Last year, Youth Code, King Yosef, Street Sects and Insula Iscariot announced a joint tour in the United States that made us green with envy. Well, guess what? The Industrial Worship Tour finally crossed the Atlantic (without Insula Iscariot) and stopped off at Point Éphémère. It was THE night not to be missed for fans of angry industrial music and painful noises, and sure enough, the venue was packed. As usual at Point Éphémère, it quickly became impractical, with people cramming in wherever they could. A friend said, “I'm going to get a drink, I'll be right back”: getting to the bar became an adventure... we never saw him again! Nevermind, we didn't come to see friends. Tonight, no friendships mattered: it was going to be nasty, visceral, wild, every man for himself.
STREET SECTS
However, we begin the evening with a vague question: last year, Leo Ashline and Shaun Ringsmuth released two albums. One with Street Sects, their noise/industrial project, and one under the name Street Sex, which is more pop and danceable. Will we get a mix of the two? Will it be more pop and danceable?
Well... For some reason, as the band starts the concert in total darkness before flashing strobe lights at the audience, something tells us that it's not going to be that consensual. Ashline wears a shirt, like real adults do. You'd think he'd address us formally and speak respectfully. Instead, he yells at us, contorts himself, and takes a dip in the crowd. With his mechanical screams and more human howls, where his high-pitched voice pierces through the different layers of machines, he is an ultra-expressive, tormented storm. At his side, his partner Ringsmuth sweats buckets behind his machines, which become as much an instrument of torture as a tool of liberation. It hurts, but it feels good. Crammed together in the dark, we realize that our entire existence was just an illusion: we are not in Paris on the banks of the Ourcq canal. We are actually trapped inside a washing machine full of very dirty laundry, and the spin cycle has only just begun. Half an hour isn't quite enough to get the better of us, but the finest shirts are already in tatters.
KING YOSEF
We saw King Yosef two years ago on his first tour of France. The audience was sparse and the young artist sometimes seemed a little shy on stage, an attitude that seemed strangely at odds with his music. A lot has happened in two years. King Yosef has cut his mullet, but more importantly, he has toured extensively and released a stunningly violent album, Spire of Fear, an explosion of industrial/hardcore/trap metal full of rage and melancholy. The artist is both aware of his musical heritage and resolutely modern, free from the dusty rules of any particular genre. The audience is also something else: from the start, arms and legs are flying as the hardcore-fan perform their bonobo jig, letting their limbs flutter in all directions. As a result, people who still think they'll make it out of there alive move aside to let them play. Basically, the venue feels like the worst metro line during rush hour.
Molting Fear hits us right between the eyes. King Yosef understands that for an explosion to destroy everything, it needs space. His music resembles a succession of mechanical eruptions, cataclysmically heavy stuff coming from the guts, separated by more atmospheric breathing spaces. Yosef bellows, Yosef struggles with himself, but above all, Yosef laughs: it's true that the chaos in the pit is a spectacle worthy of a Renaissance painting, layers of twisted bodies with faces distorted by ecstasy and suffering. ABOVE ALL, KING YOSEF KICKS ASS BLEUARGH LOUD NOISE EQUALS BIG BOOM EQUALS BIG FIGHT. “I see you screaming, that's cool, if you know the lyrics come and take the mic, I'm tired,” he says, amused, between two thank yous. He's cute, this little guy. He's cute not only because his music is sincere, wild, powerful, but also very well done. He's cute because he oozes sincerity, and you can feel all the work behind it. He's cute because you can see him growing and becoming, in turn, this storm made of concrete blocks, this unstoppable wrecking ball. In the studio, he had convinced us... And now King Yosef is becoming a monster of efficiency on stage as well. The coming years look exciting for him!
YOUTH CODE
We hadn't seen Youth Code in Paris for a while, their last visit dating back to 2018 when they opened for Carpenter Brut. It's fair to say that Sara Taylor and Ryan George have been fairly quiet in the first half of the 2020s: although we saw them at Hellfest in 2022, last year's EP Yours, With Malice ended five years of silence, their previous album dating back to A Skeleton Key in the Doors of Depression... produced with a certain King Yosef!
All these years are quickly forgotten. The Californian duo bursts onto the stage with the unmissable Transitions from the cult album Commitment to Complications, which will be ten years old this year. Sara Taylor runs around in all directions, unable to stand still, kicking at the beams of light. Ryan George leaves his machines to come and shout for a moment, then puts the microphone cable back in his mouth so he can have his hands free. Their energy is as uncontrollable and infectious as ever. In the pit, the mosh pits have given way to feet pounding the ground as EBM demands.
We get blown away by this explosive mix: Youth Code has devoured Skinny Puppy-style nightmares and Nitzer Ebb-style EBM intensity (No Consequence and that binary tension), but above all has digested it all to add an organic hardcore punk intensity. Taylor comes down to mingle with the crowd during Shift of Dismay, slapping herself, hitting herself on the forehead with the microphone, throwing herself to the ground. Youth Code doesn't pose or cheat. From this furious whirlwind emerge a few bursts of melancholy, a few strangely light melodies (I'm Sorry at the end of the evening). With a bloody forehead and short of breath, the singer communicates with humor, warning that her French isn't as good as King Yosef's. We wondered if all these people would play their songs together... obviously, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
So we end up with two songs played together, Head Underwater and Deathsafe. A contest of growls. It's like the grand finale of a fireworks, but concrete has replaced the sparks, and gray blocks are raining down on us, exploding our skulls. Cool. The giant washing machine reaches the end of its cycle. A radical and ruthless industrial tornado has passed through, offering a vision of the genre where visceral authenticity is at the heart of the approach, music that is not made for dancing, clapping your hands or posing in funny outfits, but something cathartic, violent and necessary. Let's keep our fingers crossed: if we didn't have to wait two and a half eternities before seeing Youth Code again, that wouldbe nice, just so our joints don't get completely rusty.
