Words & photos by Magda Wrzeszcz
There are gigs that you go to, note ‘oh yeah, they played this, this and this, was cool’. And then there are gigs that become life-changing experiences. So far with me and A Place To Bury Strangers it’s been the latter. It might sound a tiny bit of an over the top statement, however the first time I saw them perform live (at the 1-2-3-4 Shoreditch Festival in 2009) I had absolutely no idea who they were and as the gig went on I was falling more and more in love with what I was hearing. As soon as I left the festival, I added them to my ‘favourite bands ever’ list - which for a music lover is a life changing event. I got completely addicted to the noise coming from my headphones and I cannot explain why it took me so long to see them live again.
I got to The Shacklewell Arms on a cold Sunday evening, running like a bit of a mad person from work via a constructive yet brief music focused meeting. I was running slightly late and as soon as I entered, I reminded myself of the beauty of small independent venues: the guy on the door was standing there with a pen, flicvking throigh what looked like good 6 pages of people’s names, ticking them off and scribbling something undecipherable on our arms with the aforementioned biro.
The life changing element of the gig at The Shacklewell Arms began as soon as I finally entered the room and caught the last few songs from The Lucid Dream. Their enveloping, somewhat melancholic, soft psychedelic tunes set the mood beautifully. They proved why they earned the title of masters of reverb epicness when they finished on a gloriously never ending, captivating progressive improv. A visit to their bandcamp page followed shortly afterwards.
Soon afterwards Bambara took to the stage and yet again I got swept off my feet. They started off with looping murmurs and screams and soon the vocal followed and it was that kind of vocal that’s drenched in noise and you don’t mind that all you can hear is a husky mumble, it’s that kind of a mumble that hits the spot. Bambara’s charisma was infectious. Reid Bateh, the vocalist and guitarist, would fall down on his knees to loop his voice on two sets of pedals and then punch them with full strength to create a rhythm. There was a tribal vibe to their music that reminded me of HEALTH, but on guitars. The lighting was staged dramatically and alternated between the usual dark colours and flashes of bright light that underlined the shoutier parts of songs. Utterly mesmerising. Once again, a band that I knew nothing of before entered my ‘I need to see them as many times as I can’ list.
Then A Place To Bury Strangers came on and in all honesty, I don’t know how to find words to describe what we all experienced. You know the gigs whenyou come back and recap ‘they played this, this and this, it was good?’ - this one was nothing like that. Yes, they played songs that were meant to be played, yes, there were highlights, like ‘You Are the One’ and ‘Dead Beat’, they even performed one of the Dead Moon covers, which is a rare occurrence. We were all there for the music because we all knew and loved it, so this time around the substance very rightfully got taken over by the form. Everyone I asked about the gig afterwards has a vague memory of the songs themselves, but the experience was life-changingly one of a kind.
The moment they took to the stage, the smoke machines went off and the sound the band started to create can only be described as a hypnotic wall of noise. There were no lights going off, no gimmicks. Just the three guys on stage and us, completely taken by what was unravelling in front of our eyes. And the noise was pouring onto us from the speakers, along with the smoke creating an enveloping, soft blanket. Everything you dream of seeing at a rock gig happened - Dion Lunadon walked with his bass right into the crowd and jumped around for a bit. Dion and Oliver Ackerman played their respective guitars in perfect harmony and behind the thicker and thicker smoke swapped them for a song or two. The cloud surrounding us was getting more and more dense. The noise kept hypnotising. At some point Dion took his bass and hit it against the stage a few times. It lay there for the rest of the night, while he grabbed another one. And then, all of a sudden, the epic finale came upon us. The noise progressed majestically, drenched in reverb. The smoke machines wouldn’t stop and soon we were all in a cloud so thick I could hardly see my hand in front of me. It was the most extraordinary multi-sensory act I ever came across. If I closed my eyes, I couldn’t see anything, but opening them wouldn’t help much. I’ve lost the sense of orientation, all I could still feel was the noise that kept coming from every direction. We all stood there, completely overcome, until it all stopped. And yes, I believe I can say with no exaggeration, after this epic performance no gig will ever feel the same.
