photo by Peter Beste
METALION: The Slayer Mag Diaries foreword contributor and general Bazillion Points ambassador Stephen O’Malley is about to put forth a new studio release by his highly influential, ball-rattling band SUNN 0))). Kannon will be available on gatefold LP, CD, and digital formats worldwide on December 4, with a limited number of clear vinyl available on “Black Friday RSD,” Friday, November 27. There’s also talk of bringing back some of the Darkthrone and Bathory darkness that brought the band together in the first place nearly twenty years ago.
Here’s the sc00)))p:
It comes with immense pleasure for Southern Lord Recordings to announce the advent of a new studio album from SUNN O))), Kannon, which will be officially released on December 4, 2015.
Composed in the aftershadow of SUNN O)))’s most recent successes in immersive collaboration—the group having worked with Scott Walker on Soused, and Ulver on Terrestrials—and also from the broad and influential wake of their epitomic Monoliths & Dimensions, Kannon emerged both independently as a conceptual entity and with roots in the legacies of those projects, yet was fully realized years later in 2015. The album consists of three pieces of a triadic whole: “Kannon 1, 2 and 3.”
The album celebrates many SUNN O))) traditions; Kannon was recorded and mixed with SUNN O)))’s close colleague and co-producer Randall Dunn in Seattle, in Studio Litho, Aleph and Avast!, and the LP includes performances by long term allies and collaborators Attila Csihar, Oren Ambarchi, Rex Ritter, and Steve Moore, to name a few. At the core, the composition centers around the dynamic and intense guitar and bass interplay of SUNN O)))’s founders: Stephen O’Malley & Greg Anderson.
It is possibly the most figurative album SUNN O))) has created, which is unusual as they usually dwell in layers of abstraction and subjectivity. On the other hand the album is the most outright “metal” in years, drawing personal associations and memories of cherished albums like Panzerfaust and Twilight of the Gods again to the forefront of consciousness. Kannon is also very close to the cyclical character of mantra which the band has evolved into as a living creature, the enormity of intense sensate detail and manifestation of the live in concert element of SUNN O))), the organism that has flourished, metamorphosed and transcended tremendously over the past ten years.
Play loud and read METALION: The Slayer Mag Diaries
