Description
On the main Berghain floor, EBM duo Youth Code thrash in a stained space where hardcore and metal grind nastily up on the rusted foundations of industrial. With their new EP Yours, With Malice, that tension intensionifies – them synth lines glare harder, those drums smack that mental booty punishingly, and the shadows behind it all rear impossibly high.
King Yosef carries in his swollen industrialised hardcore an elemental weight that presses inward before it cracks messily open. Textures sharpen to test gravity, contrasts darken, metal and flesh fuse with a sweet smoke that blurs difference. Beats stomp, synths hissing and splitting under the tension as melodies are drawn from fog, stretched gauzily before being shattered by the next ripple of distortion.
A fusion of French post-hardcore outfit Birds in Row with Maelstrom and Louisahhh, Pain Magazine make their German premiere at CTM. Their debut album Violent God wrests with internal and external tyranny, harshed-out guitar energy and pulses of smoldering-circuit bleepage bleeding into raw-voxed confrontationisms, the corrosive effects of unchecked capitalism eviscerated to show how it devours dignity, necessity, and hope.