Noise, Aesthetics and Surrealism (2013)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Venue: Channel Zero, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Concert date: October 11, 2013
Attendance: 120 – 150
Ticket price: €10 in advance / €14 on the day of the show

Friday night brought a hefty dose of new-school sonic provocation and avant-garde noise aesthetics to the shelter of Ljubljana’s alternative epicenter, the club Channel Zero. For many, the headliners and the main reason to pack into the CH0 den were the New York post-punkers A Place To Bury Strangers, who, despite a name that conjures up proverbial death and deadness, the necrophiliac postmortem stiffness and lifelessness of punk, prove exactly the opposite. With their salvos of electrified, feedback-squealing guitar, the trio from the Big Apple has managed to cement its standing among the more prominent and more established names of the American underground avant-garde. After a good decade of existential shape-shifting and reconceptualizing, they stepped onto the Slovenian stage this time as defenders of a firmer grip on the scene, as the “kings of noise,” let’s call them that. Under tons of distorted chaoticism, they’ve also managed to breathe into their core a few chunks of proper full-blooded garage pop gems, with a concise gloomy whiff of the more established Scots Jesus And The Mary Chain, while at heart they’re closer to Iggy’s Stooges than to post-grunge vagueness. The predapocalyptic naive drone of the British Isles from the era of the long-buried eighties, after this year’s homage to Dead Moon with the album Strange Moon – A Tribute To Dead Moon, demanded empirical verification, according to many a connoisseur. One more reason to show up, for the ascetics sworn to the garage, could have been the noise-rock treat from Georgia, a three-piece, three-headed multi-genre noise offshoot going by the name Bambara.

Escorted by comparisons to the brilliant surrealist aesthetics of David Lynch and armed with the outstanding record Dreamviolence, the party kicked off with a punchy display of the sheer power and punch of this very trio, delivering a noisy garage dose of dirty, deliberately distorted-to-the-max pop. Pop is only conditionally in play here, since in their own psychedelic way Bambara are closer to an extreme, explosive mixture of dreamy Swans vulnerability and stadium-stuffed goth, and Lynch’s rabbits sneak in with shameless explicitness from practically every corner of the sonic saturation of this truly dense-sounding, eccentric dose of stage-confident creeping down smoky side roads of a manic-depressively constructed universe. Dark and hermetically devoted to the suggestive tricks of post-punk droning and HC gaze, they grant themselves complete artistic freedom to tear apart and knot into something truly potent the eclectic loose ends of Reid Bateh’s dreamy, bipolar-tuned vocals. William Brookshire’s bass and the drenched-in-sweat rhythms of the outstanding drummer Blaze Bateh attach themselves to those vocals as a matter of course and without the slightest generic feel, while waterfalls of rather dance-saturated electronics pour in over a decidedly schizophrenic web of nightmarishly sweet play between rhythm and melody. The guys on stage truly fall into harmony with their essence, and the tight interplay radiates from every pore of the trio on every song. The ones that lodge themselves most firmly in the hearts and minds of a crowd that wasn’t exactly the biggest were the outstanding All The Same, with its heavily spiced aesthetics, a monstrous version of Bird Calls that sounds like Depeche Mode on a very psychotic trip, the eclecticism of Hawk Bones, and the sweet echoes of demonic bite-screams in Divine Teeth, which only confirmed and cemented their status as the first big surprise of the night. Bambara joined A Place To Bury Strangers on tour at the show in Poland, and after only three shared gigs the young, ambitious trio deserves nothing but praise. I wouldn’t single anyone out, though the lion’s share of the concert pie goes above all to the remarkable Blaze, who with his punishment of the drum kit, and above all his deeply felt performance, left a better taste in the mouth, making this sonically rather exhausting musical offering even more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise … Bambara were far more than a lukewarm warm-up, closer to the definition of total garage domination, which made the job of completely enchanting the crowd before what was still to come rather difficult. The bar had to be set much higher than if some completely average nobodies had taken the stage before them, which Bambara were by no means.

The phenomenal chemistry of the great trio carried on with the arrival of the stars of the night, who took the stage wrapped in a truly extreme haze of smoke inside a pretty well-packed Channel Zero. Smoke, that foggy substance, filled practically every last corner of the club, and otherworldly laser beams pierced through the whole thing, enough to make anyone think they’d wandered into a trance party. APTBS are anything but. A sworn reconceptualization of the landscapes of early Nick Cave, the aforementioned Swans and Joy Division joins hands here with truly rustic-sounding post-punk play on the thousand-times-heard but just as often recolored palette of the records A Place To Bury Strangers, the eclectic Exploding Heads and last year’s dictate of a record, Worship, carving out a rather interesting, pop-sweetened path. There’s the dreamy vocal of Oliver Ackermann, who, together with the electronics, the pretty direct metrics of drummer Robi Gonzales and the rather atypical bass lines of Dion Lunadon, forges its way in a guitar manner that’s at times a bit screaming. From behind the waterfalls of sound from this rather naive-sounding noise pop you can even feel a bit of NIN’s sharpness, which doesn’t sacrifice danceability in this treble-saturated rush along the edge of what pop, punk, goth, electro and noise actually are supposed to stand for. Guitar rapture, posing, excess, and the crowd falls completely under the megalomaniac pressure of cathartic noise and seemingly chaotic order. The positive transfer of good energy is also reflected in the dancing dreaminess and ecstasy of the Ljubljana crowd, who gladly surrendered to the ambient play of images and sonic collages. One of the best moments of an impulsive, spontaneously played and woven-together concert, with bloody, progressive-backed undertones, was above all the epic version of the closing song Ocean. With a jam of more than 10 minutes, just one light pulsing into thick fog, and a crowd granted the honor of co-creating the incredible atmosphere, it carried the perfect, fully loaded train of pleasure into dimensions entirely different from everyday reality. The otherworldly realm was laced with screaming guitars, and in this perfect contact of all the force lines of the universe’s extreme gravity, the crowd went completely still and gave their bodies over to the swaying of the rhythm. The utter timelessness just went on and on, and after a contact between space and endless time truly soaked in sound, after the last decay of guitars and the hypnotic chant, a completely ominous vacuum set in, an emptiness that, after the onset of total silence, felt even more final, fatal and almost more painful than the salvos of noise that had burrowed under the skin and into the consciousness of the crowd.

A Place To Bury Strangers vanished into the night. A milky-thick fog of smoke embraced them, and like an apparition after extraordinary ecstasy, all that remained in our ears was a faint ringing, the irritated ears still resonating with the sweet noise of both bands. It was an outstanding show that brought to Ljubljana at least a grain of that release and dismissal of everyday worries, which slapped a nice, solid patch of total delight over the hearts and souls of this audience. The eclecticism of surreal beauty is part of this story, but the lion’s share of it hides not only in the landscapes, the imagery, the play of suggestive lights (this time completely useless for photo aesthetes), but somewhere deeper. Probably in that point of complete fusion of feelings of the right time and place, when we let all those reined-in feelings come wandering out, bound by the conventional laws of gravity. The right frequency of sound and rhythm, even a few decibels louder than usual, wakes the heart and mind and lets a ray or two of that perfect bodiless ecstasy into the world, the kind that knows no songs, band names or members, but knows it was given something beautiful, divine and above standard. And that’s why it’s worth coming back and reaching for names like A Place To Bury Strangers, or the even lesser-known and less-heard Bambara, who leave a true imprint of their true essence right where it matters most – on the heart!