Review Summary: “Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.” – The Metta Sutta
Sunn O))), despite being shrouded in smoke and cloaks, do not deceive. There is no trickery, no wool over your eyes.
When you enter the masquerade to see them live, you will see more amplifiers than you will hear guitar chords. You will experience glacial vibration more than you will experience character or complexity. Their culling is in whether you despise or embrace this simple matter.
But when you do embrace this matter, you may be surprised to find there’s more color to the dark hooded figures than was initially assumed.
There’s an organ drone, and the unconstructed, unintelligible chanting of Anna von Hausswolff.
“Troubled Air,” at first guise inscrutable from the behemoth roars that precede it, hits boiling points where the barraging waves of the ocean transmigrate into the winds of air. Lightning appears where you once thought there was only thunder. It is angelic, and where you once thought you were deep in the weeds of earth, you find yourself in the touching of electric poles - lightning. You find that you were never actually even that far from heaven.
Going back you realize there was always this beauty within the thunder. That the lightning, the inscrutable personality you’ve now fallen in love with, really, came from this One. And that you could have never really experienced the love without the loving-kindness (Metta) of that which rests underneath it all. The form underlying all the formlessness.
