With the simultaneous release of two EPs, Amenra seem to be aware that they are at a particular point in their career. While With Fang and Claw looks back to the band's origins, paying homage to the artwork on the Mass I EP released in 2003, De Toorn follows on from the De Doorn album. Introspection to refocus their approach? Or was it a reflection to better launch themselves into a future that promises to be as exciting as ever? We'll have to wait and see, although the band's current tour already offers some clues. Ton find out, we'll first have to listen to the opening acts, an always satisfying step with Amenra. In recent years, we've come across the likes of Ggggolddd, Verset Zero, Mütterlein and Jo Quail in this role. First and foremost, Amenra are following in the footsteps of Tool (from whom they've stolen more than just the tattooed back singer, the taste for the mystical and the song Parabol) and Ghost: the audience are asked not to film or photograph the show with their phones. So much the better for total immersion, nothing could spoil the evening organised by Cartel Concerts!
DIVIDE AND DISSOLVE
In the last moments before the concert, a funny little event took place far from the public eye: barely two or three people noticed the exchange between guitarist Takiaya Reed, the brain and soul of Divide and Dissolve, and the security staff who asked her for her badge to let her through the barrier leading to the stage. She didn't have the precious sesame with her and tried to explain in English to the poor fellow, who was wondering what was happening to him, that she had to get up on stage to play. Phew, things quickly got back to normal and she finally was able to take her place in front of an audience that was gradually building up!
Divide and Dissolve caught our attention shortly after the release of the Gas Lit album, when Chelsea Wolfe (a ‘magic word’ to arouse our curiosity!) remixed the track Far From Ideal and added her vocals. The duo's instrumental doom, in the purest tradition of bands opening for Amenra, is as fascinating as it is demanding. Fortunately, the evening's audience is not here to party, and knew how to hold their ground, attentive to an offering that gives place to textures, hypnotic loops and haunted, melancholic atmospheres.
The set blurred our borders and the tracks sometimes followed one another without interruption. Divide and Dissolve play seven tracks, but you get the impression that you've only heard half of them. The heaviness of Monolithic, the contrasts between the layers of Provenance and its denser parts, or the creeping menace of Derail: all of these come together to create thick, rough, organic material.
The tracks plunge towards drone or, on the contrary, suddenly rise via a few neoclassical flourishes (Takiaya Reed also plays clarinet and, on the album, flute, saxophone and piano). As she says, although there are no words in her music, that doesn't deprive it of its message, and Divide and Dissolve asserts its anti-colonial, anti-qhite supremacist message in support of all peoples massacred and erased by oppressors. The audience at the Elysée Montmartre greeted this approach with warm applause, especially as there was enough soul in this music to already plunge us into the spirit of contemplation conducive to the ritual to come.
TREHA SEKTORI
Treha Sektori is also a ritual. The eminent dark ambient project by illustrator and photographer Dehn Sora, who has already released a split with Amenra in 2014, perfectly fits here. The set design uses elements from the cover of his latest album, Rejet, and the musician sits behind a collection of bones and bouquets of dried flowers hanging from the ceiling.
There are several things that strike you straight away. Firstly, the visuals: in the dark, Treha Sektori performs in front of a screen on which images as beautiful as they are disturbing are projected, a macabre poetry in black and white that is both cold and mysterious, somewhere between Bergman's Seventh Seal and the cryptic nightmares of Edmund Elias Merhige. The props on stage continue to ‘bring life to death’ while, paradoxically, adding a touch of life to the darkness through the past they evoke and their organic touch.
The music is organic too. While Dehn Sora performs behind his machines, the sounds are not synthetic. Percussions, whispers, grunts and other sounds blend together. The idea is not to create melodies, but rather to immerse us in a set of sounds, an enigmatic and labyrinthine incantatory whirlpool that, despite its experimental aspect, remains visceral. At once complementary to and the antithesis of the harshness of his black metal project Throane in terms of rendering, Treha Sektori's music is obscure and, once again, demands the audience's attention: only by submitting your soul to it can you hope to snuggle up in this darkness that is as delicious as it is disturbing, with hints of folk and industrial.
The intensity builds from loop to loop, the visuals fascinating. Treha Sektori, who recently appeared as a guest on Mütterlein's excellent last album, hasn't released an album since 2021: let's hope that new things are in the offing and that we'll have the chance to see him live again very soon, in a more intimate setting, just to make it even more suffocating!
AMENRA
Amenra concerts are monolithic rituals, not only for their mystical dimension but also for their timeless, frozen aspect. Even if the setlist changes, you more or less know what to expect... And yet, from the very first seconds, all our reference points were turned upside down: while we knew that bassist Tim de Gieter had left the adventure to devote himself to Doodseskader, replaced by Amy Tung Barrysmith (Year of the Cobra and Slower, a doom-style Slayer cover band), we knew nothing about Mathieu Vandekerckhove's new haircut, which no longer obscures his face! Fortunately, the newcomer has got the hang of it, and Vandekerckhove remains true to form: Amenra is all about sulking! It may be very dark in the Elysée Montmartre, but that's nothing compared to the darkness their eyes sweat.
And darkness, we will behold : The new tracks Salve Mater and Heden are full of rage, tension and suffering that erupt in cathartic explosions. The main lines of the show have not changed: Colin H. van Eeckhout spends most of his time with his back turned to the audience, prostrate, screaming his guts out, occasionally hidden by clouds of smoke as black and white images scroll behind the band. However, we notice that black has taken over from white: the new videos are darker, Van Eeckhout keeps his jacket on longer than usual to reveal his tattooed back only at the very end of the concert... and above all, smoke is used less often than we remember, the absence of its white wisps completing the plunge into darkness (it seems that even the Sisters of Mercy, other adepts of impenetrable mists, are currently playing without... what's the world coming to?).
The Parisian audience has clearly understood that we've come to make an inverted U-shaped mouth, we've come to tear out our organs, we've come to contemplate our own annoying insignificance, us, poor pieces of meat vaguely covered in hair and toes that are far too arrogant and talkative. We're pitiful, we're guilty, our pettiness all the more obvious in the face of Amenra's impressive mass of music, that intimidating thing that shrivels us up with all its superb heaviness. Fortunately, the ban on filming with your phone is largely respected: absolutely nothing spoils the magnificent darkness in which we happily drown.
Not a word, not a smile. We're pelted by the usual Razoreater, Plus Près de Toi or Am Kreuz, we breathe (but silently, please, not with our mouths open) during Solitary Reign, which is always greeted with fervent acclaim, before being tossed about by its abyssal storms, we're surprised by the aggression of TerZiele.Tottedood and then, after being held spellbound by Aorte-Ritual and its snarling finale, the band leaves us in total darkness and suddenly takes off. A radical, uncompromising slap in the face, with nothing to soften the blow, leaving the audience stunned and with no reassuring light to cling to.
The power and sincerity that the band manages to exude commands respect: you always come away feeling as if struck by lightning, transfixed by the sincerity of the emotions, night after night, without it ever seeming routine or mundane: Amenra concerts may look the same, but each one is unique, authentic and total. Tonight, the mood was slightly different from the previous tour. All it took was one or two small changes to the setlist, a detail here or there, and that was it: Amenra, while following their ultra-codified ritual with their usual consistency of excellence, nevertheless delivered a concert that left you with a renewed impression. The cathartic sublimation of suffering with sacred overtones had a more raging, more desperate air: more malice, more mourning, that's a direction we'll be delighted to take in their company for years to come!
