The apocalyptic tone of Scott Walker, Sunn O))) and Soused

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to listen to Scott Walker and Sunn O)))’s respective music, and their collaboration Soused, by way of Maurice Blanchot’s notion of disaster which is framed in relation to the ‘apocalyptic tone’. This notion of the apocalyptic tone is used throughout the paper as a way of referring to the unheard and unspeakable dimensions of their music. Structurally and methodologically, this paper is inspired by the work of Daniela Cascella who uses sonic references to both amplify the unheard and unspeakable dimensions of written texts, voices and places and to establish connections between previously disconnected points. In a similar way, this paper contains three imagined frequencies that, in turn, place Walker, Sunn O))) and Soused in proximity with disaster. The first imagined frequency draws Blanchot and Walker together through the ideas of apocalyptic tone and ‘edge work’, the latter being Walker’s term for trying to speak the unspeakable with his lyrics. The second frequency pulls Sunn O))) and Blanchot together by reconsidering Sunn O)))’s aesthetic and drone music through the temporality of disaster. The final imagined frequency consolidates the ideas from the first two in an analysis of Soused, where collaboration is framed in terms of Blanchot’s notion of the secret.

KEYWORDS:

• Maurice Blanchot
• Scott Walker
• Sunn O)))
• Daniela Cascella
• disaster
• drone
• apocalyptic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although Blanchot would be hesitant to use such historical terms because his work actively resists such cultural and historical periodisation, the writers that interest Blanchot are largely modernist, particularly those writers associated with modernism who engage in experimental literature and radical forms of writing that actively resist narrative form and characterisation.

2. Blanchot’s point is not unlike William Hanks who explains how ‘To say “now” is already to have lost the moment. To say “here” is to objectify part of lived space whose extent is both greater and lesser than the referent’ (Hanks, 1996, p. 295).

3. There is the song titled ‘Orpheus’ on The Walker Brothers album Images (1967). The song ‘Blanket Roll Blues’, from Climate of Hunter, contains an indirect reference to the Orpheus myth: The closing lyrics ‘‘but I took noboby with me/not a soul’ are not Walker’s lyrics, but lyrics sang by Marlon Brando in the film The Fugitive Kind which was a take on Tennessee Williams’s own adaption of the story of Orpheus. For further analysis of the link between Walker and Orpheus myth, see Wilson (2020, pp. 61-65).

4. The examples of murmur, rumble and echo are scattered throughout Thomas the Obscure (Blanchot, 1999) and the references to resonance and reverberation can be found in The Infinite Conversation, most notably in the essays ‘Speaking Is Not Seeing’ and ‘Vast as the night’ (Blanchot, 1993).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Potts

Adam Potts is a lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University. He specialises in aesthetics and is particularly interested in the relationship between sound, music and philosophy. He has published on topics such as noise, listening and issues related to the practice of writing about sound, all in relation to the work of Maurice Blanchot. Most recently, he edited a collection called 'Sounds of Disaster: Sonic Encounters with Blanchot’, which is a collection of essays that explore the latent and explicit sonic content of Blanchot’s writing, his treatment of music and the possibilities of thinking about contemporary music and sound art through his work.