Due to Psychonaut having to be replaced and main stage headliners Ihsahn also unable to make it due to visa issues, The Ocean were now to play their second set headlining the main stage at Pelagic Fest 2024. Cobra The Impaler heroically stepped in at incredibly short notice to create a later headline in the smaller room. Last up in the lobby and last artist of the festival, Jegong, were also unable to make it and were replaced by The Devil’s Trade. Set times were increased by 15 minutes so that most bands had an hour, which created a few clashes, but the extra music was a joy.
Pelagic Fest 2024 – Muziekgieterij, Maastricht
Sunday 25 August 2024
Words: Marisa Adams
The start time was 2 pm, so, again, we had another relaxed morning. With the weather holding, and fuelled up with a Thai curry, we were then on our way over to the venue for the final day.
Spurv
Emphatically opening the second day of this fantastic festival with their set time happily extended to 45 minutes were post rock/Metal Norwegian six-piece Spurv. Comprised of some classically-trained musicians, they use the expansive wilderness of their country as inspiration, among other things. You can certainly hear this influence strongly and there is purity and airiness about their music, as if it expresses the space between earth and sky, clean and open even in its heavier moments.
Together with some older material, they played tracks from new album Brefjære whose starting point is to imagine how very different elements of the landscape – birch tree, mountain, wind and moth – might communicate.
They opened with En Brennende Vogn Over Jordet (A Burning Wagon Across The Field) from that album: a weightily galvanic, orchestral, trombone-driven celebration under fractured white spots like the sun through trees. Et Blekt Lys Lyder (A Pale Light Sounds) from 2018’s Myra was like an ethereal expression of how it feels to exist in a gigantic landscape of misty tracts of ancient forest and mountains, gaining in heaviness under a multitude of narrow blue spots as if a meteor shower were bursting overhead.
Til En Ny Vår (To A New Spring) from Brefjære, building from its quiet opening into a crescendo of euphoric proportions, was a free, beautiful and moving experience for everyone including them. They closed with the energy and driving groove of Urdråpene (The Primordial Drops) from Brefjære.
The sizable audience were very vocal in their appreciation throughout and gave back in abundance the energy all of the musicians put out – there was clearly a lot of well-deserved love for this band, who themselves were obviously delighted to be there and to perform. This was a very uplifting and energising experience.
Bipolar Architecture
Opening the small room on Sunday afternoon were this quartet from Istanbul and Berlin, a personal new discovery. Lacerating, crushingly heavy and emotionally searing but somehow tender too and full of layering and nuance, this was like a solid Black Metal edifice growing organically into a desolate but defiant and beautiful garden of a wall of sound, driven by groovy, bassy riffs, thunderous earth-rumbling drums with some stellar broken grooves of their own from Fatih Kanık, intertwined with sinuous lyrical post-rock and Sarp Keski’s powerfully fiery, raw vocals.
The dynamic and suitably architectural lighting made the stage seem much bigger and matched the size and scope of this music, which was also well served by fantastic sound.
The small room was pretty much full until the start time of EF, and the band gave out loads of spirit and engagement and got back plenty of appreciation throughout. This was excellent.
Briqueville
This main room set began drenched in heavily shrouded deep blue, and soon afterwards an eldritch noise came from everywhere and sounded as if the audience around me were all screaming.
The main guitarist, robed, hooded and masked, loomed overhead on stage, his four bandmates visible to lessening degrees as the portentous incantational dirge of Akte XVI from latest album IIII, swirled within up-pointing spots as if through smoke from floor-level openings. 
To call this doom or sludge seems, at best, a vague guide, really. Deeply atmospheric on record, live this is a cryptic, bewitching experience which quickly grasps hold and conveys you to another place altogether with a feeling of disorientated euphoric dread. Over the course of an hour, they played material from all four of their albums, starting with tracks from IIII and going backwards through time, circling through different emotions until arriving at the ferocious hypnotic intensity of Akte IV of I (Briqueville).
