AEM057 White Suns

Angela Sawyer, owner of the incom­pa­ra­ble Weirdo Records and some­one who has been quoted as far and wide as Bill­board Mag­a­zine in regards to noise music, once called Brook­lyn band Sight­ings “the most dan­ger­ous band in Amer­ica.” Obvi­ously we have long over­come our bizarre Amer­i­can belief that vio­lent music will bring on the end of the world, but if there’s one band that could have split the earth open and brought Satan out (rid­ing a bub­bling, spit­ting river of fire, of course), it would have been Sight­ings. Their music com­bines an all-out assault on the lis­tener (some­thing that feels a bit like founder­ing in a choppy, dark sea, which entails not just dis­ori­en­ta­tion and ter­ror at your sud­den appar­ent small­ness in the face of the huge ocean but also a kind of life-or-death exhil­a­ra­tion) with a really appeal­ing lack of bells and whis­tles and an abun­dance of craft that only some­one who has tried to make music like this could eas­ily dis­cern. Sight­ings, unlike most bands that thrive on extremes of vol­ume and inten­sity, didn’t remake the same album over and over again, but instead expanded their sound in all sorts of unpre­dictable direc­tions, mak­ing music that is both pow­er­ful and inter­est­ing. Fel­low Brook­lynites White Suns, a trio com­posed of Kevin Barry, Rick Visser, and Dana Matthiessen, remind me quite a bit of Sight­ings, and let me assure you that is a ter­rific thing.

White Suns cer­tainly have the volatil­ity of other bands that explore the spaces between rock and noise, com­bin­ing, as Matthiessen told me, the vol­ume and and speed of other heavy rock gen­res with a dis­so­nance usu­ally more asso­ci­ated with pure art noise. It’s not often I hear a band that actu­ally induces a phys­i­cal reac­tion, but here I find myself coil­ing for­ward in a springy mass of ten­sion and bad pos­ture, my leg jerk­ing arhyth­mi­cally. The music the trio makes is so loaded with anti-resolution that it takes a bod­ily response to dis­pose of all the tense energy it embeds in my body, espe­cially when it’s played loud, and it should be played LOUD. White Suns, as bru­tal and blis­ter­ingly fiery as their name indi­cates, play music that has roots, in addi­tion to Sight­ings, in bands like Hair Police and Japan­ese con­cep­tual artist The Gerogerigegege who walk the line between straight up art noise and noisy psych rock. There seem to be a lot of astronomy-related names in this area of music (C. Spencer Yeh’s Burn­ing Star Core, for exam­ple, or Visser’s solo project Open Star Clus­ter), per­haps the only way of con­jur­ing up some­thing large and pow­er­ful enough to reflect not just the music but the phys­i­cal pres­ence it seems to have in the room. When it stops, espe­cially at a live show, you can feel the vac­uum that it leaves in its absence before ambi­ent sound grad­u­ally fil­ters back into the room.

“Fly­ing Dutch­man,” the A-side, starts with a per­fect exam­ple of the more aggres­sive side of White Suns, emit­ting a squall of feed­back and then, after a drum­stick count in, burst­ing into a pow­er­ful, propul­sive storm of unre­lent­ing, frac­tured gui­tars that feel like they’re tremolo pick­ing right into your brain. The fast, punk-derived drums halt at three inter­vals to let a ris­ing, five note melody come through before crash­ing back into time. The shouted vocals (also not with­out a debt to punk rock) ride the crest of the wave of gui­tar noise until 1:12, when the meter actu­ally breaks down, and the song, with­out chang­ing tonally, turns into a dirge-metal stag­ger that man­ages to be even heav­ier than the ini­tial onslaught. This is where the gui­tars, which never let up until after that final, sud­den accel­er­a­tion, really feel as if they are smoth­er­ing you, which evokes that com­bined terror/exhilaration I men­tioned earlier.

They can clearly do the power-noise thing, yet White Suns aren’t a one note act, and they man­age to keep a level of for­mal inter­est in their music that eludes a lot of acts who only want the vis­ceral reac­tion and are con­tent to pound into dust the one method they’ve dis­cov­ered of evok­ing it. This is par­tic­u­larly evi­dent on the B-side of their Ampeater sin­gle, the track “Growth,” which achieves its inten­sity through a more open sound, with the snare and bass drums slid­ing in and out of phase, growl­ing elec­tron­ics that sound like processed wind, and the right panned elec­tric gui­tar reit­er­at­ing some minor key clus­ters in a tone that almost sounds like it should be play­ing some jan­gly surf melodies. The way the drums slip in and out of a blast­beat for just a moment empha­sizes the off-kilter meth­ods of pro­duc­ing ten­sion here. Whereas on “Fly­ing Dutch­man” the ten­sion comes from straight up vol­ume and speed, here it results from the asym­me­try of each ele­ment of the song. We expect the drum pulse at the very least to stay con­stant, and when it slips out of sync with itself it is severely dis­ori­ent­ing. There is a sim­i­lar effect in the jan­gly gui­tar, which stays very close to that ini­tial chord for almost the entire song, break­ing out of rep­e­ti­tion and into vio­lent dis­tor­tion only for very short bursts and only after the halfway point of the track. This delay gives us the feel­ing that some­thing is com­ing, some­thing enor­mous and ter­ri­fy­ing, given the pound­ing foot­steps of the drums, and thus the song is pow­er­ful in that it never explodes into cathar­sis. The Some­thing never arrives, though, and this is the bril­liance of the song. It’s far more unset­tling than any cathar­tic cli­max when you hear the drum foot­steps fall back into rim clicks that sound like noth­ing so much as the amphetamine-hurried tick­ing of an old alarm clock, and this com­po­si­tional think­ing is what sets the band apart from so many of their peers.

The diver­sity and fierce energy expressed in these two tracks alone make White Suns wor­thy of your ears, espe­cially if they’ve been worn thin by ane­mic rock bands that get com­pared to the Arcade Fire. Allow your­self to be sub­merged in the sound of a band that actu­ally might make you fear for your life (and enjoy every sec­ond of it).

Gabe Birn­baum

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