With a name like this, Baby Aspirin DVD, what could I expect? I really had no clue when this mysterious band was opening for Lightning Bolt at the Echoplex on Sunday night, and they turned out to be a very experimental electronic duo, using a giant harp and a table full of electronics, and making a sort of lugubrious horror-movie soundtrack. The girl was either using a bow to get creaking sound from her gothic harp, or finger-picking the instrument in obsessive loops, while the guy was probably launching a rocket into the stratosphere or preparing the apocalypse with statics. it was an interesting contrast, starting with slow heartbeats and then making the place vibrate, squeak, glitch with sudden dark vocals, almost reaching some doomed metal levels,… and before leaving the stage, they said that it was their first time doing this!
Next was Brooklyn-based quartet Liturgy, which produced a very unique music, crossing metal, experimentation and hardcore math-rock? I am not sure, they took me by surprise, the drums and the guitars got super fast, and their sound would go all-jackhammer, piercing skulls and drilling eardrums. It was a very harsh sound, with ghostly doomed vocals, the most metal-like part of them, shredding guitars going at the speed of light, which were shaking every fiber of your body. Talk about experimenting some new sound after the age of 33! However, the crowd really loved them, which shows that people are still looking for novelty and ready to appreciate experimentation or very technical stuff, and this is good news. Their sound could appeared chopped, making a quite puzzling effect, but at the same time, they were rising some mysterious forces, transcending their sound by playing this fast, which could explain the religious reference in their moniker. I googled their name and found out that the band leader, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, wrote a whole chapter for a book entitled ‘Transcendental Black Metal, A vision of apocalyptic humanism’ following ‘Hideous Gnosis’, a symposium on black metal theory which took place in Brooklyn in 2009,…. so I guess there are philosophico-mystico-religious elements into this, that go well above my head. I didn’t read the 281 pages. but to prove my point, I will give you an excerpt of an interview of HHH with Pitchfork: ‘My personal starting point is faith in a beyond of nihilism, modeled on the figure of Zarathustra. It is a legit pursuit in contemporary philosophy, e.g. Badiou‘s concept of truth or Meillassoux‘s vision of the Fourth World. I’m aware that a lot of people disagree, but I think black metal has great power as a medium for exploring the beyond of nihilism in a non-philosophical way.’ Anyway, Liturgy could get monstrous, producing a high-collision sound, not the type you could really head-bang too, rather reflect on and why not, may you go into transcendental mode.
Of course, there was no way I could have stayed first row for more than a few seconds during Lightning Bolt’s set, as soon as they started, it was a fury, and I was very happy to be allowed in the photo pit for a few songs, before finding refuge in the back of the room. The noise-punk-drum-bass duo makes as much noise as a regimen and they may be totally nuts if you want my opinion! Wearing a luchador mask, funny man Brian Chippendale is center stage and beats his drum as if he wanted the end of it, occasionally screaming his reverb-heavy vocals which just become onomatopoeia, while bassist Brian Gibson provides all the rest of their formidably loud music with only one instrument. How could two guys be possibly producing such a deafening sound… it is beyond me, but I believe it because I saw it.
There was no real stop and no real distinction between songs, it was a non-stop violence, an earthshaking ravaging destruction, which was more head squeezer than head banger, reaching psychedelic high-altitudes played by psych ward escapees. I guess they regard live music as an extreme sport, always pushing it to the limit of exhaustion, they are the stuntmen of sound, fighting against invisible forces, unleashing some mad man, building noises that will never let you guess where they are really going.
‘Fantasy Empire’ is their first LP in five years, and I am sure they played many songs from it, but they are above everything, strange noise-makers, and all kinds of sounds were rising from this rumbling, vibrating, electrifying chaos. The Echoplex was packed and had transformed into a hot steaming place, sweat was running along my back, people were crowd surfing, jumping, stretching arms to the ceiling, while the band was restless, like two freaks rising mayhem to better crash the chaos, building an ascending mountain of sound to better slide with the avalanche… I left after an encore, totally exhausted when they had been doing all the action,,,, they sure had spread an insane and powerful energy and watching my pictures on my way home, I realized that none of them could possibly give justice to the staggering experience.
