Earlier this week, we announced that the Quietus would be curating a stage at next year’s Desertfest, the metal three-dayer held in Camden Town, London from April 25-27 2014.
And today, we’re excited to announce the line-up of bands we’ll be putting on with the festival, and, even if we say so ourselves, it’s nothing short of magnificent: Master Musicians Of Bukkake, Dragged Into Sunlight, The Body, Hey Colossus, Årabrot and Slabdragger. Now, indulge your immediate instinct on reading that list and head to Desertfest’s website to get hold of tickets, then read on as we (re-)introduce you in turn to our line-up:
Master Musicians Of Bukkake
Hailing from Seattle, the alarmingly named Master Musicians Of Bukkake, are partially shrouded in mystery. Biographically, all that is known is that their line-up includes Randall Dunn (Sun City Girls) and Tim Harris and has, in the past, also included Alan Bishop, Dave Abrahamson, Charlie Gocher, Bill Horst and several ex-members of Earth. What is clear from their records however is that no matter how keen they are to pour scorn on the pompous, appropriating idea of world music, they have an aptitude for scouring the length and breadth of the space time continuum for third eye cleansing, brain blasting inspiration. Their sound – while drawn from such disparate sources as the horror score electronics of John Carpenter, Indian ragas, the hot desert sahrawi of Group Doueh, the polyrhythmic Gnawa music of Morocco and Turkish folk rock – always has an infectious groove. It’s a bedevilling sonic incantation that will always enrapture you while keeping you guessing about the intent of those who make it. As Randall Dunn says of his band: “Seriousness in one hand, and a joke handshake buzzer in the other.”
Dragged Into Sunlight
Like an altar built from human femurs, one cannot help but be impressed at the utter caustic bleakness of the extreme metal vomited up by Dragged Into Sunlight. Moving on from their crushingly unpleasant sludge/gore metal-influenced debut Hatred For Mankind in 2009, they released the much more 360-degree, mega wide-bandwidth, ultra-synergistically horrible Widowmaker in 2012, which was comprised of one 40-minute-long post/doom/black metal track which provoked one fan to remark: "This makes me want to grab a dwarf, paint him up all white, and throw him down a well, so I can watch him falling all the way to the bottom." As a nameless spokesperson for the English band who protect their identity with balaclavas told the Quietus: “Our message is the feeling in the music: a lot of isolation, a lot of misery, a lot of depression, a lot of anger. A general overtone of negativity. It stems from our personal experiences while writing music, and as a collective when we came together. We’re all on the same wavelength, and we put out a release that is conceptually communicating a message of misery, depression, isolation and negativity."
The Body
Guitarist Chip King and drummer Lee Buford are The Body, and once you have listened to their psyche-fracturing extreme metal/harsh wall noise hybrid, you will probably conclude that they are probably not named in tribute to Elle Macpherson. However the songs do utilise elements of sheer beauty such as choirs, poetry and field recordings but only in order to throw the desperate horror of their music into sharper relief. They align themselves to separatist cults and survivalism and have stock-piled weapons believing that the end may be upon us and their sonic attack represents the very dim view they taken on themselves (and the rest of humanity). Catch their breathtakingly abrasive and yet oddly beautiful music while you still can.
Hey Colossus
Now celebrating their tenth birthday, Hey Colossus have recently upped the creative ante with their first bona fide excellent album Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo and a newly reinvigorated line up featuring three million men on guitars and Tim Cedar (Part Chimp/Ligature) on drums. Hey Colossus reimagine the West Country as the Lone Star State, bringing everything from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid and ZZ Top much closer to Exeter than it ever was before.
Årabrot
Norway’s finest noise-rock group combine a searing intelligence – their lyrics are inspired by Georges Bataille, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Cocteau, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Desnos, Comte de Lautréamont and Hubert Selby Jr – with a base, sleazy, primal rock sound that calls to mind Shellac, The Melvins, the Birthday Party and Killdozer. Arabrot mainstay Kjetil Nernes has always attempted to combine high and low art in the band’s ten year history as both an alchemical quest and a tribute to the surrealists, and the process has helped transform them into one of the best heavy rock bands in the world.
Slabdragger
In the band’s own words Slabdragger are “Sam Thredder playing guitar & vocals, Yusuf Tary playing bass and yelling down the other microphone whilst Matt Byrne hits the drums with fucking baseball bats. Sludge as fuck.” To be precise about matters for a second, they play very heavy sludge-influenced stoner doom metal whose speedier passages belie a hardcore punk background. Back over to Slabdragger for the final word: “Our band interests are jamming seemingly endless riffs whilst intoxicated on a mixture of beer and marijuana.” And you can’t say fairer than that.
