With a start time of 2:15 pm for Pelagic Fest 2024, we had a bit of time to relax in the morning. After wandering around central Maastricht for a bit in blazing sunshine and having a good feed, we headed for a queue of unmistakable black t-shirts outside the venue. We were quickly admitted by the efficient and relaxed door staff and went straight to the main room to catch the first band, Thot.
Pelagic Fest 2024 – Muziekgieterij, Maastricht
Saturday 24 August 2024
Words: Marisa Adams
Thot
Entering in a steady stream of early attendees as Belgian collaborative group Thot were opening with their first song, this was my first view of the main room of the venue – a large, cool, cave-like interior with brick wall behind the stage and lights disappearing up into the ceiling – and first indication of the truly excellent quality of the sound and lighting at this festival.
Frontman Grégoire Fray got in the first of many thanks to the Pelagic family of label, crew and audience and also bid farewell to Anaïs Elba on keyboards and vocals with the band this past three years. Having not seen them live before or being familiar with their music, I was very glad to have seen her this once as she provided something very special.
Thot opened the first day of the wonderful Pelagic Fest 2024 amidst swampy sunset hues of purples, yellows and oranges illuminated overhead by white spots like lightening or like moon-rays through tree canopies. Within this gauzy dream, and interspersed with passages of lyrical storytelling, they spun an immersively strange, densely atmospheric and ethereal landscape of intertwining elongated synths, choral samples and live male and female vocals and duets upon a deep bedrock of melancholy post-rock with the added weight and intricacy of two drummers.
It was as if an apparition choir of wraiths, glimpsed in mist rising through a derelict urban sprawl being inexorably taken back by lush foliage fed by a labyrinth of underground waterways, swelled into richly colourful spectral airbursts of unusual and desolate melodic heaviness.
This was a great start and an indication of the calibre of music to come across the two days.
WuW
WuW, the Parisian four-piece led by brothers Benjamin and Guillaume Colin, opened the festival in the smaller room in baleful red backlit gloom lit overhead with white spots, as if a hoary old sun had risen over the doomy march of a bleak progression of souls, below sputtering torches of cold fire.
Animated by the music’s solemn desolation and eerie synth refrains and electronics, they passed with mournful purpose through a plain populated by a surreal toybox of fleshy horrors, misshapen mechanical oddities and twittering insectile machines ratcheting alongside and their faded, tattered robes, embroidered with the bare, poignant and unornamented stories of their lives and deeds, caught in the ethereal electrical winds of a lament of strings and keyboard.
Under erupting purple storms, they began to run, gathering intensity of momentum until they finally plunged one by one over the lip of a great chasm, tumbling minutely into a cataclysmic immensity of darkness.
The final piece was Orchaostre 5 from most recent album L’Orchaostre, an intense and heavy driving groove. Blue and green against purple spots accentuated its quality of redemption as if some few remained of the doomed host to climb out of the blighted plain under green light, resilience and vitality of hope, surviving against a tempest of odds.
This was an immersive and moving journey, performed with emotional intensity by the band and appreciated by a decent-sized crowd who were fully engaged and gave it plenty of warm applause.
Playgrounded
Heavy diffuse smoke and lighting created the deep, potent gloom of a dream, a red-orange haze with blue lightening coming from underneath like being above clouds in a fleeting realm of meteorological rarity. Within this glowing twilight, the Netherlands via Greece five-piece Playgrounded cast a potent, kinetically euphoric spell that carried along the crowd around me, who responded with huge appreciation and lots of movement.
The layering of Orestis Zafeiriou’s keyboard and electronics and Michael Kotsirakis’ groovy lyrical guitar manages to be both massy and airy, and the clear melodic vocals from Stavros Markonis with backing vocals from Kotsirakis and bassist Odisseas Zafeiriou delivered soaring anthemic songs such as Tomorrow’s Rainbow and opener The Swan.
All of this is weighted down with the double heaviness and huge kicking pulses of the incredible basslines and keyboard/electronics, of which second from last song, The Death of Death, is a prime example, and is driven along by Giorgos Pouliasis’ intricate, unusual and hugely satisfying drumlines.
