Even the Sky Weeps When the Witch-Trial Accuser Brings Icy Frost to the Silent Planet…(2011)

Author: Rok Klemše

Venue: Channel Zero, Ljubljana
Concert date: 06.06.2011
Attendance: 0

First, a little disclosure: the author of this report listens to two of the three bands from the night recapped below pretty regularly on the daily bus rides from home to work and back, which add up to almost two hours. If any of you reading this also commute by public transport every day, you can probably vouch for the fact that a 50-minute ride (with the right soundtrack) can drop a person into an almost transcendental state, somewhere at the crossroads of sleep, meditation and a (mental) trip across the vastness of space…

So let’s head back in our minds to that night, when, courtesy of our beloved “Smrdljivkči”, American Abigail Williams, German Thulcandra and northern-Norwegian Iskald rolled into the old-school black metal den that is Channel Zero on Metelkova. Since black metal doesn’t belong in the sun and nice weather whatever the season, the sky over Ljubljana and the surrounding area poured down water mercilessly that afternoon, as if it wanted to wash away all the filth of the world and clear the way for an undisturbed, pure journey through the spheres of musical (un)ordinariness. Despite the weather, despite it being a Tuesday, and despite the fact that the bands on the bill probably don’t have a huge fanbase over here, about 40 metalheads (by eye) were wandering around Metelkova.

A little after nine in the evening, the duo Iskald took the stage in front of the crowd gathered in the hall. They’re Simon Larsen (guitar, vocals) and Aage Andre Kleking (drums), and for the tour they naturally armed themselves with one more guitarist and a bassist. The band, whose name says it comes more or less from the north of Norway, is a very atypical black metal outfit. The music is dynamic, with influences from other metal genres, even positive and almost cheerful to a degree, yet at the same time extremely cold, distant and otherworldly dark. In front of a crowd of around 30 heads, who stayed calm and quiet during the set and rewarded the band between songs with almost academic applause, the guys rocked us into the embrace of a truly icy frost from faraway worlds, which everyone can interpret in their own way but few survive unscathed in the long run. With a cross-section of their four albums (with an emphasis on this year’s metal ode to cold and a dehumanized world, “The Sun I Carried Alone”), they brought a chunk of the north to Ljubljana that touched everyone in the hall and, for a good half hour, rode a wave of brutal guitars, thundering bass and machine-gun drums to carry away all the crap in the world. The animal vocals, which would scare even a pack of starving wolves in a snowstorm, were the cherry on top of the black, death and thrash metal riffs, which the guys wrap up in a package backed by inventive drumming and rock-solid bass and serve with such coldness that a concertgoer can feel all the energy they pour into writing songs. In my view the band doesn’t even expect much of a reaction from the audience, because the music is more than obviously written because the band playing it likes it, and the listener’s choice is simple: enjoy or leave. No worries, we enjoyed it!

Up second were the Germans Thulcandra, who took their name from the Silent Planet of the science-fiction Space Trilogy by British author C.S. Lewis, who a good half century ago was already predicting that humanity’s future is only possible on other worlds, both mental and physical. Musically, the band (project?), which also includes members of the technical death metallers Obscura and the melodic black metallers Dark Fortress, builds on the incredible legacy that Jon Nodtveidt left this world with his cult band Dissection. A post on one of the metal forums describes the music of Obscura quite nicely: “Thulcandra are fucked up. If Jon from Dissection were still alive he’d kill himself again. (by Haliaetum)”. The guys played us most of their one and only album so far, Fallen Angels Dominion, and to close out the 40-minute set they threw in the Dissection classic The Somberlain, leaving the biggest crowd of the night (50 of us) speechless, drool dripping from the corners of our mouths, wishing we could keep going on this musical journey to unknown planets and mental spheres for at least another year. Definitely the winning band of the night, with every member mastering their instrument to perfection. It’s hard to describe the atmosphere in a hall where the smell of weed was spreading and most of the crowd was fairly static, but only on the physical level. We were all surely traveling far, far away in our heads on waves of music, waking up from the trance slightly dazed between songs and rewarding the band with applause and shouting. Definitely a band that belongs on small stages in small clubs, since they play far too intimate a vision of black metal to come fully and flawlessly alive on big festival stages. If you weren’t there, go read a book on meditation and start training; the rest of us can load any Thulcandra song onto our MP3 players, put headphones in our ears, press “play” and, in a state of total trance, set off on a journey into the depths of the soul…

To close out this fast and tightly run evening, Abigail Williams took the stage. Of all the bands we heard that night, they play the most “regular” black metal, one that leans heavily on the Scandinavian school tradition. I was skeptical about what the guys could show after two such perfect sets from the support acts, but it turned out the Americans are really excellent musicians live too, and their music was just the thing to bring us back down to earth after the musical journeys we’d witnessed that night. The band has only put out two albums and an EP so far, and luckily they left the really early material alone, where they flirted with other metal genres (well, if we’re being a bit generous and count metalcore among them), and delivered a very energetic show. Live, their music comes to life much better and with more variety than on record, and although the band probably expected a louder response from the crowd, which was already thinning out a bit, the audience followed the set pretty calmly, in the style of the whole evening, and rewarded them between songs with decent applause, so by the end of the stroll through both of the band’s albums, everyone was surely satisfied, band and crowd alike.

We were treated to an ideal package for a Tuesday night, which I can describe with only one word: perfect. The bands were surely happy too, hanging out with concertgoers in front of the hall for a long time afterwards, and we can only hope we’ll get more visits from groups that play black metal in such an interesting and varied way, draw their lyrical inspiration from the human psyche (probably their own too), and prove again and again that metal can also be extremely intelligent music.

Photos: Nina Grad

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