SUNN O))) '观世音 Kannon'

'观世音 Kannon' is an album that was composed in the aftershadow of SUNN O)))’s most recent successes in immersive collaboration (the group worked with Scott Walker on 'Soused', Ulver on 'Terrestrials' in 2013 and 2014) and also from the broad and influential wake of their epitimous 'Monolith’s & Dimensions'. '观世音 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 is 36 minutes in length and consists of three pieces of a triadic whole: "Kannon 1", "Kannon 2" and "Kannon 3". The album celebrates many SUNN O))) traditions; '观世音 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, Steve Moore and others. And 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’s 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. At the third time it is 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 face of SUNN O))), the organism that has flourished, metamorphosed and transcended tremendously over the past ten years.