Terror Fest Review: Church of Misery, Primitive Man, Unearthly Trance, Terminator 2

Around midnight Friday inside Empire Control Room, Hiroyuki Takano belted out “I, Motherfucker (Ted Bundy)” with a smile, taking the infamous serial killer to John Waters heights of filth-filled glee. Given the group’s aberrant subjects – almost exclusively mass murderers – Church of Misery invoked palpable sociable exuberance inviting grins.

Church of Misery inside Empire Control Room 6.7.19 (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

More early-Seventies post-blues than THC soundtrack, the Tokyo quartet never abandoned rock & roll excess during their grand 50-minute set. No wonder. Bassist Tatsu Mikami has spent over two decades carving hard doom grooves. Slashing through CoM transmissions, Mikami and guitarist Yasuto Maraki delighted in their unholy object of fascination – the guitar – skinning Sabbath alive with streamlined riffs and brick wall push.

Before the Masters of Brutality elevated the room, Denver trio Primitive Man sunk the stage into a pit of despair. Each howl, tone, scrape, and hit carried a burden and mutated perception. Drummer Joe Linden led from behind the beat, slogging rhythm into new depths of sludge, while Ethan McCarthy and Jon Campos trudged lowdown tones into advanced stages of emptiness.

Primitive Man (Photo by David Brendan Hall)

Screaming hot noise replaced stage banter in between their time-warping minimalist compositions, whose architecture vanished in the fog and revealed oblivion. Even their sudden blasts of fast tempo took the time to meditate as they gazed slowly into malignant chaos.

Of the evening’s indoor performances, Terminator 2 unraveled the most, reducing order into sheets of noise. Ruptured bass and a tall order of eq racks, a reel-to-reel tape machine, and a video monitor stacked precariously on a milk crate emanated sound buried in off-the-rail noise rock drums to create a sunburnt sonic junkyard of cinema screech. Meanwhile, Long Islanders Unearthly Trance proved to be the most patient and punctual with their unsane saga of lean cuts.

Ultimately, Primitive Man, through calculated aural turmoil, activated the highest somatic pleasure, offering the unknown as horror – horror as sound, and sound as feeling. Via perfectly blighted design, the core of their system operated with unadulterated desolation.