In this autumn packed with musical news and concerts, Parisians who love bold sounds and violent noises were faced with a difficult choice: Attila Csihar, Iggor Cavalera and Verset Zero were performing at Mains d'Œuvres at the same time as Author & Punisher and Bong-Ra at Backstage by the Mill. Tristan Shone's industrial doom project last album was one of our favourite releases of the year, so we couldn't miss the machinist's return to France as headliner, especially with the mad alchemist Jason Köhnen opening the evening!
BONG-RA
Incidentally, Köhnen is keeping us waiting! Perhaps due to the still sparse audience, the concert starts half an hour later than announced. All the better, as this gives the venue a little more time to fill up. The singer/bassist/mad mastermind behind Bong-Ra is accompanied by guitarist Attila Kovacs, and together they plunge us into their hallucinatory mechanical hell. While the recent Black Noise (review) marked Köhnen's return to a more aggressive sound with more doom and atmospheric experimentation, the live show allows us to appreciate the variety of Bong-Ra's torments and follies.
Black metal, free jazz, doom, glitch breakcore... Bong-Ra has tried everything, torturing every sound in every conceivable way to bring to life polymorphous, unpredictable and often terrifying sonic monsters, demonstrating true generosity and great inventiveness when it comes to baffling his audience. It's reminiscent of Aphex Twin getting dirty with Mayhem, or Igorrr without the opera and the funnier touches – it's heavy and in-your-face. Paradoxically, Bong-Ra seems more accessible live than in the studio and gains additional effectiveness with its hypnotic heaviness.
The set is entirely devoted to Black Noise and its companion album To Mega Panopticon. Amidst all this noise and fury, we have the pleasure of hearing their take on Godflesh's Cold World (fun fact: The Waiting Ones, Attila Kovacs' other band, had already covered this Godflesh track) for an obviously chilling result, delivering an imposing, martial and tormented version of Killing Joke's SO36... And, surprise, a cover of Pastel Prison, not recorded in the studio (yet?), a visceral and raw outburst from the industrial/rap/grunge/hardcore duo Doodseskader! This gives the audience a few familiar bones to chew and shows Bong-Ra's diverse influences.
This music isn't necessarily for everyone, but that's okay: not everyone was there. A fascinating hybrid monster, Köhnen's project is extremely rare on French stages. So it was necessary to savour its forty-five minutes of dark nightmares and musical explorations as they should be savoured: with furrowed brows, in the dark, and by appreciating the very particular flavour of uncertainty, of being lost in a fog as delightful in its opacity as it is slightly mystical!
AUTHOR & PUNISHER
These Machine Kill Fascists: the slogan emblazoned on Tristan Shone's gear has been dominating the stage since the start of the evening. Over time, the inscription has lost some of its sharpness, but the artist's determination has not wavered one bit, as proven by Nocturnal Birding (review). For several years now, Tristan Shone has been accompanied on stage and in the studio by guitarist Doug Sabolick... There was Laurel & Hardy, Chip & Dale, and now we can make lame jokes about which one is Author and which one is Punisher.
Behind his homemade machines, his face betraying his desire to crush us, Shone remains unmistakably both the author and the punisher! Any desire to laugh disappears from the very first moments of the concert. Meadowlark may start off gently, but its melancholy is quickly crushed by the heaviness of the sound. Author & Punisher's doom/industrial mix is impressively powerful live, playing loud, making the walls shake and our organs contract. We fear that the wings of the Moulin Rouge, located a few metres away, might crash again and that the Richter scale has just been crushed.
The concert is a veritable assault on the senses. The intensity of the monumental Titanis, with its Indonesian tribal touches, is an apocalyptic wrecking ball that Shone and Sabolick hurl at us after four minutes or so. However, the peak of madness of the evening comes shortly afterwards, when Matthias Jungbluth and Titouan Le Gal, respectively singer and guitarist of the sludge/industrial band Fange (one of our national treasures), take to the stage to catapult Black Storm Petrel into our jaws. It was already the most violent and metal track by Author & Punisher, but now it was a furious, possessed tornado that devastated Backstage by the Mill, making this Parisian date THE date of the tour that you shouldn't miss!
On stage, Author & Punisher illustrates the tensions felt in his music, Shone's body encased in his equipment, the human who ultimately manages to dominate the machines or join forces with them in a fusion reminiscent of Shin'ya Tsukamoto's film Tetsuo the Iron Man, bringing to life a soul, an organic voice in this mechanical chaos. Doug Sabolick, freer in his movements, can also communicate more easily with the audience by brandishing his guitar. Towards the end of the concert, when he appears on stage with an instrument in each hand, we wonder what he's going to come up with. In fact, he hangs one up to use the other, a gesture whose meaning quickly becomes figurative as he ‘hangs up his guitars’ and leaves the stage, leaving Shone alone for one last song. Author & Punisher ends as it began: solo. It is with the hypnotic and guttural incantations of Terrorbird that we must part, a reminder of a less metal but no less massive era.
We had known it for a while, and things were confirmed with Nocturnal Birding, played in its entirety and in order tonight before concluding with the older tracks The Barge, Nihil Strength and Terrorbird: Author & Punisher is one of (if not the) most fascinating industrial metal projects around at the moment, delivering a deeply personal and catchy take on the genre, an irresistible and atypical steamroller whose signature sound, taste for texture and invention of exciting material are immediately recognisable. But it is not necessarily (only) in the relentless force of the assaults, which have earned him the label ‘industrial doom’, that the most important thing ultimately lies. Like the beautiful contemplative interlude in Thrush and the birdsong that inspired all the tracks on the latest album, it is in these moments of poetry and fragility that Author & Punisher really takes off, with dizzying contrasts that not only highlight everything else but also clearly expose the human soul at the heart of the machines, the very heart and soul of the project.
