Stumbling into Oblivion
How I accidentally went to a music festival.
I didn’t even know there was an event going on. I mean, when in Austin, The Live Music Capital of the World, one should always assume there’s an event going on. It’s pretty unavoidable. During SXSW bands play in coffeeshops, grocery stores, street corners… I was already going to Austin to visit my partner. We met there while we were both attending the University of Texas, and she moved back after graduate school. So, I go back as often as I can.
This time the trip coincided with a rare appearance by Have a Nice Life, one of my favorite bands, and one I’ve never seen play live. I had tickets to see them at the Strange Day Festival in Olympia, Washington in 2017, but I lived in Chicago at the time and ended up not being able to make it out there. With Planning for Burial and Chat Pile also on the bill, this show was a very welcome surprise.
Next I found out that clipping. was playing the next night at the same venue. Now, I haven’t seen a live show in four years, since July 28, 2019, which is the longest I’ve gone without seeing live music since I saw KISS as an eight-year old. With plans already in place to see Godflesh on July 2nd in Orlando, this was shaping up to be quite the return to live performance.
I eventually found out that all of these shows — including headlining spots by Tim Hecker and Godflesh — were part of the Oblivion Access Festival. I didn’t know that going in, but it made the procession of bands in town at the same time make a lot more sense.
That Friday was The Flenser showcase, and Planning for Burial, Thom Wasluck’s one-person band, was my first stop. It hovered around a hundred degrees for the whole ten days I was in town, so it was hot out there. Thom trooped through a blisteringly sweaty set of guitar-flailing post-metal anyway.
After Mamaleek, there was a thunderstorm delay. In heat past a hundred, the light rain was welcomed with arms to the sky. We were all huddled on the top deck, watching the lightning when they corralled everyone inside for an hour.
Once the thunder subsided, we finally emerged to a short, sharp set by Oklahoma City’s own Chat Pile. These guys were the buzz of the festival, and for good reason. Their Flenser debut, God’s Country, has been in my rotation since its release a year ago. Chat Pile is able to take the basic blueprint of rock and make it sound intimidating. They’ve gleefully brought back some of the anger and danger that’s been missing from rock music.
Have a Nice Life has been around for over 20 years. They’ve done a few records and played relatively few shows. As I mentioned above, I’d been keeping an eye on their schedule, and was finally able to end up in the same place at the same time as one of their shows. It was well worth the effort.
To call them a powerhouse seems an understatement. Have a Nice Life pull so many different elements together into a firm focus and point it right at you, it’s a lot to take — especially live. Their records are not ones you listen to casually. They are immersive. Seeing them live is massive, emotive, and cathartic. Ask anyone who’s seen them.
I spent most of the next day recovering from the onslaught of Flenser bands, but I made it back to the Mohawk to see clipping. I got there in time to meet up with Mars Kumari and to catch Clams Casino’s eclectic live set. Mars has been not so quietly building a hauntological body of work that defies categorization. Check out her record, Mars Kumari Type Beat on Deadverse Recordings, and be on the lookout for her next project, I Thought I Lost You. It’s so dope.
“This is going to be a good one,” Daveed Diggs said at the beginning of clipping’s set, and it was. As story-oriented as they are, each of their records a universe unto itself, their live show was a raucous party. Where some seem to struggle with that translation, the crowd at the Mohawk was all about it, rapping along with all but the most frenetic of Diggs’ verses. He prowled the stage in front of Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson’s table of noise-making gear, rapping nonstop from song to song. It was a party for the apocalypse. They did an impromptu encore without leaving the stage, which included a celebratory cover of J-Kwon’s club anthem “Tipsy.”
Justin K. Broadrick has always been involved in a lot of musical projects, and he performed as three of them in Austin. His most-known industrial-metal band, Godflesh, headlined on Sunday, his heavy-techno project, JKFlesh, did a late-night set on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and his oldest incarnation, Final, played in the giant Central Presbyterian Church in downtown Austin on Sunday afternoon. As this solo ambient-noise act, he rarely performs live. Such a rare setting for such a rare performance. It was a magical, mesmerizing day of drone.
After Justin packed up, Tim Hecker took to the pulpit. There’s really no way to convey that experience in words. The church was dark, lit only by the light coming through the stained glass. Hecker was hidden in a haze, obscured by clouds from a smoke-machine, so there wasn’t much to watch. What we heard there though, lined dutifully in the pews, was transcendent. His stuff has always been an odd mix of old and new, organic and synthetic. I read a while ago that he admits to thinking about ideas like ‘liturgical aesthetics after Yeezus‘ and the ‘transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune’. Any description I could hazard will read like a similar string of barely descriptive phrases. I might even say it was religious.
The thing about multi-venue festivals like Oblivion Access is that you’re always missing something. You have to make decisions. Though most of mine were made before I arrived, I could still feel the tug of missing out. You have to go with it and be truly present for the shows and the people around you. Many thanks to Thom Wasluck, everyone at The Flenser, Dan Barrett, Justin Broadrick, William Hutson, Suraj Patra, Mars Kumari, Katie Alfus, and Lily Brewer for getting me into shows, hanging out, and making my accidental festival experience so much fun.
[Photos above by Renee Dominguez, Andrea Escobar, Robert Hein, and Mars Kumari.]
ESCAPE PHILOSOPHY: Journeys Beyond the Human Body
Hey, if you’re into Godflesh, I wrote a book about them. Well, I wrote a book largely inspired by them, black metal, horror movies, and science fiction. Escape Philosophy: Journeys Beyond the Human Body is available as an open-access .pdf and beautiful paperback from punctum books. It’s really quite good, but don’t take my word for it…
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Escape Philosophy takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” —Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
As always, thanks for reading!
Stay cool out there,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com