I went to see Sunn0))) last week, which was one off the musical bucket list. I don’t regret going, but all the same, I doubt I’d go again.

I lasted about an hour, and if I’m honest I spent the last fifteen minutes or so willing myself to endure the onslaught, before finally realising that’s a really stupid way to spend even a small part of what remains of your life, and going home. On my way out, I bellowed to a friend in the smoking area that an hour was enough. Some other person bellowed back “you’re weak”, and I thought yup, and I’m totally fine with that.

The next morning, I had what I can only describe as reverse tinnitus. Usually a loud guitar-based show damages you with the top end: splashy cymbals smashed to bits at the upper end of a straining PA, plus all the jaggedy upper harmonics of amplified instruments playing in a regular range. But with this lot, there’s really no top end at all—and so the next day you find yourself missing not the top end of your hearing, but rather various notches of the mid-range. It took three days before people with alto speaking voices stopped sounding like they were talking to me through a novelty vocoder patch.

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The friend I bellowed at while leaving said to me the next day that he was disappointed because they’d played so loud that he couldn’t tell one track from another. I replied that I’d assumed they weren’t actually doing “songs” in any traditional sense of that term—because, for starters, how would you, as the artists, even attempt to coordinate the performance of a sequence of canonical tracks under those conditions? I had assumed they just kinda improvised for ninety minutes; in fact, the more I think about it, the more risible becomes the idea of them planning out a set-list.

Then again, risible may be the point. Their intro tape, which ran for a patience-testing ten minutes or so while the techs tried to build up a decent density of dry ice, consisted of material from the Venom live album that’s probably best known for providing a sample on the album Check Your Head by the Beastie Boys: they’d taken what I assume must be the whole set, sliced out the actual songs and reduced each of them to a literal second or so of roar and clatter, and then pushed the remaining file through some sort of echo plugin. The result was like hearing a possibly drunk but certainly macho Cronos Lant haranguing you for ten minutes through a mogadon haze… and it’s hard to read that as anything other than a very elaborate in-joke at the audience’s expense. Maybe this is their way of dealing with the increased attention from the art world in recent years? I dare say the money that’s come with it has been very welcome, but one can’t help but feel that while they’re not exactly biting the hand that feeds, they’re definitely giving it as good a chew as they think they can get away with.

And why not, you know? The heavy guitar-based musics are dying off, and have been for a while now; artforms always go decadent and abstract toward the end. Sure, there are still rock and metal bands—though I’m not sure if the likes of Sleep Token qualify for that category—but the point is that the old tradition of playing live through stacks of valve amplification has been all but eradicated. You might see a whole bunch of Marshall cabs up there on stage, but nine times out of ten they’re just dummies for show, because the guys running the live mix really don’t want a guitarist to have the capability to go rogue with regard to their levels and transients mid-way through the set. (Especially if they have some sort of cut-out or hard limiter tied to dB levels—which in this litigious, venue-shuttering era, is regrettably commonplace.)

There’s a bunch of reasons why this is probably a very good and sensible way for things to have gone, but as someone who was in a live band during the last few years you could play stacks live and get away with it, it’s hard not to feel it’s also the end-game of an entire ethos. I don’t care what you try to tell me, it simply isn’t the same—you can’t feel what you’re playing, not in the same way. Even with just a single 50 watt stack, you’re not just playing the guitar, you’re playing that entire system: the amp, the speaker, even the room are part of the instrument. It feels powerful and a little scary, it’s hard to control, it ruthlessly exposes your lack of skill (unless you paper over it with layers of effects pedals), and it’s one of the reasons my hearing is moderately fucked—but once you’ve played that way, playing at sensible volumes will always feel disappointing, like how I imagine Formula 1 drivers must feel when they have to do the school run in a sensible family car.

The lads from Sunn0))) are far more native to that epoch than I am, and must be delighted to have found a way to not only keep playing the “real” way, but actually maximalise the whole thing to the point of complete absurdity; fleecing the Quietus-reader demographic (which, as is probably obvious, is my demographic) to pay for a decent tour bus and salaries for their road crew must be a lovely extra, after years of critically acclaimed obscurity in this and various other acts. I don’t begrudge it them in the slightest.

They called a recent album Life Metal, and it’s not a joke—or at least not only a joke: their recordings are magical, strangely energising things. But the live show is a dirge, intentionally or not; the whole shtick comes across as an elaborately ironic dead-pan requiem for itself, and seeing it that way lets me avoid regretting both my leaving early and my having gone in the first place.

I got to doff my hat as the cortege went by; I don’t need to hang around and watch the box get lowered into the ground.