0))) Presents?

Pentemple is the recorded and heavily edited result of a collaborative improvisational performance recorded in May of 2007. The original Sunn 0))) duo — Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley — were touring with extra members, guitarist and sound terrorist Oren Ambarchi, and Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar. In Australia, they met up with the real Tasmanian devil, in one-man black metal band Striborg aka Sin Nanna, who also records for Sunn 0)))'s label Southern Lord. This is a single 43-minute performance divided into two imperceptibly divided drone tracks, "Pazuzu, Pt. 1" and "Pazuzu, Pt. 2." The music/noise is pure, evil sounding, overdriven drone sonics with a thoroughly uneasy, tense sense of slowly unfolding drama. The messed up vocal acrobatics from both Attila Csihar and Striborg are cool, but the real bonus is to hear the unhurried, feedback drenched Sunn 0))) attack with drums! Striborg can play the devil out of a kit, and we're not simply talking blastbeats here. His sense of time, subtlety, dynamic, and drama adds a deeper realm of evil to these proceedings. What's more, with the droning bass, airplane guitars, and keyboards building up a steady tension, the two vocalists — especially Striborg — are able to complement one another eerily; the moans, wails, growls, howls, and guttural glossolalia are very complex and super creepy in their spontaneity. But does it ever work! While O'Malley and Anderson have issued great solo work in individual projects like KTL and Burial Chamber Trio (to name just two of the many), this is the single most freaked out thing to come from Sunn 0))) since Black One in 2005. Ambarchi's edit and mix offer extreme brute force and vibrational nervous system terror at high volumes — not to mention probable speaker shreddage. This is a must for doom and drone fans.