Bristol
31 March 2024
A sparking musicality drawn between Jesse Sykes on voice and acoustic guitar, Phil Wandscher on electric and Bill Herzog on bass. Stripped to the desiccated bones of their Sweet Hereafter project and lit in red against a backdrop of SunnO)))‘s mighty amplifier cliff-face, their spectral folk-rock really struck a chord with the early attendees.
A really well rounded set that slipped slowly into a dense swell of noise that marked their finale – a tasty over-driven derailment that found Phil Wandscher abusing his amp into a wall of fedback squeal, setting a pre-scene for the main act to follow.
As for the main feast it was all about the carnality of the live experience, and that cacooning corona of grainy drone swishing around you was intense, overwhelming (got me wishing I’d brought some ear protection). The dry ice silhouettes of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley dipping in and out of fog (their carbon dioxide bill must be astronomical) as the lights cut the stage up into broken shards. A Caligari-like dagger to that rumbling rampage as rising vapour is textural-sliced like a futurist MRI scan, filling your eyes with swirling phantoms. Of all the times we’ve seen SunnO))) in action, this is definitely the best. The doom theatrics seem to be taken to a new level, visually grasping the apocalyptic with fresh conviction, the red disc lights behind glowing like dying suns cloaked in smokey blooms. Beacons shivering out in radiating spokes of arrowing light as the sound luxuriates in the smouldering pyroclastic cliff fall.An endlessly disrupting, throbbing, primordial mass of guitar that seemed to amalgamate 25% concrete, 25% steel and 50% glass into an enormous sheet that was sent crashing into a planet like some futuristic battle cruiser. Are they playing songs? Do they even have a set list in mind before they emerge or do they act off the cuff, imbuing each appearance with the air of a unique ritual? Who knows, but there’s no denying that the sheer physicality of this was immense.
Literally breathtaking, a slow-mo of decaying breaths plunging gritty ripples through your body and making crop circles of your nose hair. On closed eyes it was like being tossed around, lost in the weight of crashing waves then suddenly shot into a quaking crumble full of satelliting scar tissue. A show that transformed the duo’s simple guitars into devotional relics that slammed you straight into a catastrophic gouge of a finale. A tour de force that saw O’Malley placing his guitar on top of one of the speakers, coaxing a further cacophony from an already howling instrument, while Anderson plunged his guitar head ground-ward, splintering the awestruck crowd in bony spectres of feedback – an unholy baptism to that sea of upraised arms.We left the venue absolutely buzzing.
-Words: Mr Olivetti and Michael Rodham-Heaps-
-Pictures: Michael Rodham-Heaps-
