The 10th and 11th of December saw the third weekend of Incubate 2016. Incubate is a festival with a very broad scope, where music, film, documentary, and art are brought together in Tilburg and spread over several venues. This Sunday, one of the ten venues, the Dudok, was curated by the folk from the Little Devil, Tilburg’s heavy metal beer bar and concert venue, under the name LittleDevilXL.
No strangers to the darker arts of metal, and the varied people who attend such shows, they set up an evening of Black and Death metal of a scope far larger than can be achieved in the pub itself. Ghost Cult Photographer Suzanne Maathuis and reviewer Lorraine Lysen comfortably nestled themselves in the Dudok to investigate the sinister events that were to unfold.
Saturday we kick off rather later, getting to the little devil as Exo7 are playing their droney noisy doom. A bleak slow swirl of bass and distortion sometimes cut trough by wailing vocals, the duo manage to create a dark and bleak atmosphere. Sadly though I can’t seem to get sucked into it enough, to really transfer to Exo7’s own world.
Next up we get a boisterous American thrash band. There is something about thrash that just gives American bands an edge. There’s very few American bands that can really do depressive doom like Britons can, or black metal like Scandinavians do, but there’s no place that can match Americans for how well they do thrash. Oozing Wound were a perfect example of this and in general played a very enjoyable thrash set, without too many frills attached. It must be the landscapes, the water or even the society, but the happy-go-lucky rebellious yet very urban nature of thrash just works for them.
Okkultikrati; sometimes you see a genre label or description of a band and think that can never work. Okkultikrati are best described as a mix of punk and black metal, and while black metal at it’s roots stems from punk, imagining the two mixing again now seems very difficult. However, the band somehow pulls it off, having the almost upbeat anarchistic punky vibe in the verses and then twisting into dissonance and cold distorted vibes of black metal in the chorus. Their frontman’s crazy-eyed antics really pull the viewer into their strange weird world, and I will definitely keep an eye on this band.
WORDS BY SUSANNE A. MAATHUIS AND LORRAINE LYSEN
PHOTOS BY SUSUANNE A. MAATHUIS