By Mike McGuirk

OM ARE A two-piece resonance metal band. Resonance, according to the dictionary, is the "enriching of a musical tone by vibration." Resonance metal is when you're listening to a band and a goddamn third eye appears in the middle of your forehead. At first you think it's some next-level-consciousness thing, but then you realize the bass is just turned up really, really loud. Trust me, it happens. Anyway, Om's music vibrates a lot. It's like four zillion pounds of bass rumbling around inside your head.

Om drummer Chris Hakius and bassist-vocalist Al Cisneros once made up the rhythm section of the influential stoner metal band Sleep. But their new band is an entirely new configuration of their rather idiosyncratic talents. Cisneros has barely been visible on the musical map since the breakup of Sleep in 1996 – but here he is, back with the original Sleep drummer, playing songs that are long, long, long and super-repetitive, like some long-held dream. Or nightmare, even. If you think about the two band names, Om and Sleep, you realize they are both related to different states of tranquility. Om conveys tranquility. Sleep isn't necessarily tranquil. It can be a dropping out of life, which is what Cisneros did, musically, after walking away from Sleep. Maybe this music is more of a search for some kind of peace, and always has been for him.

Oblivion seekers

First of all, Cisneros is a really kind and quiet person, and he seems like he is very calm all the time. I actually had a hard time imagining him as the guy who wrote the brilliant but somewhat fucked-up lines "Bong in hand / Drop out of life / Follow the smoke to the riff-filled land" for Sleep's "Dopesmoker." He just seems too positive to encourage drug-fueled oblivion. Those lyrics were written a long time ago, though, and Cisneros is clearly older and more grounded now, and, if you ask me, further along on the path toward peace. But then we talked about Black Sabbath, and he started in about how Tony Iommi closed the door on "riffology" and that Iommi's riffs were "overly decisive" – an amazing term – and I realized the 20-year-old kid who loved weed and Black Sabbath was still there, only grown up and in a different, hopefully better place.

Om's new album is called Variations on a Theme (Holy Mountain). There is no guitar, just bass riffs and drum lines, with Cisneros's spoken/chanted vocals coming in like islands of structure among the "riffology." There are three cuts, all parts of one single song. Like he was explaining the universe, or infinity, Cisneros insists Variations, and Om itself, is all about patterns and pitch and sending forth unholy amounts of resonance. "There are so many layers simultaneously within that pitch, there are so many textures within that tone, it feels like an abode, that key," he explained. "So there'll be changes within it, but it won't go outside those parameters, of that overall tone."

Decode this

Cisneros and Hakius have been working out this kind of deep-thought resonance metal since high school and have been playing together for just as long. It's more about the patterns you can plot out while jamming within a specific set of chords and drum lines than it is about delivering a crushing riff, although that is what ends up happening.

As Cisneros sees it, these patterns are all there, hanging around in the universe, waiting to be decoded. And he has no choice but to mess around with them, to be in service to them. In disco they call this being "a slave to the beat." I think it's the same for Cisneros, only more metal.

"This stuff's happening 24 hours a day in my head," he said. "It's like a continual loop going on. So when the instruments are hooked up, it has an output. I mean, the songs continue to be played regardless of whether the instruments are hooked up or not. You're just uncovering it." You get the feeling that Cisneros loves his music but is also cursed by the need to make it.

He doesn't so much play the music as he unlocks a door and lets it out. Also, I think it means the mathematical coding behind the notes themselves even more than a melody or riff. This is music that is picked from out of the chaos of the universe.

I was going about the Om record all wrong. I was listening to it as if it were music made by Sleep. But Om are a whole new thing, and Hakius and Cisneros's aims go beyond the youthful Sabbath worship of their old band. Om are not playing ambient, supposedly mystical space metal – what they are doing is beyond incorporating the trappings of some meditative experience for effect. Om are interested in exploring the things that cause their metal to be meditative. In this way, they are like monks, true monks of metal, both mystical and mathematical at the same time. Like some really weird jelly-making math monks investigating the fabric of existence. But instead of jelly, they make records, and they dress normal and play superloud.

Om play with Six Organs of Admittance and Fortnight Selections Sat/21, 10 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $10. (415) 474-0365.

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Om, Variations On a Theme