This is not an easy performance to review, because it is not the easiest music to approach. It is not a rock concert in any conventional sense. It is a highly experimental, deeply immersive, and completely otherworldly aural voyage. Even for those familiar with Attila Csihar’s work in Mayhem, Sunn O))), Tormentor, or his own Void ov Voices, or with Iggor Cavalera’s tribal drumming in Sepultura, Cavalera Conspiracy, and his harsher electronic solo projects, nothing could truly prepare them for the sounds unleashed at Mains d’Oeuvres, in the industrial outskirts of Saint-Ouen.
The one element that connects this project to something resembling a metal experience is its darkness, which should surprise no one given the participants’ backgrounds. Yet if you came expecting riffs, songs, or any sort of structure, you were in the wrong place. This collaboration functions as a free-form, fluid organism that reacts as much as it performs. It responds to the musicians themselves, to the audience, to the space, and to the shared energy surrounding the event. The result is a singular act of sonic extremity, closer to a druidic ritual than a concert.
So is it good? Is it bad? That almost feels irrelevant. A performance like this exists beyond such measures. It simply is, or rather, it was. It happened. Some of us were there to experience it, transported to another realm, a world of darkness, menace, and sensory distortion. Hypnotized, entranced, perhaps even briefly possessed. And then it ended. The lights returned, and it felt like waking from a strange and vivid hallucination. Like any hallucination, it defies clear description and leaves only fragments in memory. Yet for a moment, we were all somewhere else entirely.
