From the welcoming flames of the fire-dancers, to the ornaments of human bone, blood and hair on sale inside, with slabs of rare and cult wax, insane and unhinged cartoons, a whole library of occult wisdom all there in the hallway of Korjaamo, we already felt ourselves drawn in towards a greater purpose. All our dreams and idealistic fantasies had come to fruition on this night and had turned into a reality. A marvelous zenith had been unearthed for a group of providential pilgrims. This was it. The "extravagant boom boom" as L. Kaution wrote.
Each artist we had booked were like aged vintage wines from the best years, all with a unique and potent kick. Future legends and stories were writing themselves as tales lovingly recounted at Helsinki parties in 2020. Hugs of anticipation at first and then there were hushed excited expressions of "I can't believe I will actually see Suuri Shamaani perform live" without daring to even whisper that old Syriac name of the devil. On the track to the road of the weekends journey we were met by a man in a wig with tinted shades who asked us to come with him to look at some stars while he philosophized us with audio discourses on time and the universe. We saw a nucleus of the elements for all his work, and were reminded of his importance as an artist that stretches far beyond the club whose membership is hard to renounce. We took a look at ourselves too in the repetitious images and themes he revolved before us, and that feeling of greater purpose and meaning to music, with the vital urgency that is sometimes only felt in teenage years, slowly crept back. If the value wasn't felt by all in the immediacy and first impression, our minds opened up there and as the evening wore on there wasn't anyone left who wasn't still discussing the images and sounds they were left with. As my grandfather was fond of saying "thought is like a disease, it grows and grows in the brain."
Further onward as our family caravan of new brothers and sisters ferried into the opening portal, we landed in a church where people circled around and sat on the floor, some standing cross-armed around a candle-lit American preacher who called himself Burial Hex. Holding aloft a flame that incensed the air while he berated and gesticulated, recited and screamed in their faces. This wasn't hip hop or noise or electronics or any of the newfangled name-tags the labelers in the grey factories like to put on things. This was a new religion where heart-breaking strings and funeral trumpets are throned by a fierce angel in biblical fury. The vast newness of the experience left our virgin minds longing to see more, but as all great and wonderful revelations bring us abruptly back to earth, he closed his book and blew out the flame, adjourning from his new congregation that were left all goose-fleshed and teary-eyed.
When the last door was opened and the inner sanctum revealed we gambled inside the temple's interior and found there a scene akin to the dreams invoked by the 1922 discovery by Howard Carter and George Herbert of the son of Akhenaten. Serpent sigils festooned the altar and masked priests stirred the smoke that enveloped us and snaked our minds out into the blackness. A sonic hooded masseuse that put it's breath into your gullet and sponged out all the cardboard stiffness that modern realities install. Three seemingly giant proportionless figures behind coffins of neatly laid out human skeletons, with gongs and ancient instruments. They threw their potions to the fire and as the magical music writhed, spells were ejected from the embers. DNA tests would conclude that our fossils left, after the wind of this ceremony had blown us into antiquity, were part animal, part Egyptian mummy. Only a visit to the British Museum would give people a glimpse of what it must have been like. Here we were ritual and invocation, not just participants but living through the magic and evolving into something new. After a trip to the otherworld your physical makeup is altered beyond recognition. The glow of the red coals and the haze of the lights, the music was formless and transmogrified until we were unsure of where the sound began and the room ended. Apparently a difficult name for our French friends to pronounce at first, all were fluent with the words Arktau Eos by the end of the evening and a desperate struggle ensued to rush for the swiftly sold out merch stand. A vain attempt to take away some memorial relic.
There are no words for what we felt as the night's shows drew to a close. Some said it was "the perfect way to begin the festival" and I wouldn't argue with that. You can write a postcard from a trip or take a photo but there is nothing that can describe the feeling of being there. Sharing the knowing looks and newfound kinship, all who were there were instilled with the memories and arsenal of an experience that would never run out of munition. We were one and the same with the music.
On the second day we gave birth to ourselves again and left the familiar surroundings of Korjaamo to stagger about the industrial landscapes of the cable factory. Deep in the foundations, a Romanian artist called Costin Chioreanu had hung his work in a vault. Beautifully black walls, oil lamps and candles to a soundtrack that swam in and out and all around. People sat and spent their time there in silence taking in the music and the carefully crafted hand-drawn images. Hippies outside accosted strangers who were thrust into the exhibition hall and fed cake and wines. Old men, lone spinsters in knitwear and groups of boys with guitars on their backs all moved their eyeballs over the canvases in wary but solemn appreciation. A serene and calming day of fine art before the operation they were calling a "mindfuck" began.
Swallowed describes the way we were consumed. Deep downtuned Sabbathical riffs hacked out by ghastly young broken souls, while etchings of black and white tree-like veins and sinews ejaculated themselves over the screen behind. Smogged in green swamp fog and standing like corpse children from a beautifully cult horror movie, we were molested by schizophrenic and haphazard death metal deep from the black blood wells of purest source. This was the real deal. Living embodiments of what made those early Beherit photos look so damn cool. The drummer's character convulses through the music as he refuses to play a single standard beat. He speeds up, collapses, crashes and deconstructs any semblance of normal rhythms, through it summoning a fantastically macabre artwork. All the while spitting, flailing and vomiting forth pained screams to make mothers bawl. The guitarists bent sweetly sick and doomfilled melodic maladies as if bastard sons of the 70s had grown up in a graveyard. Creating a new psychedelia that has it's rotten roots in death metal but tentacles out into something way beyond, this band recreates the sound we were deeply infatuated with in our youth but as if those years had never happened. It's Nirvana 2002 for the first time on LSD. Death metal should sound and feel dangerous and transcendent, dare I say spiritual and Swallowed make old fat men from the 90s feel irrelevant and comedy show.
An orange kiss from the lips of the blazing Pazuzu as we were thrown into a storm of expertly honed Finnish blackmetal. Much has changed since we last saw this band on an old boat, when they were dressed in humbler attire and played a hazier psychedelic fare. Now precision and cold hard, calculated rhythms took the place of slower jams and the finely tuned machine hummed at a more heightened magnitude. With a lightshow that gave them the air of a massive stadium act, their pop-catchy samples and sound effects whipped up a frenzy of headbanging and shaken fists from a spellbound crowd. Dressed in futuristic horror garb like cenobites escaping from New York, their white lit futuristic soundscapes played with precise and mathematical intensity that were high fidelity in their new rawness. Rising from their underground origins, we were astounded to witness masterful craftsmen who are sure to go on to rule the modern day. The chemistry from the band and their act was so precise and well formed out, that half drunk revelers at the front were standing open mouthed in their wake. A first class show of massive proportions.
To be continued . . .
