Two Hours of Stone Age Riffage with Carnaval in Cerkno (2016)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 2 October 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Concert date: December 23, 2016
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €5.00

Bar Gabrijel celebrated 21 years in business this year. We’re talking, of course, about the famous Cerkno music mecca located nowhere else but in Cerkno. For the occasion, the organizer put together an interesting night of live music, pairing Serbian rock’n’roll troublemakers Straight Mickey And The Boyz with Slovenian merciless stoner metallers Carnaval, who had released their new studio album just two days before the Cerkno show.

Sadly, not everything went according to plan that night. Straight Mickey And the Boyz canceled their show at the last minute. Blame a »short circuit« in the lumbar vertebrae of the drummer’s spine. The guy got pinched in exactly the wrong spot, and the band had to pull out. So it wasn’t just the lineup that got cut in half, the admission price did too. Carnaval took over as the headliners of the night. They didn’t split their set into two parts with a break in between, as was originally announced.

Carnaval played the whole show in one go and built up an incredible »feeling« in it, an incredible atmosphere! Hell of a thing. This is an unbelievably seasoned crew, a superbly tight and fired-up quartet. I’ve never experienced such a loud show at Bar Garijel. After the gig I spent a while checking whether my head was still on straight, and I was deaf for a good while. And I wasn’t the only one who felt like a proper steel drill had been bored into their ears for two hours.

The band stretched their uncompromising stoner metal stance across almost two hours of playing. Everything clicked. All four building blocks of the sound. And that sound is incredibly full, fat, smeared. Rolling riffs that grab you instantly and carry you through the hollow, deserted bowels of monstrous vistas of alienated desert sonic confinement and total trip-like rapture, complete mental absence. The phrases repeat over and over, and the effect of taking in a Carnaval concert gets downright hypnotic in places. The band repeatedly cranked up the volume during the set, dropping into a lower tonality to reach an even bigger sonic mantra of smeared distortion from the crashing racket. At the same time the drums were incredibly furious and explosive, a totally basic kit, but giant in size for a small club stage. A huge bass drum, (just) one bigger tom, an unapologetic snare and crash cymbals of a bigger diameter. A superb thunder, through which the melodic, rattling bass line always cut effectively. And on top of it all sits a clean, spot-on hollow vocal that even Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) could envy. The execution? Par exellence. Even the longer passages, where the band sticks with extended repetitions of the lead guitar phrases, get effectively aired out by the bouncy lead guitarist Vitja Balžalorski, who was surrounded by a whole candy box of assorted pedals laid out at his feet and, of the four, shook his neck vertebrae the most intensely during the show. Of course there’s a lot of lingering on the wah effect, with which Carnaval squeeze even more decibels of first-class sonic corruption into the sound.Carnaval seriously came to strip the walls of the bar, with patches of plaster flying off and windows straining out of their frames, and all the doors of the bar shook jerkily on their hinges. The sound was, to put it mildly, uncompromisingly deafening. Utterly sinister and relentless.

Between songs, the band came across as a man-of-few-words crew. Two bits of banter stuck with me. First, that they’d eaten really well before the show, which was of course thanks to Dario Cortesse, who apparently treated Carnaval to some secret recipe from his rich arsenal of wild-game cooking, and of course the dedication of the song Stupid Music to the one and only, unforgettable Boštjan Cvek.

Excellent turnout. Great energy, old friends catching up, in the same old familiar spot. Far away from kitschy, pretentious Ljubljana. Carnaval remain a superb band. We can say that in what they do, in their homegrown musical craft, they’re one of the strongest entities in Slovenia, one that can compete on the international scene without any trouble, where with an approach like this and music this good, they could command much bigger stages and even bigger crowds.