Playgrounded also use silence in a really strong way, creating vacuums where the music arrives back in like a tsunami. Every aspect of this band is excellent. Their music is irresistibly danceable and hypnotically transporting, which is really magnified live, and their lyrics add another level also in storytelling and imagery.
They played all of the songs from second album The Death Of Death, closing with the powerful and hopeful spark of Our Fire, tension building in hushed intensity until another enormous series of bassy riffs was unleashed like a giant’s stairway of cataracts. The sound and levels were outstanding for this set, which was pulsatingly heavy, beautiful and visceral.
It got under the skin and set everything buzzing, something which didn’t wear off for some time afterwards, and for me, this was the set of the festival. The room was packed as far as I could pay attention to such things, and the applause and huge cheers after the songs and at the end went on and on.
This festival provided lots of opportunities to speak directly to the bands, and this being one of my favourites since seeing them last year at the UK festival ArcTanGent, it was really great to also meet them all and say thanks in person. They are working on new material – ‘exciting’ does not really cover it, although I would absolutely love to see Crossing from second album, In Time With Gravity, live again one day.
HIPPOTRAKTOR
Belgian quintet HIPPOTRAKTOR are a pyroclastic flow of movement and power with moments of grace and with the live experience being something special to behold, utterly typified by storming opener Renegade from second album, Stasis. The concepts behind their two albums provide a rich seam for philosophical exploration and expression of the full range of emotion – light to dark on one axis; calm to storm on the other.
Introspective melodies and lyrical progressive passages were threaded within and between tectonic heaviness and galloping drums, riffs and grooves, with Stefan De Graef’s clean soaring vocals giving way to incendiary abrasive roars accompanied by mighty physicality, the whole thing exploding with elemental force like the bursting of some colossal prehistoric dam of rock holding in a great inland sea. 
Vocal solos and duets managed to harness the elemental rage of storms and, in the next breath, express halcyon beauty and melodic balm. The energy in performance from all of the band, and the engagement with the crowd from De Graef and main songwriter and guitarist Chiaran Verheyden, was utterly infectious. This was like being amongst a crowd of surfers on a colossal tumbling landslide of giant boulders under lights roving like comets thrown by warring giants.
The small room was absolutely rammed, sweltering in the unified movement of a crowd bristling with a multitude of pumping fists. Heavy as Olympus Mons but groovy and funky at the same time, nuanced and balanced by pacific or melancholy contemplation such as in The Indifferent Human Eye from Stasis. Final song Beacons, from first album Meridian, sent the roof to the gods on a jet of volcanic flame to deafening applause.
A Swarm Of The Sun
This Swedish duo, Erik Nilsson and Jakob Berglund, with supporting keyboard, guitar, bass and drums, present a searingly beautiful haunted doomscape of post-rock and Post-Metal. A Swarm Of The Sun opened in dark blue light, gravity and chilled increasing exponentially with widely spaced drumbeats and flashes of white spots overhead on each beat.
This was like being counted down into a deep hypnosis and then far below awakening having wandered off the main path somewhere further back without realising it, the last daylight fading and a baleful red light waxing all around. Lightening illuminating further, tendrils of dread crept up from the leaf litter, under the skin, rooting feet to the ground, and a shroud of ghostly arms wrapped tightly around.
Thus cradled, an enchantment of stormy melancholic immensity enveloped and solidified into a darkling edifice rising all around in layered soundscape, infused with sorrow, haunted by a bereft, forsaken spirit whose spectral fingers probed delicately at the chest wall, seeking a way in, to squeeze, to bring through the veil. 
My fevered mind identified Berglund’s use of a Theremin (or similar device) in particular as the conduit for the supernatural, but this is only one part of their rich sonic layering. Incarceration And The Woods, and The Burning Wall from new album An Empire, which has just been released, engulfed in waves of rising conflagrations of desolation giving way to gentle melancholy like the fading warmth of a hand’s imprint on stone, and then reignited, the orange and white lighting on the brick wall behind the stage for The Burning Wall complementing this evocatively.
Subsiding finally at the delicately hushed end of These Depths Were Always Meant For Both Of Us, the spell dissolved and we were released, but I remained haunted.
