The choker necklaces, the black leather-based boots, and the Deftones tees are so ample exterior Austin’s Empire Control Room, you’d assume there was a cult initiation taking place. Inside, the music is simply as loud, with hoards of folks galavanting from venue to venue in the metropolis’s personal Red River Cultural District. Connection is palpable. Welcome to a haven for the offbeat and misunderstood.
Headlined by Godflesh, Tim Hecker, Faust, Duster, TR/ST, and clipping., this 12 months marks the second voyage of Oblivion Access (previously Austin Terror Fest). The competition, co-founded by Dusty Brooks and Dorian Domi, additionally runs parallel to Bonnaroo in the southeast, an occasion that totes the identical drained headliners as many others this 12 months. There is none of that at Oblivion Access. Named after a Lil Ugly Mane album — who miraculously carried out a blazing rap set regardless of canceling his tour — the four-day music competition is a real magnification of the underground; a spot that celebrates the unclassifiable and underappreciated, the shadowy and subversive. One look and also you’ll see that the invoice is gloriously weird, stuffed with a large spectrum of hip-hop, metallic, psychedelia, and punk. If you’re not tapped in, many of these units will soar proper over your head — that’s while you miss the great things.
Read extra: Music competition matches to make you stand out from the relaxation
Look to Yellow Swans, who carried out their first correct present in 15 years. Beginning as an experimental outfit from the Pacific Northwest that created lysergic noise music, the band slipped into the unknown when the mission disbanded in 2008. So it’s endearing that earlier than they play a single notice, Gabriel Mindel Saloman spills his guts about how grateful he’s to be breaking their dry spell. “I’m here for imagination, something radical, something fucking different. Something where we survive and live our best life. That’s where this music comes from,” he says earlier than their earsplitting blast decimates Elysium’s 500-cap house. If you didn’t put on earplugs, you now have tinnitus. Similarly, Have a Nice Life expressed gratitude earlier than launching into their gloomy, emo-adjacent shoegaze that had everybody deep of their feelings.
[Photo by Robert Hein]
One of the longest units from the weekend, although, got here from Earth, who performed their revolutionary debut album, Earth 2, in full. Of all the uncommon performances that went down this previous weekend, their set could also be the most coveted. Back in 1993, the band turned drone-metal pioneers by dropping the report on Sub Pop, regardless of not being half of the grunge emergence. Rather, they took Slayer riffs and stretched them into 20-minute meditations, luring metalheads into their trance as a result of guitarist Dylan Carlson wore a Morbid Angel tee on the again cowl. Here, inside Central Presbyterian Church, their sermon produces a spellbinding impact. Hardly anybody strikes. People sit there transfixed, flung right into a religious state as the gradual crush of the drone takes maintain in quadraphonic sound. It quickly turns into a check of endurance. How lengthy are you able to let your thoughts wander earlier than the temptation of your neighbor, checking a textual content, or capturing an Instagramable second breaks the hex? There are a couple of fidgets. Photographers tread frivolously on the sides. Even jotting down a pair of fast notes seems like sacrilege. Cosmic lighting heightens the expertise, like a Pink Floyd laser present for folks with blackened wardrobes. When the set lastly wraps, one tune melding into one other so seamlessly that you may’t inform the place it begins and ends, the applause is deafening. There’s a standing ovation, cheers, rapture. The band have achieved one thing outstanding. For a time, all the harm felt a number of realms away.
[Photo by Andrea Escobar]
This 12 months’s Oblivion made a degree to nod to the new technology. On Thursday evening, the warmth is godless. Everything feels prefer it’s melting, the kind of temperature the place folks brush up towards you they usually’re moist, however the crowd is buzzing over MSPAINT at Empire Control Room. Vocalist Deedee appears like he tousled the set instances and is fronting for the unsuitable band. He grunts and yelps into the microphone, transferring about onstage as if he’s been wired for days. They’re not fairly hardcore — there isn’t any guitarist — however that’s the closest you’ll get if classifying them means one thing to you. A man standing close to the again switches from vibing to aggressively head-banging in seconds. Two giants in tanks doused in sweat go by, uttering profanities (probably about the temperature or the band’s reside smarts; it’s unclear). But for all the folks fleeing the pit, there are simply as many getting into. MSPAINT’s energy is plain, but they’re solely getting began.
