With one giant track, Sutekh Hexen brought a nightmarish ambiance on Saturday night at Vacation Vinyl; midset, I realized I had already seen the San Francisco trio since they had already visited Vacation Vinyl last year, … but you have to forgive me, I have seen so many bands lately.
These guys build some massive noise, a dark and atmospheric machine that reaches some grandiosity, as the soundtrack of an awesome horror movie would do it.
One thing, they had no drummer, but the height of the layered sonic wall they could reach with the electronic equipment and the accumulation of pedals for the guitar and the bass, didn’t let any room for the drums. If it was metal, it was quite experimental, it could have been avant-garde-modernism metal, with less doom parts and more bone-marrow-freezing winds and cringing-door-like noises. Freezing? Actually, with the current scorching temperatures in Los Angeles, and no AC inside the store, it was rather hell! But extremes always meet at the end.
The totally indecipherable and buried-in-noise vocals were adding to the ambient nightmare, as the blasting sound was reaching saturation. On the subject of imagination, anything could have gone through my head while listening to the eviscerating metal-noise, like for example imaginary screaming damned voices falling into the entrails of hell! What can I say, they were giving me combined visions of Dante’s Inferno, science fiction Odyssey, and large-screen movie about the fall of the Roman empire.
They played one endless and epic track that was making the extremely hot air around us vibrate, as if we were dragged into hell and safely brought back to life after 15 minutes.