Menacingly unrushed, rhythmical, repetitive, fear-inducing basslines and bassy guitar riffs solidified and honed by intense and intricate drums, chugged with languid but laser-like intent, arriving, burrowing into flesh, through viscera and along bones. Woven through a wall of eerie synth drones and field recordings, they sewed the listener into a singularly strange immersive cocoon of noise which increased in transformative intensity as an array of weirdling vocal personalities crooned abstruse incantations and darkly playful sprites of refrains tangoed in the flashing crepuscular gloom.
Tucked up tight within this state, you might dream you had got lost in some mountainous country and found yourself at the gates of a strange citadel, and happening upon an ordinary-looking marketplace you might chance upon a particular covered stall and ask for directions, and find yourself conveyed to the back and beckoned down a glowing hatch in the floor, thence along a myriad of catacombs until arriving into an enormous cavern yawning upwards out of sight which holds a gathering of thousands into which your guide disappears.
The air is filled with the whining of the wheels within wheels embedded in the floor and gigantic cryptic mechanisms upon the walls, cycling inexorably into new configurations as the mass respond in turns with choreographed steps or animated abandon. Things only half seen in the flashing blue and swampy orange half-light make strangled cries or melancholy rasps descending into blackened animal growling as if a shapeshifter is out there somewhere in the shadows, and all of this is for some utterly inscrutable purpose when at some point you realise that you are no longer observing this event but have become integrated into its unfathomable objectives and have abandoned whatever reality you once inhabited. 
At times, there was a twist of perception as if partially awakening or entering into a different dream, such as in the nearly 20-minute-long Akte VII of II, a desolate howl of bitterly mournful lament grounding the senses somewhere in the searing waking world, the two guitars lit by one white spot each as they delivered a hushed and poignant passage before tribal drumbeats and overhead lights like green and white fire rained down.
Overcome once more by flashing dark, the opening strains of Akte IV of I began in baleful red light, signalling how this would end – a crimson and white strobed intoxicating crescendo gathering level after level of trance-inducing intensity to itself, as glimpsed around me the crowd responded with feverish abandon until all sound and light was obliterated at the final instant.
Huge applause swelled in to fill the void, and I made my way out in a daze.
Emerging from this cathartic experience, there was no way at all that I could absorb any more music for the time being, which is why I missed Karin Park aside from popping my head around the door, so I went outside in the sunshine to join a similarly stunned friend and lay flat out on the grass, synapses fried, blown, exploded, all of it. What a set.
Year Of No Light
The main room had filled up again when we returned, and this six-piece opened with Hierophant from their 2010 album Ausserwelt. With plain overhead lighting and no effects, night quickly fell and the effects built with distinctly different lighting for each track as the set progressed.
Hierophant, like most of the five tracks they played, starts with heavily decelerated doom like the approaching tread of some colossal entity detached from a vast mountainside and risen in the dead of night from long moss-covered slumber, swathed in tapestry robes of majestically sombre drones and funereal riffs from the synths and three guitars and bass.
Elements of its weighty corporeal form fall away as it gathers pace, but it retains and grows in transmuted mass and density as the intricate drums take off running in tribal unison, the powerful and mesmerising intricacies of Mathieu Megemont joined from the synth by Bertrand Sebenne.
Falling back from such ascents into melancholy contemplation, or hushed dread, or dark lyrical flow, and rising again, the soundscapes created by these six musicians might describe a constantly shifting landscape which they take the listener to bodily as opposed to describing.
A realm of towering pinnacles separated by airy voids of hushed potency above twilit foothills and shady valleys through which stygian waterfalls and mournful winds are sucked into crushingly black sepulchral chasms.
Within, there approaches one such as the robed entity like a creature gathering in the haze, taking on corporeal form once again, putting on flesh, claw, eye and hair with each drum beat, a different personification for each listener. Rising together as it waxes in darkling splendour of form and enfolds within robes now become leathery wings, the quickening double drums and soaring balefully lyrical walls of sound paint each peak as the set progresses. 
It is the headlong ascents of these pinnacles which make this a cathartic and exhilaratingly dark psychedelic experience. A prime example and the highest of these peaks was Aletheia. A central piece of the set, Aletheia means a state of ‘unconcealedness’ and was one of three songs they played from their most recent album, 2021’s outstanding Consolamentum,
It began with the single vibrant guitar line of Pierre Anouilh, added to by each of his bandmates layer after layer, building from there and just continuing to build. Heavy is one thing. This is something more.
