Considering Sunn O)))’s stock in trade has been the time-dissolving, low-end-driven guitar drone, their work has proved remarkably adaptable.
Lovecraftian portals to realms at the very outer edges of consciousness, every album has been both a psychic potholing expedition and carrier signal for their variously unhinged collaborators. Entering into Scott Walker’s frayed and fragmented nightmare world, however, is the kind of transformative experience that would warp even the most fearless. As much as Sunn O)))’s subsonic mire plunges Walker’s untethered, cold-sweat odes ever deeper into flesh-crawling, nocturnal depths, for the most part even they find themselves stuttering and disintegrating at Soused’s rim, drilling away at the peripheries of the mentor’s alien internal logic. Walker’s sparse delivery forces the band to cycle through incidental sound effects as if to get some purchase – the cracked whips as Scott croons ‘A beating would do me a world of good’, the David Lynch-ian pneumatics pulsing away under Herod 2014 – are all transcripts dredged up from a substrata of dread that will insinuate themselves deep into your waking hours.
