(((O))) : Live: Beyond The Redshift Festival, (Various Venues) London. 10th May, 2014

The Beyond the Redshift all-dayer, curated by Cult of Luna and split across three venues in Kentish Town, was billed as an ‘audio-visual experience built around a concept.’  It wasn’t specified in the promotional materials exactly what that concept was, but by the end of the headliner-curator’s all-encompassing set at the Forum, it was clear that it had something to do with variations on a theme of expansive and punishingly heavy post-rock/post-metal atmospherics.  Cult of Luna’s two-hour performance was a dizzying tour of their discography, and with the band apparently going on hiatus for several years, it was a fitting summary of their ambitious career so far.  Contributing to the stormy intensity for the packed crowd was a harsh assault of lighting, which strobed and scanned the audience, highlighting then hiding the eight? nine? ten? bandmembers amongst swirling clouds of smoke, before whirling us into green and red worlds.  All the while, the band tore up versions of “Passing Through” and then finally, left us there with “Leave Me Here.”

That stage had been previously graced with the black metal revival of Norway’s God Seed, featuring ex-Gorgoroth members Gaahl and King of Hell.  Considering the advertised audio-visual nature of the event as a whole, amidst the light-and-smoke thunderstorm of the headliners, and some evocative screenings behind Jesu, AmenRa and particularly Syndrome, it was this band that ended up actually providing the most intensely engaging visuals of the day.  After the rest of the band had cranked up their juddering black metal style, Gaahl emerged in full corpse-paint, black streaks across his face as well as his microphone-clutching hands. Stalking the stage calmly and authoritatively, he needed no other stage theatrics to draw the eyes of the assembled audience of heretics; though some who stared too long risked being selected for a fixed baleful glare and accusatory pointing.  While the spell was compromised a little by the fact that the other musicians hadn’t gone all out (or gone anywhere, for that matter) with their make-up, and more so by a slightly muddy sound, the unmistakable aggressive black metal noise added an extra touch of harshness to the day’s otherwise expansive tones.

Prior to that, I managed to catch a bit of Bossk’s set over at the Dome.  The Ashford postmetallers brought their atmospheric Kentish soundscapes to town; but, set timings being what they were, I wasn’t able to see as much as I’d have liked (and, on the theme of the audio-visual, despite no particular projection or light set-up here, they do have some pretty consistently great sleeve artwork).  The timing issue might have been the stages getting slightly out of synch with the schedule, as I’d been just downstairs at the Boston Music Room watching most of Dirk Serries.  Unfortunately it seemed that technical issues with the backing tapes obstructed Dirk’s plans for the set.  A pity, since his work with Fear Falls Burning and the Microphonics series has been interesting – explorations into new territories of drone textures.  As it was, Justin K Broadrick, who had been intending to join Serries only at the end of the show, was on hand to collaborate on an impromptu and improvised guitar duo set.  While it was entertaining enough to watch Serries set up and then shift the droning tones while Broadrick subtly chimed in, the sparse audience were left wondering what they might have heard had circumstances not conspired against us.

Still, weighing against that disappointment were the unexpected blessing of HARK.  They were on before Serries and Broadrick, who I’d gone to see since nothing was on at the Dome and I wasn’t walking all the way back to the Forum just yet.  Seeing the wild-eyed Welshmen’s stoner stomp made me wonder if, in walking down the back staircase between the two venues I had taken a wrong turn and inadvertently found myself a mile down the road and two weeks in the past at Desertfest (in fact, looking up their recent tour dates, that seems to be about the only place the band haven’t played in the last month).  Jimbob Isaac’s stoner sludge in HARK, emerging from the ashes of Jimbob Isaac’s stoner sludge in Taint, was overflowing with riffs: riffs packed into each song.  Fuzzy-guitar riffs, fuzzy-haired riffs, fuzzy-brained riffs, with yet more riffs even threatening to leap out from the feedback haze between songs.  A welcome hard rock shot in the arm halfway through a day which featured more thoughtful, sombre shades and more hardcore-influenced heaviness…

