Enough with the stopgaps: Since the 2009 release of Sunn O)))'s gloriously oversized Monoliths & Dimensions, the band's principals, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley, have kept busy, though not by recording any new material for their drone-metal vanguard. Together, they've reunited their old Washington state doom squad, Thorr's Hammer, for two festivals and another reissue. Anderson reformed Goatsnake for similar treatment while steering his Southern Lord label into the knotty world of contemporary hardcore. Meanwhile, O'Malley focused on rare collaborations while launching his provocative label, Ideologic Organ, with albums by composer Eyvind Kang and Russian polymaths Phurpa.

The latest tease is a collaborative reissue between Southern Lord and Ideologic Organ. More than a decade after the release of Sunn O)))'s proper debut, ØØ VOID, Southern Lord offers it again, packaged with a bonus disc of remixes of the material by British experimental masters Nurse With Wound. That same material is available via O'Malley's new imprint as the 2xLP set The Iron Soul of Nothing. If those minutiae seem overwhelming, just trust this conclusion: Sunn O)))'s essential ambitions of grand presentation and aggressive collaboration were intact at the start.

Just after completing Monoliths & Dimensions, O'Malley described collaboration to me in terms of the Buddhist concept of the beginner's mind, or of allowing oneself to proceed through tasks without expectations and preconceptions. "It comes back to working on the sound itself as its own thing rather than having special guests," he said. It may be difficult to hear that sense of inclusion and openness on ØØ VOID, which from the first bass moan of "Richard" to the last guitar decay of "Ra at Dusk" sounds mostly like unwavering and unapologetic drone metal. On subsequent albums, Sunn O))) incorporated noise lords like Merzbow and John Wiese, a women's choir, Hungarian maniac and Mayhem member Attila Csihar, and an army of others. As O'Malley's quote suggests, they all played an essential role in shaping the band's sound at that moment.

But here Anderson, O'Malley, and longtime partner G. Stuart Dahlquist-- respectively credited as the Duke, MK Ultra Blizzard, and G:Subharmonia-- trudge through riffs in synchronous, suspended time, making up for a lack of surprises with a wealth of tone. They'd recorded their only previous release, The GrimmRobe Demos, in a small Los Angeles studio, but ØØ VOID was captured in Hollywood's Grandmaster, a high-fidelity location where Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, No Doubt, and Tool have all made records. Sunn O))) have always had a reputation for exacting technical standards and for pushing the limits of their force and fidelity ("Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results," their credo goes), and ØØ VOID offers the first perfect sign of that. These recordings are monolithic, dense, and relentless, even if the compositions themselves sound much as you might expect.

There are some allusions to extracurricular influences here, like the ghastly vocals of Scream's Pete Stahl, which circle like ghosts inside the electric tide of "NN O)))".  A delicate pluck opens "Rabbit's Revenge", and long, thin tones sometimes rise to gird a riff's lumbering end. Speaking of subtle additions, the 14-minute crawl is a cover of an early version of the Melvins song that some have suggested (and others have contested) became 1992's "Hung Bunny"; listen closely past the five-minute mark, and you'll notice that Sunn O))) seem to have momentarily drafted a drummer and a screamer. It's actually a bootleg of Melvins playing the song, the sample spliced beneath the drone as both acknowledgement and texture. Years later, Sunn O)))'s evolution would come to depend on such outside sounds.

But the Nurse With Wound renderings of the material-- lifted from a transfer of the complete sessions by studio wizard Mell Dettmer in 2007-- offer a prophetically revisionist take on Sunn O)))'s eventual incorporation of mostly everything. The icy "Dysnystaxis (A Chance Meeting With Somnus)" punctuates a glowing stasis with short bass throbs and softer sounds that suggest Jon Hassell's recent nuevo-ambient riches playing in the next room, not unlike moments of Monoliths & Dimensions. Both "Ra at Dawn Part One (Rapture, at Last)" and "Ra at Dawn Part Two (Numbered by Her Light)" quell Sunn O)))'s beastly roar into a sort of barely there industrial static, the signal's strength oscillating like the processes of an assembly line. The most typically Nurse With Wound pieces here, these remixes show that aggression alone isn't enough to make something sound sinister; these hums move as though they're alive, each ghastly manipulation haunting the space as if for the first time.

But these three pieces are mere curios compared to "Ash on the Trees (The Sudden Ebb of a Diatribe)", the real reason this set of reissues is worth the investment. Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter pull Stahl's vocals from beneath the mire, pitting his sneered apocalyptic visions against crests and collapses of mutated noise. It's a terrifying maze of tangents, like the early works of Nurse With Wound cronies Current 93 and O'Malley's own Khanate remixed by some actualization of evil. As O'Malley suggested years later, it's a synthesis that is more about the "sound itself" than the special guests lending their name to it.