The weighting game

"What's the heaviest music ever made?" That's the question that Dom Lawson gamely attempts to answer in the latest Solved! column for the Guardian.

Sunn O))) feature heavily (pun intended), as anyone who's seen them live would have anticipated - and as they no doubt will in Harry Sword's forthcoming history of drone, Monolithic Undertow. Similarly, the inclusion of Swans was a given - again, not something I can argue with, having experienced Michael Gira's mob in the flesh (albeit in recent years rather than at the terrifying peak of their powers in the 1980s).

Lawson points out that heaviness isn't simply a matter of volume, defining it instead as a combination of "atmosphere, intent and an almost primitive physicality". For that reason, the holocaust section of My Bloody Valentine's 'You Made Me Realise' - still by some distance the loudest thing ever to assail my ears - doesn't qualify.

For me, it's not a purely sonic quality, either. In addition to Lawson's terms, there is for me - for want of a better word - often an emotional dimension (Exhibit A: Johnny Cash's cover of 'Hurt'). And, at the risk of coming across as the sort of person that Lawson caricatures as a pseud, claiming that "silence is the heaviest sound of all", Low and Codeine are two of the heaviest bands I can think of.

(Incidentally, the accompanying Modern Toss cartoon reminded me of the Mogwai gig in April 2006 that inspired our circle of gig-going friends start referring to "brown noise" - like white noise but so loud that it results in involuntary bowel evacuation...)

(Thanks to Kev for the link.)