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Late last May I found myself on a kind of impromptu expedition to the West. It was originally to be a road trip through the heart of America, but a dying automobile, escalating gas prices and the lure of San Francisco aided in altering my plan to a train trip that would gently arc through the Southwest till I hit San Francisco. It was a long, weird trip, but that’s a different story.

Aside from a chance to separate from the rest of society at large for a couple weeks and see some friends, I’d planned the journey for music: to listen to it, to see it live, to ruminate on it. After hearing about amazing show after amazing show in the Bay Area over the last decade (and many decades previous), the time was right for some closer investigation.

I planned the trip around a series of smaller trips, one specifically to a Six Organs of Admittance and Blithe Sons concert in Big Sur. Wholly to my surprise I’d come to find a virtual cornucopia of happening live events awaited my eager ears/eyes in the coming week: The Books, The Boredoms, the aforementioned Six Organs of Admittance / Blithe Sons gig and a holy climax of Six Organs of Admittance (again!) opening for Om at Bottom of the Hill that Saturday night. Was I dreaming? Did my subconscious somehow know this pot of gold awaited me? I couldn’t have planned it any better myself, and I didn’t. Leave it to God to fill in those blanks.

“Variations on a Theme” (Holy Mountain) had rarely left the player since I’d first heard it four months before. Om is the consummate rhythm section to anyone even remotely familiar with stoner or doom metal. With Matt Pike (currently of High on Fire) on guitar, Al Cisneros (bass) and Chris Hakius (drums), known then as Sleep, crafted one of the most influential sonic statements of the 90s in “Dopesmoker.” Built around motifs previously explored on the “Sleep’s Holy Mountain” album, the extended one song megalith set the standard for meditative sludge and remains the pinnacle of down-tuned metallic catharsis.

Om somehow manages to build upon the ideas of Sleep and simplify them at the same time. Rather than find a new guitarist to fill the void left by Pike, Cisneros and Hakius eventually decided to perform their trance inducing space metal as a duo of only bass and drums. Now this should be a cardinal sin in the world of metal, but Cisneros manages to get massive power and infinite tonal yield from his low end bass trills. His fat, dense tone, in tandem with Hakius’s methodical drum patterns, results in the ultimate combination of brute force and psychedelic displacement. This is music for traveling inward and outward; for climbing the highest mountain and breaking right through to the other side.

In Dream Magazine, George Parsons describes the lyrics as, “a series of apocalyptic instructions delivered from some scorched future world.” These painstakingly rendered intonations detail an ever present desire to ascend to the highest spiritual plane and leave this world behind, all delivered as a series of repetitious chants that eventually take on a celestial resonance. Not the typical stuff of heavy metal indulgence, but then one eventually has to ask himself, “why must I head-bang, anyway?” It’s not just so he can have a wicked case of whiplash the next morning.

By the time I arrived at the Bottom of the Hill, my cranium had been effectively waxed by the previous nights’ shows and all manner of touristy misadventures over the previous four days. Six Organs’ set this night was an about face from the more intimate affair at the Fernwood Resort the night before. Ben Chasny employed loops, chants and plenty of fuzz as he let chance play a larger role in his performance. He even turned “Home” from his recent “School of the Flower” album into a fractured blues jam with the aid of Noel from Comets on Fire playing caveman drums. I was especially impressed with the impromptu use of a Rolling Rock bottle as a slide.

During the changeover between sets, I made my way out to the small patio area of the club and wasn’t too surprised to find throngs of dark clad stoners doing what they do best. Being from a place where people used to regularly get multi-year sentences for possession of the most meager pot amount, it was something of a shock to my podunk constitution to see every single round table in the space loaded up with big beautiful glass pipes spilling over with the most pungent sweet fruit I’d ever inhaled (second hand, mind you). It was like a High Times convention, only cooler. Apparently in San Francisco you can do whatever you want as long as you’re just nice about it. Well, anything but actually smoke inside.

After the rest of the bank of Green amps was cautiously carried through the crowd and deposited on stage, I passed Chris Haikus on his way up and told him I’d come all the way from Texas to see him, so he better kick ass tonight. He replied, “Ah, man, that’s not far!” “But I took a train!” I blurted in my defense. “Well that’s cool, man,” and he shook my hand before moving on. His grip was firm.

They situated themselves in what would remain mostly stationary positions the whole night: Cisneros slightly hunched over to one side, bass diagonal against his frame; Hakius behind his drumset which was placed front and center of the stage. Cisneros leaned down, plugged his chord in to the screech of searing feedback that quickly shifted to what might’ve been an immense combine slowly cranking into motion. It sounded like Godzilla’s roar before Haikus kicked in the most punishing percussive backdrop of bass kicks, fills and cymbal crashes. This first track was a new song, and sounded really nothing like the three songs on their album. It could’ve just been that it was live, but it sounded more primal and minimal at the same time as Cisneros’s bass tone mimicked the breaths of some ancient robotic creature and Hakius exploded in thudding mechanical cycles. It was dark and beautiful, and seemed to perpetuate a very real sense of…well…doom, but at the same time it was one of the most hypnotic pieces of heavy rock I’d ever heard, and felt as inevitable as a supernova.

Next up was the 20 min “On the Mountain at Dawn,” which took up most of the hour long set. Just watching Hakius pound his drumkit continuously for the length of the song was tiring, so I couldn’t imagine the stamina it must’ve taken to actually play it, but he never missed a beat. At about halfway through the song, he somehow seemed to explode into a more propulsive rhythm while keeping the exact same time. As much as I enjoyed the album, I now truly understood the alpha and omega of Om. Experiencing them live is essential to this understanding.