…some of which had just been provided by the hard-as-nails Swedes The Old Wind just upstairs.  Thundering through a set drawn from their syntax-defying album Feast on Your Gone, their sludgy metal drew a large crowd to the Dome.  Tomas Liljedahl’s frantic vocals kept all entranced for a full hour set, complete with windy sound effects between songs.  Before that, back at the Forum, Justin Broadrick’s Jesu had filled the Forum’s art deco arena with glacial shoegazey reverberations, backed with black and white footage of collapsing tower blocks, helicopter-shot images of vast factories, mining landscapes and imposing concrete dams.  The literally post-industrial visual language was obvious enough, though no less appropriate or evocative even if a little predictable in its subject matter.  The similarly austere sound threw up imaginative vistas of its own, while brief touches of colour in the films – green grass in the wind, what looked like a monk walking past a sunset-reflecting pool – corresponded to the buried emotion and melody amongst the metallic heaviness.  Occasionally the pneumatic snap and hiss of Broadrick’s preset percussion was a reminder of Godflesh’s industrial-noise razors, an implied counterpoint to Jesu’s steely calm-after-the-apocalypse atmospheres.

Witnessing the Jesu set, I’d only just got back in time after managing to catch a song and a half of Esben and the Witch’s Sonic Youth-inflected guitar angles.  I hadn’t been able to quite get there in time to take in a full dose of their set - the distance up and down Fortress Road was surprisingly far compared to what it had looked like on the map, especially if a schedule clash made time tight!  Still, there’s never enough time to see everyone at these events… another band I was kicking myself for missing out on was Atlantis, who suffered from the curse of two festivals: I missed them at Roadburn thinking I would catch them here, and missed them here thinking I should have got to the station earlier in the morning.  The reason why I hadn’t made it up to the Dome for more of Esben and the Witch, however, was that I had been completely rooted to the spot for the whole of a crushing AmenRa set.

Entering the cavernous gloom of the theatre upon arrival, I was confronted with the incongruous sight of two people wearing matching white tshirts, even emblazoned with small crucifixes… I was about to request some reading material about what the Bible really teaches, before realising… ah.  The Church of Ra.  The Belgian band’s fervent acolytes were out in force, and after their raging set which kickstarted the day’s proceedings, I’m sure AmenRa made a good number of new converts.  A brief ominous hum joined AmenRa’s set to the preceding half-hour Syndrome drone, a monotone which was quickly destroyed by the furious noise of AmenRa’s pounding rhythms.  Singer Colin van Eeckhout appeared as if forcibly restrained by invisible assailants, compelled to stare into the screen, trapped in occult Clockwork Orange punishment and retribution.  His back to the audience, arm twisted painfully behind him, he could only shout his horror at the unfolding images of empty cathedrals, cliffs and swirling seas while the tidal guitars crash on.  Adding to the sense of inevitable forward motion was a section where drummer Bjorn Lebon abandoned the usual percussion to instead rhythmically smash together two metal poles, urging on the pulsing riffs and investing the screen close-ups of skin and skittering forest streams with a sinister urgency.  The vocalist at last managed all at once to break free of his imaginary captors and his tshirt too, turning to the audience as if simultaneously invoking and warning against that which he summoned.  At its peak, each element of the set combined into a greater whole… the rhythms of the heavy guitars, the smoke that drifted across the stage uniting with the projected flickering clouds and fumes, an intensely intoxicating brew.

The calm that set the scene for that storm was guitarist Mathieu Vanderkerckhove’s project Syndrome which had opened the day’s proceedings.  Having started out while scatterings of people chattered and drifted into the arena, at the other end of the 30-minute set the area in front of the stage was packed, the crowd ready for AmenRa but entranced by the looped ambience and sombre drones.  On a chair to the side of the stage, Vanderkerckhove built up a finely-tuned layering of tones, accompanied by Stefaan Temmerman’s imagery onscreen. Factories reclaimed by plants, light trickles of sand, a wind turbine turning slowly behind leaves in the wind all moved across the screen, while silhouetted mics and cymbals foreshadowed the attack of the set to follow.  Having seen Syndrome before, and listened to the half-hour piece “Now and Forever” quite a bit.  It was quite powerful to see that familiar piece played- no flashy improvisations or deviating versions, just a well-constructed, balanced piece in which each note fell into place with a worn, heavy inevitability.  A wave splash was the most dramatic moment of the video, coinciding with a tentative peak of high-register sweeping drone. Later the monochrome layers amassed, pulsing and sweeping in front of iron girders and rain illuminated in front of the dark.  After silent detonation of a camera flash from the audience, the mass of sound subsided into more measured guitar stabs, before flooding in again, the sound of wind whistling sadly through derelict buildings and cars abandoned in forests.  This evocative drone, followed by AmenRa’s crushing weight, set the scene for the rest of the day’s varied explorations into heaviness beyond metal.