Sunn O))), Jesse Sykes with Phil Wandscher & Bill Herzog @ New Century Hall, Manchester – 28/03/2024

On this Thursday evening, for the grizzled, the crate diggers and the life-damaged, all roads lead to Manchester’s New Century Hall, where we are sucked into vortex for the ceremony of Sunn O))).

The Sunn O))) story is well documented, of course. The latest chapter, perhaps the band’s most defining. 2018’s Life Metal, Pyroclasts and 2021’s Metta, Benevolence. BBC 6Music: Live on the Invitation of Mary Anne Hobbs: the latter, a live document that reinterprets the songs from the band’s preceding two releases. Such as its dynamic force, led by guest vocalist Anna Von Hausswolff, and underpinned by Sunn O))) amplifier worshipers Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, one can interpret Metta Benevolence… as the third part of a trilogy that caps off the band’s most vital period.

Tonight Anderson and O’Malley drag us back to the deepest parts of the black pit that has been their biggest source of inspiration. Where it all began, as Shoshin (初心) Duo, this is Sunn O))) at their most primal and visceral.

Tonal Intoxication: In Conversation with The Lord’s Greg Anderson and Petra Haden

First though, we are eased into the night courtesy of the majesty of Jesse Sykes. Backed by Bill Herzog (of Earth fame) and Phil Wandscher (formerly of Whiskeytown), Skyes unfurls the kind of hazy Americana that moves likes husks in the breeze, (the exquisite Reckless Burning the pick of the bunch tonight). With Wandscher’s tweaks and twangs, Skyes’ songs are ethereal and filmic, passing off a blues-y, folkish slow-motion vibe. It’s beautifully timeless.

The wait isn’t long before the arrival of Sunn O))). The stage, dominated by amplifiers tailor-made for an ungodly racket, which are masqueraded by veils of smoke. Already this is milieu fertile for disorder.

Be-robed, Anderson and O’Malley saunter out onstage and the first notes that ring from their guitars lie somewhere between a crumbling edifice and a Minotaur’s perilous growl.

It’s not so much the rolling sea of volume, but the bowel juddering vibrations that inflict the most harm. Lucky enough to witness the sound check hours earlier, and the New Century Hall’s floorboards (the very same when Jimi Hendrix graced this space), were buckling under the weight of sonic mayhem. The only way to describe it is like walking along the fault lines of an earthquake, and those lucky enough to experience the same moment would agree.

And whilst perhaps not as telling with 1,200 strong battening down the hatches, the experience is still one that is unique. Anderson and O’Malley, orchestrating a performance of sweltering mind-fuckery.

Road Dog Blues: In Conversation with Droneroom’s Blake Conley

While haemorrhaging, walls of sound cannon from the speakers, the thread that runs through this avalanche is actually meditative. The same spirit that Sunn O))) captured and harnessed during their above-noted works, amalgamating the primitive, blackened tonality of ØØ Void and Black One with their humid, psychedelic core of the present, it opens up a new sound portal. This is, indeed, life metal.

And this evening, it lasts for an hour and 20 minutes. A performance that, in many ways, defies belief. A knot within the mind too complex to untangle. From movement of sound to fluctuating tonality, Sunn O))) create an experience of hypnotic catharsis. Words really can’t do it justice, rendering something like this null and void.

And speaking of the latter, that’s exactly what this is. Not an instruction from the void but a communion within it. And after being swallowed up in this space over the past 80 minutes, the crowd are spat out, back into the cold reality of a wet Manchester night, trying to decipher what the fuck just happened.