Two days prior, Dark MOFO sent out a firmly-worded caveat emptor to ticketholders, absolving themselves of any responsibility for hearing loss and promising earplugs to all and sundry: “Consider this your warning: this performance will be loud. Like, really loud.”
It was a brave fool who defied this warning when Veil of Darkness materialised on the stage. Festooned in cloak and collars, Striborg defied his Howard Hughes reputation by leaving the empty Kleenex boxes for his hands and feet back in the gothic grotto from which he emerged. Delivering an almost implausibly textured performance with an iPad synth and stripped back array of pedals, Striborg’s ghoulish rumbling masterfully galvanised the theatre’s creeping sense of tense unease.
Dylan Carlson strode into view looking every bit like he’d just crossed the Mojave Desert on foot, grizzled and gaunt with a ferocious glint in his eyes. In a set skewing towards the post-wilderness years between Pentastar and the Divine and Bright EP, Earth treated the assembled to a sonorous rendition of There Is a Serpent Coming from their upcoming album, with Adrienne Davies’ forceful, almost frugal work on the drums hinting at the pride of place the September release will occupy in the band’s catalogue.
The smoke machines hit at intermission and didn’t let up until halfway through the Sunn O)))set, at which point no-one in the room would’ve have been surprised if Cthulhu itself rose from the fog. Certainly it felt as if the crowd was party to a pagan festival, with Marshall stacks and every surplus amp head in the state arranged in a semi-circle like a modern Stonehenge charting the passage of the impending winter solstice.
Pinned to their seats by the sheer force of sound, writhing under the weight of every errant otherworldly shriek, the two-hour set was a difficult ask even for those who celebrate the marriage of music and masochism like others do bread and butter. Those of us who survived to the end were beaten into submission, but the few of us left with our eardrums unperforated will be ready to sing the praises of our captors forever.
BY SEAN SANDY DEVOTIONAL
Loved: Dylan Carlson’s effusive joy at being in Tasmania (and also alive).
Hated: Though they came perilously close, Sunn O))) did not fulfill my wish of hitting the Brown Note and making everyone in the room void their bowels.
Drank: Maker’s Mark.
