Why a plethora of Japanese artists should have adopted the music and aesthetic of an art form that was once the sole preserve of narcissistic Norwegians shall forever remain a mystery, but I’m sure glad they did. Black metal is no longer the preserve of Norway and as it travels the world it is absorbed and reconfigured by the cultures it touches. DEATHROLL, NECRONOMIDOL and SIGH have all left their mark on the genre, but none more so than Violent Magic Orchestra (VMO) an ensemble who’ve, like master alchemists, brought techno and electronics to the genre, and are taking the form into unexplored territory and, in the midst of a European tour, bring their paranormal prowess to London’s Black Heart venue.
Violent Magic Orchestra + Khost + Kentaro Hayashi at The Black Heart, London on 16.10.2023
It feels as if Halloween has come early at the Black Heart, especially with Osaka-based electronics maestro Kentaro Hayashi dealing in occult sounds, and seemingly lowering a microphone into the very depths of hell. He is a one-man army who, armed only with a laptop, fuses sonics in a cataclysmic fashion. Subsequently, antiquated Gregorian chants are melded to space-age sounds, and while you feel it shouldn’t work, somehow it does. What makes these fusions work is Kentaro’s modus operandi; he has the confidence of a mad scientist who is either going to save humanity or blow up the world, but whichever way things go, it’s going to be highly entertaining. If you want to know how the eruption at Krakatoa sounded, or the nuclear reactor melting down at Chernobyl, then just listen to Kentaro Hayashi.
There’s something about the City of Birmingham that keeps producing extremely heavy bands, and we can draw a direct lineage from Black Sabbath, through Napalm Death and right up to Khost. A pair of sonic terrorists who appear against a backdrop of dark imagery and dystopian sci-fi, they deliver a nosebleed-inducing, earth-shaking sound and it moves the very earth beneath our feet. With the lights kept low, this pair certainly aren’t made for the weak of constitution and they deliver hefty riffs that march like the proverbial Iron Man and crush all in their path. As with the brutalist buildings that are projected behind them, Khost create the feeling of something so vast and huge, it can barely be comprehended; it towers over the listener and we’re made to feel infinitesimal and insignificant. Imagine industrial titans Godflesh on steroids and you’d have something approaching the musical enormity of Khost.
Black metal, perhaps more than any other musical genre, quickly became codified in a straightjacket of rules and regulations. Bands were expected to play a certain style, a dress code was rigorously enforced, and those who deviated from the norm were effectively ostracised. It took the aforementioned Japanese bands to breathe new life into the scene, adding a new slant whilst retaining the core elements, and current master practitioners of the dark arts are Violent Magic Orchestra. In a scene that was in danger of becoming staid and stagnant, VMO are fresh and exciting, and that becomes immediately apparent when they hit the stage and attack all our sense at once.
Each band member is an explosive bag of energy riling up the crowd, whilst the strobe lights flash at a rapid tempo, and in an epilepsy-inducing manner, as VMO hit our eyes and ears simultaneously to create a sensory overload. The word “hyperactive” doesn’t really do VMO justice, but if Melt-Banana played black metal, then I imagine it’d sound a lot like this. In fact, the energy that radiate from the stage is highly contagious and despite this being a rainy Monday evening, the crowd respond in kind and go suitably wild; a mosh pit erupts and doesn’t let up for 45 furious minutes. There’s no let up in pace as the band performs tracks from their rich discography, and while some might bemoan the brevity of their set, both band and crowd look visibly drained at the gig’s conclusion, but in truth VMO have packed more into that set than most bands pack into an entire career.
Photos by: Ciaran Mooney