A dread-inducing, relentless, dizzying acceleration, each time seeming to have reached its zenith and then finding another infernal gear until it seemed as if, bursting through a fleshy veil, horror had become a reality and that resisting this ascent would result in skin separating from flesh, flesh and sinew from the bone.
Hypnotised by the terrifying intensity housed in the backlit drums, a silent scream rises in the throat as utter dread takes hold, but I cannot help but break out in a huge smile. Alongside the mounting terror is also an awareness of aching beauty, poignancy, yearning and transcendence. A truly singular experience.
There were some warm words from guitarist Jerome Alban for Pelagic Records for organising the festival, and also for bandmate guitarist Shiran Kaidine who is fighting cancer and could not be there, and to welcome the musician who had stepped in for him. We wish Shiran well.
Final song Stella Rectrix (‘guiding star’) from 2013’s Tocsin, began in almost full night and built from delicate and ethereal to a heavy beauty before it, too, made its terrifying ascent under multiple spinning shafts of light.
Massive and prolonged applause deservedly followed, and again it was necessary to spend some more time outside afterwards, meaning I missed most of Årabrot but thankfully had seen them recently in May in the UK for their excellent Portals set.
The Ocean
The Ocean are simply immense live, like a giant weather system. They create an atmosphere so dense and lush with the complexity of the years of the paleontological epochs they bring to life in their impressive oeuvre that you can almost see pterodactyls and giant dragonflies swooping over the forest of audience hands in the excellent and imaginative light show for final song Cretaceous | Jurassic from 2020’s Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic, an infectious eruption of progressive Post-Metal chronicling a time when everything was bigger.
They played a mix of songs from that album, and the others were from 2024’s Holocene, which whilst still being mightily heavy, uses more synth and electronics than the previous few albums.
The sound was really outstanding, hugely powerful without being too loud.
Quiet atmospheric starts built to an unleashing of thunderous storms, Loïc Rossetti’s vocals ranging from clear and soaring to volcanic incendiary roar, always strong and always leaving nothing back. Not breaking with his habits, he gave the mic to several audience members to sing parts of the final song before diving onto them and continuing to sing held by them in a kneeling position – utterly at home, this man loves to interact with the crowd and he and the rest of the band got all of that love and more back from this particular one, who were packed into the main room and its balcony. 
There was extended cheering and noisy calls for one more song when they had finished, and also huge appreciation from them and Rossetti for Robin Staps and Pelagic records for organising this festival, and thanks from Staps himself to the crowd for coming early to give all the bands their support. We left to catch the final band in the small room, much of the audience remaining and still calling for more.
Cobra The Impaler
Replacing Ihsahn at the 11th hour, this Belgian heavy Progressive Metal supergroup five-piece stepped up and delivered to an audience hungry for a barnstorming close, a lavish meaty feast of driving riffs and satisfying grooves, clear, strong vocals with some swerve and abrasiveness from vocalist Manuel Remmerie and harmonies from bassist Mike Def. Drummer Ace Zec provided some quality pounding that got heads nodding and fists pumping.
From a stage bathed mostly in swampy red shot through with roving white spots, they gave canyonfuls of energy to a crowd which happily devoured it and fed it right back to them. With some great lyrical moments too, this was powerful, emotional, groovy and with snakepits of attitude. A really great finish to the action on the two stages of this excellent festival.
Pelagic Fest – Absolutely Stellar
Dark Folk artist The Devils Trade in the lobby, the final music for the weekend, had stepped in to replace Jegong at the last minute, and I saw a little, but this was another one filed away for getting back to as there was a fair bit of chatting and catching up underway again by that stage.
And so it ended, finally, and we made our back to the hostel for a last beer before the final night in the pod and flight back to London the next day, with a considerable task of digestion ahead of us.
Even though it comes the week after ArcTanGent, a yearly pilgrimage come rain or shine (and there are usually plenty of both), Pelagic Fest needs to be added to that hallowed list and attended every year. Absolutely stellar.
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.
