Sutekh Hexen at Vacation Vinyl on Wednesday, July 27, 2011
They turned the lights off and lighted up these scented candles which were making the room so smoky and smelly that the air inside Vacation Vinyl turned borderline intoxicating and the ambiance appeared a little strange and claustrophobic. But it was even before Sutekh Hexen had started to play their sinister long song. I am not even sure you can call it a song, as the lyrics were very scarce, completely undecipherable and sometimes would manifest only into screams.
I hardly understand how white noise is produced, but black noise? A sort of metal white noise, scorching into a doom atmosphere.
They actually played only one track, one long track of about 20 minutes (I could not even videotape the whole thing), which started like a grainy black movie soundtrack, slowly floating before crashing like a tsunami of two terribly fuzzy-thick guitars balancing their chilly notes to each other through a wall of amps. They sounded like a metal duo making more turbulence than a tumultuous wind going through the windows of a haunted house, and more static than a murky AM radio brutally amplified, making the room as chilly as a nordic winter in the middle of July. And there was almost no progression in this raw violent clamor, just a foggy ritual going on for the longest time, with some brief pauses but definitively no hope in sight.
If you are ready for such a trip, and are into the occult and Satanic ceremonies, the Bay Area duo is for you. When they stopped playing, they quickly left the room without a word, almost indifferent to the dark and morbid scene they had built.