Technical difficulties for Nilsson’s guitar at the start of the final song did not succeed in breaking the atmosphere for me due to other bandmates maintaining a drone until it could be fixed by the crew. Glassing’s set was due to start, but most of the audience seemed to remain immersed, were very encouraging as the issue was resolved, and gave prolonged and well-deserved applause at the end.
LLNN
Headlining the small room on this Saturday were the four Danish cinematic post-hardcore obliterators LLNN. This is music documenting the bleakest crushed, bleeding edge of post-apocalyptic desolation. Heavily distorted hammer blows ring out metal on metal like the contorted spectre of bells in some immense echoing shell of a vertical crater, gouged out of a preternaturally massive future city by a cataclysmic event and then rebuilt as a depraved monument to hubris and power, and now returning to ruin as huge metallic chunks fall from the structure and crash down with devastating force.
This warped and broken cathedral, a colossal eye socket with remnants of the crater-forming event glowing toxic red deep within, stares into a direful future as it plays host to a wild ride – part horror, part monstrous requiem in some defiant scorched analogue of long dead religion.
As ever the music is matched only by the demented physicality of all members of this band, making for a spectacle that sucks inhibition into the inhospitality of deep space and produced in the packed-out smaller room a writhing sea of a crowd, which vocalist/guitarist Victor Kaas surfed more than once in between dystopian riffage whilst still pouring out an assortment of spine-abrading vocals.
The performance has been polished and was more theatrical, rounded, and denser somehow, drummer Rasmus Sejersen leading his bandmates in the equivalent of driving several locomotives into each other one after the other with some crushing prolonged decelerations, which added weight to something that Rasmus Furbo’s bass ensured was already approaching a dangerous counterbalance to all of the matter in the universe.
The sound and levels were amazing, with Ketil Sejersen’s keyboard/synth in particular really clear – sometimes and especially in larger venues, it seems you need to be standing in the right spot to catch it, but here I think it would have been clear everywhere.
Most recent offering The Horror, which sees the other band members depart to leave Kaas alone on a stage he fills with rasping, menacing intent, has migrated to the middle of the set of Deads and Unmaker material like a malevolent incubus. Closing with pulverisingly infectious anti-anthem Obsidian, this was a one-way trip on the conveyor belt of a hydraulic press factory making parts for intergalactic spaceships, and as usual, I emerged (as one!!!) with a huge grin.
The Ocean
Closing Saturday in the main room, The Ocean played 2013’s Pelagial in full to celebrate ten years since its release. The concept behind this album is going down through the different depth zones of the ocean and, by allegory, states of mind. This band have an immense, complex and emotional sound with warmth and honesty about it and huge scope and energy, which should also be experienced live if possible, and this was no exception.
They were as tight and powerful as always, and the theatrical elements, imaginative lighting and stage design including a video backdrop of sea-based imagery, overlaid with extra auditory elements like water samples, all assisted in creating an immersive voyage that filled the large room and got progressively heavier as it went on, pulling the audience down into the crushing depths with lead vocalist Loïc Rossetti physically bringing his performance into the packed crowd. 
Following final song Firmament, from 2010 Heliocentric, huge cheers and a sea of hands erupted from the crowd, consoled by the fact that now a second set would be delivered by The Ocean on Sunday. Psychonaut were sadly no longer able to play on Sunday due to an imminent family bereavement for one of them and had made the collective decision to support their bandmate.
Arms And Sleepers
Concluding Saturday’s proceedings in the lobby was experimental US electronic artist Arms And Sleepers, providing some liquid sounds to swim through for a decent-sized audience and for me whenever visiting the bar. By this point, I was catching up with some people I had not seen for a while, but this is certainly on my list of new music takeaways from this festival. 
The first day ended in a relaxed way, there seeming to be no sudden kicking-out after the music had stopped but our conversation had migrated outside anyway, where it continued for a while before we said our goodbyes and tottered happily back to our tiny but very comfy hostel pod bunkbeds.
Full Sunday coverage is to follow. You can read all about Pelagic Fest 2024 at MetalTalk.net/Pelagic-Fest.
Pelagic Fest have released early bird tickets for 2025. With a line-up that includes Ihsahn, Psychonaut, A Burial At Sea and Bear, a 25% discount is available at the Pelagic Records website.