GEL, on the different hand, are defiantly hardcore. It’s 103 levels out once they take the stage at Mohawk on Sunday afternoon, the sort of distress that might fry your cellphone battery in case you depart it out too lengthy. But vocalist Sami Kaiser isn’t fazed, providing a lot power that she generally wants to carry the mic with two fingers as she flings from one aspect of the stage to the different. The crowd could also be withering in the warmth, however their “hardcore for freaks” is so ferocious, you’ll be able to hear it clearly down the street.
[Photo Robert Hein]
Although Oblivion Access is rife with underground heroes, experimentalists, and metallic shredders, Chat Pile really feel like one of the bands that embody the competition’s ethos the most. So a lot in order that they performed twice on the power of their brutal debut album, God’s Country. On Friday, proper earlier than the group are slated to go on, a thunderstorm threatens to smash their second act. As the crowd heads again inside, somebody remarks how “sick it would be to see Chat Pile in a lightning storm.” It’s exhausting to disagree. The interim is agonizing, although the music flipping from soul to nü metallic appears to predict that they are going to go on quickly. When Chat Pile do lastly make it on the stage, they open with “Why” (“Why do people havе to live outside?/In tents, undеr bridges/Living with nothing and horribly suffering”). It’s wildly on the mark in a metropolis like Austin, the place the homeless inhabitants exceeds 5,000. People stroll round the metropolis with pillows. Every underpass presents a chance for an encampment. It’s widespread sufficient to stroll by somebody handed out on the sidewalk, baking in the warmth, it’s sickening. In between their sludgy noise, vocalist Raygun Busch recommends Toni Morrison’s Beloved and suggests the metropolis erect a statue of Tobe Hooper.
The thrill of ’70s Germany got here alive on Saturday evening with back-to-back units of style descendants Beak> and krautrock OGs Faust, who had been ringing in 50 years of pushing boundaries, conference, and tastes. On report, Beak> are tight and intentional, with their songs hardly ever breaking six minutes. Live, they’re a very totally different band. Their jams grow to be longer and unbridled, leaning into their potential to make crowds transfer much more. To be truthful, this lot isn’t as practically animated appropriately for a bunch this nice, and others take discover. “Are we gonna stand around, or are we gonna dance to this shit?” somebody asks between songs. The music will get groovier, trancier, extra mystifying. But as shortly as the trio arrived, with drummer Geoff Barrow harassing his crew lovingly (“Slower, bit faster, no, yeah that’s it,” he taunts as his bandmate struggles to realize the proper tempo), they descend the stage.
[Photo by Robert Hein]
Faust, nonetheless, are objectively unusual. During their hour-and-a-half efficiency, a girl sits onstage studying Wall Street Journal. At one level, founding member Jean-Hervé Péron takes a chainsaw to a barrel. Toward the finish, a member of the crowd is invited to bash that very same barrel till he has nothing left to offer. Look a little bit deeper, although, and also you’ll discover a band which have trodden their very own path for half a century. Even their frontwoman Jeanne-Marie Varain — a more recent addition to Faust and Péron’s daughter — possesses the identical aptitude for theatrics as the band that had been “naked and stoned a lot” in the early ’70s. She remodeled from a girl slinging their very own merch previous to the present into a fascinating, depraved creature not of this Earth. She regales the crowd with tales of her haunted desires, laughs manically, and sticks her tongue out savagely.
But at their core, Faust lay down an expertise so gripping, time slows. “We don’t play rock ’n’ roll. We play krautrock,” Péron repeats for the third time in the night earlier than launching into the tune of the identical identify. At this second, the band give up to the warped pulse that outlined a whole motion, created new doorways, and made folks assume otherwise. You hear it in Radiohead, Joy Division, and Sonic Youth, amongst numerous others. But whereas they level to their very own grand previous, it’s clear that Faust immerse themselves in the current. It’s all there may be, actually.
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