ArcTanGent is an outstanding curated festival of math and post rock, experimental, progressive and Post Metal, which this year celebrated its 10th anniversary. There are full tents around all stages – great when it’s very sunny or raining, and it generally does plenty of both, but also for the atmospherics and theatricality of live performance, which contribute so much to transporting an audience.
Walking out of bright sunshine thronged with people, you enter into a quickening spell that is unique to each band or artist. The neutral outdoor festival space and daylight is always present at the edge of this realm, but it is dark enough inside to achieve a deeply immersive atmosphere with almost full lighting effects even in the middle of the day, from which you emerge in a changed state.
Drone three-piece A-Sun Amissa played a truly spellbinding set on Thursday morning, the first day of the main three-day festival. Upon entering the Elephant in the Bar’s gloom, now with its own dedicated tent and no longer relegated to a side area of the merch and bar tent, at 11:30 am on Thursday, the blue-lit stage was empty of musicians, their instruments waiting. There was a sizable audience at this early time of the day, meaning many who had been up the night before for the Wednesday 4-dayers’ opener of favourites from the previous year had made it down for this, and by the end the tent was full.
Guitar, bass, clarinet and vocals enveloping and enfolding, this is a sound which roots itself in the solar plexus and performs its alchemy there. Time stretches out, unrushed, giving space for nuance to be felt and for the mind to rise and open as if floating on water. The interactions of the musicians, their counting of elongated beats, their concentration in knowing where they are in the expanding soundscape, as well as being able to get a glimpse into how it was constructed, including the use of inventive bowing and percussive sounds, all added to what was a very moving experience that had me welling up about halfway through.
A-Sun Amissa – A very moving experience that had me welling up about halfway through.
A sample of Pauline Oliveros became noticeable at the start. This one I believe must have been Meditations On The Points Of A Compass: gently intoning spoken word travelling to each point of the compass and exploring its character, bringing to mind directions, paths, journeys, spaces, crossroads, choices, and loops returning to the same point but changed each time by the point itself having moved relative to space, like bodies in a star system.
The three musicians entered one by one and began spinning their complex orbital webs within blue luminescence shifting in hue, as a warm breeze from the sunlit morning realm outside passed through the audience like a gentle caress, smoke billowing through multi-shafted revolving spots which slowly changed in pattern.
The piece began as the spoken word sample faded, with deep steely ribbons of notes as if eyes were opening upon vast flat wheels speeding by below, part of some gigantic superstructure in the blackness of a void, glinting in a cold wan light from an unseen source as steam rises gently from the illuminated places. Rising elongated bass notes and polychromatic clarinet threads building in intensity, as beyond the wheels a cityscape appears, an odd forest of dome and lozenge-shaped structures upon undulant steep-sided hills with channels crisscrossing through, clusters of needles and a myriad of platforms encrusting them.
As this vista moves by slowly below, millions of windows twinkle frostily like mica, continuing down into the unshadowed sides of great vertical shafts which open up here and there revealing a dense habitation of industry like a vast warren. The whole of this view shimmers gently as if in rising heat, but there is no sunlight upon it.
A high, clear melodic refrain, repeated throughout the piece, expresses the simple objective beauty and grandeur of the sight, before bassy guitar blares of foreboding announce some wrongness about this metropolis, a stillness that is somehow too profound. Quieting again to a hushed lullaby whispering for the city slumbering in its own darkness, a single reverberating bowed bass note rises and repeats like an echo of the last breaths of this stilled giant.
Within a building of percussive loops, the vibrations of this breathing gradually fade and return, and weave around a keening clarinet telling of the life of this nameless place, reconstructed in remnants by describing a quality of poignant absence suffusing the mile upon mile of structures that were always immobile but now have a hollowness, like vessels which once contained the intangible teeming juice of a billion lives: activity and vitality and all the miniscule vibrations of things that are alive in flesh, now vanished. All beauty now unseen and all meaning absent, just a shell remains, haunted by the echoes of their memories like a delicate shroud upon this cold, dead world.
With a weighty buzzing of enveloping drones entwining with the clarinet refrain, the cityscape moves away. Its true vastness revealed, the black void around it is filled in with billions of points of light where it ends suddenly at gigantic sheered-off edges pockmarked with the myriad interiors of dwellings, and huge rents and gouges in rock strata are now in view beneath as this planetary fragment turns slowly in the vacuum of space.
ts flawless diamond of frozen respiratory medium shimmering and glinting around the chilly sparkle of the countless windows within, the huge wheel sections arc outwards into space like broken wings. In the quiet of its frosty repose, ethereal vocals sound an exquisite undulating lament for this tomb city.
From an aching swell of high melodic threads and percussion, the direful bassy guitar chords loop around once more in breaking waves as this strange jewel spinning in the vast emptiness of space, a splinter or shard from some unimaginable catastrophe, moves towards something or somewhere: a slowly turning seed frozen in a state of potential balanced between opposing lodestars, destruction within promise and promise within destruction, approaching the soil of new worlds like a comet containing a contaminant of possible futures. Illuminated by an icy object in the Oort cloud it is passing through, the great arcs of orbital calculations swing around to a fateful encounter with slowly accelerating inexorability as it passes twinkling from sight against the massed firmament.
Bending over their boards the musicians un-wove and released each sonic thread in turn as if they had tethered the city and its story to sight; it disappeared, eyes closing on its fate, as stillness fell. The audience, having been silent and rapt throughout and maybe visualising other stories to add to their own experiences, responded with huge appreciation.
Talking to friends afterwards who had found it similarly moving to the point of tears, we agreed when we finally reached the close of what had been a festival packed with standouts that it had been one of the best moments of the whole thing.
Originally written just for ArcTanGent, this A-Sun Amissa piece will now be played live elsewhere – which is wonderful news as it would have been a shame if others could not experience it.
A-Sun Amissa will be playing HANS, Goor in the Netherlands on 2 November and will then tour Germany between 3 – 6 November. They will return to the UK and play Newcastle on 8 November. Further dates and info can be found on Instagram.
ArcTanGent have announced 2025 lineup. Tickets and full details are available from here.
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A-Sun Amissa / A Spellbinding Drone Performance At ArcTanGent’s 10th Anniversary first appeared on
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