Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 11/20/2012
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €12.00 (presale) / €15.00 (day of show)
Junius – the original Boston quartet, standard-bearers of the modern underground as generated by the portmanteau of post-rock and -metal, though they hide no shortage of other genre admixtures – landed at Ljubljana’s Orto Bar as part of a joint tour with Katatonia and Alcest. But with a beauty flaw: no Katatonia and no Alcest, who took that very day off for a breather. Junius clearly don’t know what a breather is and don’t lose sleep over rest. They use gigs as one big release, and that keeps them at a full gallop. Right on. They’ve nailed the core of their artistic being in the first basic axiom of achieving authenticity in popular musical artistry.
The clock says a quarter to ten at night. Wednesday. Late. Barely 50 people in the club ambience of Orto bar, that alt-music garden we know all too well. Two red blinkers from behind and above, two beams of white light from behind and below, guitars run through a pleiad of different effects that conjure up the souped-up, massive sound of old-school mellotrons, while into this massive cosmic voyage through the ambient states of manifold phase dimensions gets mixed a metallic, distorted rumble, an extra fixative for the special expressive vibe this band nurtures and develops.
Rosetta, *shels, Hum are just three bands that flash through your mind when you meet Junius face to face. So, four guys. More or less silhouettes in the dark, because you can count the lux let loose into the room on the fingers of one hand (the poor photographers of the evening will explain that best!), and they bet all their aces on the element of predatory hypnosis generated by their ambient voyage on gigantic waves of massive sonic structure (generated by distorted guitar riffs and the sound effects of guitar synthesizing).
There’s plenty of use of »loop« effects too, meaning memorizing any given phrase and gradually »knitting« those phrases into the colorful macramé of the band’s language. The vocals, working as an extra instrument, are also often run through an effect that recalls speech heard on the other end of a phone line, and in the way the lead melodies develop they occasionally evoke the vibe of Porcupine Tree, even though the two bands are only very distant relatives. And the occasional single-string »delay« ornaments built into the throat of the sonic mass often recall the »Gilmouresque« touches used in Pink Floyd standards like Run Like Hell, Take It Back,…
Junius are hedonists. They couldn’t care less about their surroundings. All that matters to them is getting to a power outlet. Everything else happens by itself. With the extraordinary charm of independent expression, which absolutely nobody has any influence over, and whose basic generator of experimental, idea-driven daring is nothing but the soul and heart of this quartet.
The »glare« of the white beams was blinding at first, but combined with the undulating cosmic vibe of psychedelic post-metal speak, it leads you into a soothing state of disconnection that eventually hypnotizes you completely, estranges you from reason and carries you off on an adventure of esoteric voyaging, where the experiences with the Junius message are fully magnified and realized. No more, no less. Those who caught this »trick« of the Junius story left the gig with a full haul. And you don’t need fragrant cannabis smokes for it, although they help outfox the body and receptors, so you can take a shortcut to such a state of disconnected consciousness. (»a stoner’s joke, optional reading«): Let’s first wait for the legalization of the intoxicating herb. If nothing else, while waiting for that happy day you’ll grow an enviable long gray beard like the biblical patriarchs, Moses and company, with which you’ll be able to detect anti-personnel mines in the vast minefields of the »brave new world«.
At the show, Junius presented their current studio effort. Their second. It’s titled “Reports From the Threshold of Death” (2011). »Threshold« is a term normally used in the physiology of animals (and humans) when we talk about the propagation of action potentials in nerves and receptors (in Slovenian it’s »vzdražni prag«, literally the »excitation threshold«). If we keep splitting the meaning of the album title analytically, the word »threshold« carries all its sense in the moment we call »death«. That’s the point of excitation in a being’s state that triggers the moment the soul separates from the body, and the whole film of the life you lived plays back once more. All the pluses and all the minuses get tallied up, a karmic bill is issued that sends you onward into a new cycle of life, while the blessed are merged with universal matter, which is nothing other than information, for the creation of a new world. A world of the people, wherever in the endlessness of the cosmos. Junius’s moody musical experiences are a reflection of the pragmatic vault of boundless insight into the unconscious state, a coding of the universe’s accepted ideas into one unique moment in the language of music.
An excellent and unusual musical experience, which for devotees of the current underground of the post-rock and -metal universe is very much the sought-after energy elixir of intoxication and ecstasy. For a good hour. Then you wake up, cleansed, enlightened and ready to slip back into the role of a beaten-down slave of our lovely social order.
Setlist
1. Betray the Grave
2. All Shall Float
3. A Universe Without Stars
4. Spirit Guidance
5. A Reflection on Fire
6. Transcend the Ghost
7. In the Hearts Of Titans
8. Elisheva, I Love You
9. Stargazers & Gravediggers
—encore—
10. Eidolon & Perispirit
11. The Antediluvian Fire
Photo gallery
