sunn o)))

Sunn 0)))'s music recalls a tradition more typically associated with the cerebellum: Minimalism. In fact, Steve Reich's 1968 essay "Music as a Gradual Process," a seminal articulation of this objective principle applied to sound, could be cited with surprising aptness here. In it, Reich argues that the systematic reduction of the musical work will tend to render our experience of sound more material. Just as Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 "White Paintings," which are animated only by the play of exterior light and shadow, must be experienced as inhabiting space with the viewer, so too is sound displaced into the real world—that is, the world of the listener—in Minimalist composition. For Reich, narrowing the differential between compositional parts is key to accomplishing this transposition of the work from world unto itself to thing in the world: "Listening to extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it." Paradoxically, the closer the music comes to being all of a piece—be it one-note or non-note, very loud like La Monte Young's early drone pieces or silent like John Cage's 4'33"—the more differentiated it becomes experientially.

more from Artforum here.