Audiovisual Ohlsen Overkill: 2024-04

2024-04-30

ROADBURN FESTIVAL 2024 • DAY TWO: Friday, April 19th

- Where will you be when paradoxes burn the timewave? -

feat. BENEFITS, BLOOD INCANTATION, DARSOMBRA, DEATH GOALS, ECHOES OF ZOO, HEDVIG MOLLESTAD TRIO and PRUILLIP

Fuck it, no preliminary banter about the weather, breakfast or whatever - let's get right to Tilburg!

Ok wait, not so fast. Let's get that certain unavoidable paragraph done right away before that...

CLASHBURN:

This was a festival day on which I didn't see that many shows, because there were three performance over one hour on my schedule and especially those in the Paradox Jazz club demand complete commitment if you want a front row seat. Without that aspiration I may have had a chance to see at least half an hour of Dool performing their new album "The Shape Of Fluidity", but I frankly didn't even want to come close to the Main Stage if I wasn't going to stay for the whole show anyway. Too hard to leave for me. Luckily I will get my chance to see them later this year.

Similarly painful and also sacrificed for the Paradox queue was the second heavier performance of Clipping. in The Terminal.

I chose Death Goals over the very tempting Drone Assembly and sadly couldn't watch LucyKruger & The Lost Boys, who clashed with Blood Incantation. The last band marked as "HOT alternative - probably not doable" on my timetable was the Hip Hop duo Angry Blackmen. And finally the only thing on my plan which I ommited was the Electronic set of Forest Swords, because I just needed the longer break at the time.

All in all the usual (awesome) day in the Roadburn Festival office: you just can't see even half of everything interesting, but you're probably still having a fantastic day, right? Well, this is how mine went...

Where will you be... when England buuuuurrrns!? Holy shit! What better way to begin the festival day then to be berated and smashed in the face by some angry Brits? Benefits kicked everyone awake in The Engine Room with an ingeniuosly unexpected mixture of Electronic Noise and Punk, which very much centered around the spoken and screamed Hardcore beat poetry of frontman Kingsley Hall in a way which reminded me of Chat Pile's "grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg". This was no bad drug trip though, but a merciless reality check on Post Brexit Britain. Sometimes this was just relentless ranting to nothing but Metal blast and double bass beats, which in theory may seem like a maybe too primitive idea, but mate, Benefits killed that shit!

Anarchy may not be what it used to be, but at least there are exciting new bands burning the system down. A better show than I had expected - brilliant stuff!

How do you transition from the cold Punk fist of Benefits to a multi-media Psychedelic lovefest like Darsombra? You don't. But that whirlwind of impressions is just a part of Roadburn's beauty, which makes it so challenging to process everything afterwards once you're home again.

The duo of Brian Daniloski (guitar, vocals) and Ann Everton (synth, percussions, expressive dance) had a contagious joyful charme about them. Both almost equally important for the whole of the intimate show in the Hall of Fame their intoxicating Krautrock and Everton's film projections had a lot of down to earth low-fi, sometimes outright silly DIY elements, but also just worked in an incredibly transcendent elevating way.

Most details of the performace would probably just sound silly if I tried to describe them, but if you were there you'd know how unique and trippy this has actually been. One of the most magical experiences of the week.

Enough halhucinatory happiness, give us some angry Englishmen again! I didn't find myself in the mood to squeeze myself inside the packed Engine Room for Fuck Money, so I soon headed back to the Hall of Fame for yet another duo. This time however the signs were poiting to wild Hardcore with raw Punk energy and mind-melting Mathcore breaks.

Carrying over the strong queer representation from the day before Death Goals were as far as I witnessed undoubtly responsible for the gayest moshpits of the festival - and that's just to be read as sheer fact without any knee-slapper pun.

No matter which colour your orientation and identity had, this show was definitely a phenomenal bone-breaking ass kicker for everyone. I wish I could have stayed for all of it, but my rollercoaster of a plan pulled me towards my only event in the 013 venue of the whole day and into a completely different mood and mindset once again...

Even though I love the "Timewave Zero" album I had been going back and forth about including Blood Incantation's Klaus Schulze worship in my schedule several times in preparation for the festival. It's just one of those big all-or-nothing events - comparable to the Bell Witch show on Friday last year -, which you don't want to cut short. And ultimately I'm very glad that I decided in its favour.

A source of fascination for many Main Stage shows at Roadburn is the pure fact that they are even allowed to take place in such a huge setting. It certainly isn't an everyday experience to see a super slow motion Ambient performance with nearly no action on stage unfold in a room for three thousand people. So much droning, mellow deep synth swirling and lingering in atmospheric textures...

Yet the band didn't keep their analogue electronic excursion as minimalistic as on the album. During the second third of the seventy minutes performance they added more colours and in the finale they not only opened the accessibility up with a strumming acoustic guitar and a drum machine beat, but also grew to a sextet including a trombone player and experimental vocal improvisations by non other than Attila Csihar (Sunn O))) / Mayhem). This was something else!

At times - I'm not going to lie - this show could get a bit demanding. The reward however was worth everything! And if you heard "The Man" Walter talking about the Sisyphean task of getting all the rare 70's equipment the band required for the show, you know that it's extremely unlikely to happen anywhere in Europe again anytime soon.

Sitting down for an even longer show after "Timewave Zero" sounds like a weird idea, but if it disturbs you to imagine a seated show of the Hedvig Mollestad Trio you can breathe out in relief now, because it was only the first two rows, while the rest of the audience in the Paradox was free to move around. Well, at least as much as that was possible I must add, since the interest in the Norwegian band was much bigger than the space the club could provide. Tales tell of a ridiculously long waiting line outside - for the very slim chance that anyone would leave this stellar Heavy Jazz Prog Rock spectacle.

Just like in the Extase bar back in 2017 Hedvig, Ellen and Ivar were firing one explosive riff, crazy drum freakout, jazzy electric and upright bass solo and every kind of other shredding, grooving, rocking, banging and smoothly flying goody into the audience as if there was no tomorrow. Was there actually? As fast as these seventy-five minutes flew I'm pretty sure that the key to actually warp time had been unlocked at this point. Everything about this performance was just electrifying.

Too bad that the bands playing the Paradox don't sell their stuff at the merch area in the Koepelhal, but only on the spot directly after the show. Of course buying from the artist themselves directly is the cooler superior way to do it. On the other hand I just didn't have time to add one or two items to my collection, because the doors of the Hall of Fame weren't exactly waiting just for me...

What was missing to make this day even more perfect now? Maybe a little quality Sludge of Doom?

The Belgian duo Pruillip provided just that, but then also spacious Dylan Carlson style Drone landscapes, distant dreamy female Shoegaze vocals and some quirky krauty rhythmic choices and electronic stuff, which made the whole thing hard to put into a specific box.

So my spontanious observation was to specify them as a heavy guitar version of Spill Gold. And I still stand by it; even though Pruillip are using a different, much more crushing vocabulary, these bands are surely spiritually connected somehow.

I closed my night with yet another band from Belgium in the Paradox. Echoes Of Zoo's Jazz Fusion may seem a little tame compared to a lot of the often more extreme, heavier, more aggressively avant-garde stuff which usually touches Jazz at this festival, but I loved what I heard from their most recent album "Speech Of Species" before and was very keen to let drums, bass, guitar and saxophone wash through my exhausted tired head.

Keeping up the high quality of the whole Friday there was really nothing to complain about during the journey their creative story-telling musicianship took us on. While still being exciting and adventurous enough this was just the right show to unwind now.

What a day! And how unbelievable that two full days with many exceptional highlights still lay ahead of me...