m not sure there was much of a difference. That sound they play is the same sound you hear humming from every air conditioner, every car’s exhaust, every almost-dead light bulb. It’s the same sound roaring at the core of the earth. I thought about my journey in reverse. I imagined getting off the train and searching for the source of the dull roar that comes from every city, hearing it get louder and louder as I got closer to the pier, to find two figures in black robes playing some of the loudest music I’ve ever heard from the most amps I’ve ever seen on one stage, all at the end of the earth in Red Hook.