Field Recordings from the Sunn I
An Inter-Dimensional Music Supersession for Sunn-bathing and Nag Champa huffing
Zazen is a slow walk in the wilderness. Step by step, bell after bell, chant after chant, breath after breath over many years—and without effort, one may reach a vast field of illumination.
— Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
The Shamanic Bones of Zen (2022)
Sunn O))) released their tenth studio album on April 3 of this year, but as of starting this writing I hadn’t listened to it yet, as I was fixated on digging through the “tapers’ & fans’ audience recordings, 2002-present” in the Sunn Live Archives on Bandcamp, where the drone metal titans have followed in the footsteps of the Grateful Dead by officially encouraging DIY ethnomusicological documentation of their live rituals. Each “RAW & LIVE!” recording is available for $5, but they’ll occasionally make the whole thing Name Your Own Price, which is where I got hooked at the beginning of March, acquiring nearly half of the official archive.
Listen to the 97-minute Field Recordings from the Sunn I episode of Inter-Dimensional Music as you read along, or scroll down for download links and the annotated setlist.
Whether you’ve been down since the Behemoth took flight in 2002, or you’re among the more recent converts won over by Life Metal, Sunn’s rainbow-hued Steve Albini-produced, NPR-approved American Beauty moment from 2019—this archive of audience recordings, along with a couple unmastered soundboards and at least one FM broadcast, is daunting. And given that the core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson acknowledge a tendency toward monochrome over the course of their almost 30 year career—see the albums White1, White2, and Black One—even fair weather fans may wonder what the point is of maintaining an archive of 170 performances and counting.
As with other mystery cults whose acolytes document and circulate their rituals in less than optimal audio formats, the uninitiated will wonder why, for example, I prefer any of the 25 live versions of the Grateful Dead’s “Row Jimmy” in my library over the pristine studio recording found on the band’s 1973 album Wake of the Flood, which isn’t even counted among the 334 hours and 22 minutes of Dead songs on my hard drive. There’s a technical answer that has something to do with the improvisational aspects of bands like the Dead—which leads to the taxonomical understanding that, like String Cheese Incident and Umphrey’s McGee, CAN and Miles Davis are jam bands at least in the lowercase sense of the designation. While, as one example, despite being regularly bootlegged and dropping surprise live jams such as the 17-minute long “A Forest” from Kilburn National Ballroom on May 3, 1992, The Cure is not.
The allure of audience-sourced recordings of Sunn’s megaliths is more elusive than the infinite variations of the Dead’s kinetic collages of folk, country, funk, jazz, rock, and drone. Most of Sunn’s songs, especially the ones that soothe my anxieties, are long grumbling waves of unadorned dual guitar drone that sound much better, technically speaking, in the studio. For example, the crush of sound on their new self-titled album on Sub Pop—which I have now listened to at this point in the writing of this newsletter, which has fragmented into a multi-part series so subscribe now if you want more?—is conveyed with 130 guitar tracks per song, which gives the music a dizzying sort of density that takes me back to 1993, the year I smoked weed for the first time which was not coincidentally also the year I listened to Siamese Dream 1,000 times.
Live, Sunn has achieved a similar outcome with the sheer volume of their performances, creating a cathartic auditory-massage effect which would be impossible for some guy standing in the crowd to capture with a microphone. But there is something to be said for the crowd noise, unintended aberrations, and intentional improvisations, even if they never reinvent themselves as completely as the Dead. The band’s documentation of each performance is minimal, only adding to the mystery. What, for example, might it mean when they describe their May 28, 2006 set at Nyabinghi Dance Hall in Youngstown, OH—featuring Oren Ambarchi, Mark Deutrom, and Boris’ Atsuo Mizuno—with the line, “No monitors were harmed, but feelings were.” And what tragedy befell the band in Amsterdam on January 26, 2010, as hinted at by the epitaph: “Attila’s black wings failed him this night.”
As the Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes in The Shamanic Bones of Zen, a book that has unexpectedly synched with my Sunn gazing: “Step by step, bell after bell, chant after chant,” . . . riff after riff . . . , “breath after breath over many years—and without effort, one may reach a vast field of illumination.” A Buddhist concept expressed as the Oblique Strategy “repetition is a form of change,” and realized in chanting the Heart Sutra at meditation practice three times a week, singing along to “Sugar Magnolia” at least once a month, or going to see Sunn whenever their tour brings them within range every couple of years.
Singing, chanting, zazen, or heavy mellow meditation are all more powerful in the company of others—the three jewels of Buddhism are the teacher (Buddha), the teachings (dharma), and the community (sangha). Solo practice has its limitations. But there’s still relief to be found on my own, as I listen to unsuspecting chompers trying to keep talking as the ritual begins, and another of the 80+ lossless low-fi low-frequency Sunn live tracks titled “01” rumbles out of the stereo, maximum volume moderated to home listening volume, my anxieties buried under a landslide of large boulders the size of small boulders.
