Turn it up

Silence can bring its own terror. In one of the world’s quietest rooms, the concrete-sealed anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratory in Minneapolis, attendees have reported episodes of panic caused by the environment of extreme sensory deprivation, a simmering dread at the sound of the blood thrumming through their ears, while anyone who has watched a slasher movie will be familiar with the eerie quiet that foreshadows a jumpscare – the silence that brings forth the scream.

Halfway through their show at east London’s Troxy on a steaming hot July night, American guitar duo Sunn O))) suddenly cut the noise to create silence so thick it feels like a wall. The air is vacuumed from the packed room of more than 3,000 (mostly male) revellers, leaving nothing but humming dead space and the ringing of ears acclimatising slowly to an ambient decibel level. On stage, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are cloaked in black robes, wielding guitars, waiting. Then their arms swing down on strings and the banshee wail of volume starts up again. Even through the noise, I hear the middle-aged man next to me let out a yelp of surprise.

Since their founding in Seattle in 1998, Sunn O))) have regularly been described as one of the loudest bands in the world. Birthed from the grey city’s drone metal scene, the duo have released 10 albums since 2000. Backed by a wall of 1970s Sunn valve amplifiers – a brand so beloved that the group named themselves after its logo – O’Malley and Anderson chug through slow-tempo compositions that feel physical more than cerebral. The valves on their towering amps heat up, speaker cones undulate and vibrational frequencies pour into the room.

“I compare playing this music to being on top of the ocean. It’s like trying to stand on a wave,” O’Malley told me the week before over a call from Paris. “You have to ride it and it’s often feral.”

Over the course of their 90-minute performance those waves of sound – and high-intensity soundwaves – become something for the audience to ride. The man next to me who yelped, Martin Shaw, tells me that it’s at least his fifth time seeing Sunn O))). “I first saw them in the early 2000s and it was like an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was breathing the music,” he shouts with deafened ears once the show is done. “There’s something about totally immersing yourself in these vibrations that means you can start to pick up subtle differences. It’s actually quite emotional.”

For my part, earplugs in, I experience a fight-or-flight sensation after about 15 minutes. My adrenaline spikes as my body tells me it’s in danger while my brain reassures me that I’m perfectly safe. At some point, though, I start to settle and feel like living in this sound field is a new normal. My mind quietens as there is no space for inner dialogue and time becomes liquid. I feel as if I can float.

“Because of the volume we play at it’s factual – you’re gonna feel it!” Anderson suggests to me. “It’s a profound experience for a lot of people and it seems to have become an event now rather than a gig. It’s like skydiving or taking a drug – it’s something people are interested in doing.”

If it’s intense in the crowd, it’s surely even more overwhelming on stage. “I remember seeing Metallica when I was 14 and it blew my mind. I’d never heard anything at that volume,” Anderson says. “I wanted to chase that feeling and in the early days it was more chaotic and an out-of-control wall of sound but now we’ve mastered it.”

The duo tweak and calibrate the 12 amps they use on stage every day to ensure voltages are balanced and tones are precision-tuned. O’Malley describes spending much of his day-to-day life now in silence, as if preserving his ears for the onstage onslaught. And yet when the duo come back to that quiet during the show, veering from abrasive distortion to sudden nothingness on the track Butch’s Guns, they create a shocking dynamic. Sometimes silence can be louder than noise.

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design