Satøri – Colossloth – Lucifer Sky – Birmingham live review

Club Borrowmind presents a night of esoteric electronics… – Satøri – Colossloth – Lucifer Sky – Centrala Birmingham – Friday the 28th February 2025

Fighting Boredom head off to the Minerva Print Works in Digbeth for what we’re told will be ‘a night of esoteric electronics…’ Featuring Cold Spring Records’ Satøri and his ‘mission to document the stupidity of our species’. ‘Industrial / esoteric electronic alchemist’ Colossloth and Lucifer Sky with ‘trauma electronics from the ghost town’ have a read of what we thought below.

We are late, more to do with me heading up the wrong motorway and back again than bad timekeeping this time. This is pointed out to me at various points in the evening by the Photographer much to his amusement. This is a Cold Spring records double header, both Satori and Colossloth have albums out today so this promises to be a good night. First though we have Coventry’s own Lucifer Sky. We haven’t seen her perform for a while and this has moved on considerably since last time.

She stands at a small table filled with electronics, a rainbow hued balaclava on her head and makes odd guttural noises on what I’m assuming is a throat microphone as we come in. It’s silent except for these horrible sounds and very disorientating at first as you have no idea where the sound comes from. The drones and static rise into a huge noise and she is growling incoherently over the banks of drone and static. It all fades down as she stands still waiting and then a bass static beat rises again morphing into another huge noise, she Knocks wooden blocks to make sounds over it all, the drone carries on and she is talking underneath it, she takes the mic off and puts it in her mouth. This is when the sounds get really disturbing, she swallows and gags on the mic, she is now on the floor as the gagging and retching sounds surround us, it’s horrible and then it’s back to the drones and static as she reattaches the mic to her throat. A genuinely upsetting and at the same time excellent set.

Colossloth stands in front of his little table of electronics and hits a button. Weird shuffling sounds start over weird beats, the sound growing and feeding on itself. The drone gets very gradually stronger and bigger. The weird shuffle is still there but it now feels like a million mutated insects marching forward through the aluminum winds across the rust caked, crumbling concrete. It’s intense. Then the static white noise that Colossloth uses so well drops down from the sky and obliterates everything. Wipes it clean. The drones start up into the static and he is shaking the equipment, coaxing more madness from the flowing electricity. It becomes louder, stronger and harder and buried somewhere in the oceans of layers depths there are beats, the noise is just pure emotion, it’s clearing my head of all the mundanity of life and filling it with this glorious sound.

He is totally into it. The noise rises even further and it now feels like the building is coming down on top of us. Voices talk over the sound and the whole thing is completely overwhelming. The noise drops down to just the voice and stops briefly until massive beats built of static and barbed wire fall down, deliberately slow and hard, static rises and again it’s a glorious noise. He is looking right through the crowd as he makes minute adjustments to the sound.

I thank the Gods that people do this, I need this noise, I need it to drown out all that I am, this is where my head is clear. I am sitting directly below one of the speakers as I write, it’s fantastic. Colossloth brings it all down to just a strummed guitar, the same sound over and over, a moment of tuneful beauty in the maelstrom. The drone rises over and around it and it fades back into wherever it came from. The drone static and noise fades down to tiny echolocation sounds and it all turns slightly trippy and weirded out. Everything we are listening to and absorbing has been painstakingly refined and built up, this is not spontaneous, but it is pure. The beats come in sounding like broken cogs moving in strange configurations, then again the noise, but this time it’s like electronic scum coated metal being played by the old Gods, a pagan unholy rhythm that Colossloth is doing his best to break. It storms on around him as he rocks back and forth before dying as the crowd shout and applaud, if Colossloth’s music gets any better than this there will be no stopping him.

Now then, I grab some water and sit back down to watch the headliner, Satøri starts of with a rumbling drone and huge stabs of noise. This is a lot more industrial sounding that what has come before tonight, it’s very heavy and again, very loud. He picks up the mic and starts to shout into it over and around the noise. The music stays very much in the industrial vien and he moves back and forth on the stage shouting and ranting into the mic, gesticulating and generally being pretty damn pissed off. The music throbs and the beat turns to a buried techno pattern buried deep in the drones. The rhythm is relentless and he is quite disturbing to watch, I feel like I should move back but stay where I am.

The drone rises up and it sounds like a circus briefly before the huge static drone takes over it all again with an equally enormous throbbing bassline. A cymbal keeps time as the sound turns woozy and drunken that just grows and grows in volume, he carries on shouting, drowning out the shit around us at the moment. It sounds like buildings burning and the end of things.

But then he loses me. The projection behind him turns to films of plane crashes, executions and lynchings, suicides and mobs, cutting out everytime it is about to get utterly horrific, but I’ve seen this stuff all before and I don’t need to see it now, it adds nothing and takes me away from the sound.

It cuts to a wonderful film of spiders but I’m not moved anymore, it’s just noise now with angry shouting which of course is what it was before but it was moving me. The massive beats and drones kick in again and the anger is palpable, but it’s not a glorious ending and it’s not what I needed to obliterate everything inside. Slightly disappointing.

But even so it’s still an excellent night. Colossloth triumphed again. Bring the noise.

–

Satøri