Inter-Dimensional Music 2026.03.15
Field Recordings from the Sunn I
mixcloud / FLAC
For this first Inter-Dimensional Music: Field Recordings from the Sunn SuperSession, I took fragments from two shows that first caught my attention when I began my ongoing deep dive into the live archive, and mixed them throughout the sort of broad percussive spectrum regular listeners to our airwaves have come to expect. We start out with blackened sludge metal, in keeping with Sunn’s origins, but quickly detour to ‘80s West African dance music, deconstructed techno, a Kieran Hebden/Hope Sandoval collaboration, and Islamabad Discipline’s “kaleidoscopic exploration of his cultural heritage filtered through a collage of field recordings, guitar mantras, and experiments in traditional forms influenced through his studies with the late Ustad Mohammad Ajmal Khan.” In keeping with Sunn’s minimal written commentary on their live archive, this is a “more dharma rock, less dharma talk” edition of ID Music, free of any announcements or commentary from your host.
I returned to using a four-deck setup, and faded loops of a 2009 soundcheck from the Monoliths & Dimensions tour that features a lot of chanting in-and-out of a recording of the band in their Shoshin Duo configuration performing in Athens, Greece in 2025. This mix of the two performances lurks in the background of the entire set, resurfacing at full volume during in-between moments.
The 2009 recording catches the band in partial ensemble mode—core duo Greg Anderson on guitar and bass, Stephen O’Malley on guitar, with Attila Csihar offering his signature vocal performance that ranges from soaring arias to croaks of gastric distress, and Steve Moore on keyboards and trombone. According to the show notes, it was recorded by “retrodude83 utilizing the Olympus LS-10 Recorder, plus Church Audio STC-9000 with the Church Audio CA-11 mics.”
The 2025 show documents the minimalist setup of Anderson and O’Malley and their guitars, as recorded by “vavmos” who writes “here’s my recording from your recent performance in Athens, Greece, using Church Audio CAFs - Church Audio Ugly 2 - Sony PCM.”
The session is book-ended by excerpts from DrumCircles, an expanding collection of live psychedelic ritual trance music from YslashY and the Drummers of Zevenkamp. It’s not exactly 77 Boa Drum and I don’t know much about the artists beyond the statement of purpose on their label’s Bandcamp profile to “promote experimantal ways of getting into a mediative or trance state of being.” Conveniently, their ethos is also in keeping with the themes of communal rituals discussed above. “Donkse Oog prefers releases by artists who also perform live. everybody can be a studio/laptop artist, but not everybody is able to reproduce their sounds on stage.” Beyond that, the label’s hidden behind a Dutch FB reg-wall so I hope it’s nothing sketchy . . . but I’m a Nag-Champa huffing sucker when it comes to decent long-form drum circle jams like this.
Our multi-channel broadcast media installation includes the following selections:
artist — work
Y/Y and The Drummers - DrumCircle December 23, 2025 (edit)
SUNN O))) - 01 soundcheck (2009.10.22)
SUNN O))) - Crank (2025.10.19)
Lord Mantis1 - Vile Divinity
Actress - Voodoo Posse Chronic Illusion
Jay Duncan ft. Ben Vince - In Limbo
Alèkpéhanhou - Zozo Piaa!
Maral x El Kontessa - Butterfly Magic
Eyad - Qalq
Autechre - YJY UX
Chaka Chawasarira - Hurombo
Four Tet ft. Hope Sandoval - Into Dust (Still Falling)
islamabad discipline - aankh micholi
Mark Ernestus & Ndagga Rhythm Force - Ndiguel
SUNN O))) - 01 soundcheck (2009.10.22) (edit)
SUNN O))) - Pills (2025.10.19) (edit)
Y/Y and The Drummers - DrumCircle December 23, 2025 (edit)
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I think most Vøid Contemplation Tactics readers are here for almost everything except the metal, but that’s all the more reason to perform my due diligence as a conscientious selector who may be introducing people to offensive or even harmful material. I do my best to vet the music I play on the show, and for that reason this is the first time Lord Mantis has appeared on the ID Music airwaves, as I file them under the category of “problematic fav.”
Parsing metal ethics is a wild ride because a lot of these mfers are very loud in inscrutable ways about being very flawed, and their convoluted paths may lead to extremes in radical acceptance or bigoted oppression without many waypoints. In my limited experience as an amateur researcher of shitty metal politics I have found that heroin addiction and self-deprecation is often an optimistic indicator of ignorance and (sometimes very very very) bad judgement while clean-living snappy dressers with a conspicuous interest in theory are waaay more ominous.
Reading up on Lord Mantis’ history and connections with other artists has been an inversion of my experience vetting an artist like Dominick Fernow, where instead of scratching the surface of a confrontationally transgressive work and getting occult white supremacists and William Luther Pierce, I found a Columbia University ethnomusicologist and radical Black poet Tongo Eisen-Martin. Due to the inscrutability of a lot of metal in terms of actual lyrics, one is often forced to gather an impression of artistic intention—even if it’s just “I didn’t intend to be a shit head”—based on the company they keep. The difference between being a few degrees of separation from Clandestine Blaze or Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
It also would’ve saved me some time if Vice had bothered to mention that Laina Dawes, the person interviewing Lord Mantis vocalist Charlie Fell in 2014 about transphobia and racism, is a respected academic and critic, as well as the author of the 2013 book What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal. A Black woman writing that “The music of Lord Mantis does not deserve clichéd descriptions, as it’s far too rich, too textured and too important for an easy dismissal” is more significant than another white dude defending his favorite shitty band.
More on all of this to come in a future newsletter.
Thanks for this bhai! Lovely and sublime sounds and words. I had no idea that there was a Sunn tapers scene! Cool stuff. Om.
Lovely writing