Oblivion Access Festival celebrates the glory of the underground

The choker necklaces, the black leather boots, and the Deftones tees are so abundant outside Austin’s Empire Control Room, you’d think there was a cult initiation going down. Inside, the music is just as loud, with hoards of people galavanting from venue to venue in the city’s own Red River Cultural District. Connection is palpable. Welcome to a haven for the offbeat and misunderstood.

Headlined by Godflesh, Tim Hecker, Faust, Duster, TR/ST, and clipping., this year marks the second voyage of Oblivion Access (formerly Austin Terror Fest). The festival, co-founded by Dusty Brooks and Dorian Domi, also runs parallel to Bonnaroo in the southeast, an event that totes the same tired headliners as many others this year. There is none of that at Oblivion Access. Named after a Lil Ugly Mane album — who miraculously performed a blazing rap set despite canceling his tour — the four-day music festival is a true magnification of the underground; a place that celebrates the unclassifiable and underappreciated, the shadowy and subversive. One glance and you’ll see that the bill is gloriously bizarre, filled with a wide spectrum of hip-hop, metal, psychedelia, and punk. If you’re not tapped in, many of these sets will soar right over your head — that’s when you miss the good stuff.

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Look to Yellow Swans, who performed their first proper show in 15 years. Beginning as an experimental outfit from the Pacific Northwest that created lysergic noise music, the band slipped into the unknown when the project disbanded in 2008. So it’s endearing that before they play a single note, Gabriel Mindel Saloman spills his guts about how grateful he is to be breaking their dry spell. “I’m here for imagination, something radical, something fucking different. Something where we survive and live our best life. That’s where this music comes from,” he says before their earsplitting blast decimates Elysium’s 500-cap space. If you didn’t wear earplugs, you now have tinnitus. Similarly, Have a Nice Life expressed gratitude before launching into their gloomy, emo-adjacent shoegaze that had everyone deep in their emotions.

[Photo by Robert Hein]

One of the longest sets from the weekend, though, came from Earth, who played their revolutionary debut album, Earth 2, in full. Of all the rare performances that went down this past weekend, their set may be the most coveted. Back in 1993, the band became drone-metal pioneers by dropping the record on Sub Pop, despite not being part of the grunge emergence. Rather, they took Slayer riffs and stretched them into 20-minute meditations, luring metalheads into their trance because guitarist Dylan Carlson wore a Morbid Angel tee on the back cover. Here, inside Central Presbyterian Church, their sermon produces a spellbinding effect. Hardly anyone moves. People sit there transfixed, flung into a spiritual state as the slow crush of the drone takes hold in quadraphonic sound. It soon becomes a test of endurance. How long can you let your mind wander before the temptation of looking at your neighbor, checking a text, or capturing an Instagramable moment breaks the hex? There are a few fidgets. Photographers tread lightly on the sides. Even jotting down a couple of quick notes feels like sacrilege. Cosmic lighting heightens the experience, like a Pink Floyd laser show for people with blackened wardrobes. When the set finally wraps, one song melding into another so seamlessly that you can’t tell where it begins and ends, the applause is deafening. There’s a standing ovation, cheers, rapture. The band have achieved something remarkable. For a time, all the hurt felt several realms away.

[Photo by Andrea Escobar]

This year’s Oblivion made a point to nod to the new generation. On Thursday night, the heat is godless. Everything feels like it’s melting, the sort of temperature where people brush up against you and they’re wet, but the crowd is buzzing over MSPAINT at Empire Control Room. Vocalist Deedee looks like he messed up the set times and is fronting for the wrong band. He grunts and yelps into the microphone, moving about onstage as if he’s been wired for days. They’re not quite hardcore — there is no guitarist — but that’s the closest you’ll get if classifying them means something to you. A guy standing near the back switches from vibing to aggressively head-banging in seconds. Two giants in tanks doused in sweat pass by, uttering profanities (likely about the temperature or the band’s live smarts; it’s unclear). But for all the people fleeing the pit, there are just as many entering. MSPAINT’s power is undeniable, yet they’re only getting started.

GEL, on the other hand, are defiantly hardcore. It’s 103 degrees out when they take the stage at Mohawk on Sunday afternoon, the type of misery that could fry your phone battery if you leave it out too long. But vocalist Sami Kaiser isn’t fazed, offering so much energy that she sometimes needs to hold the mic with two hands as she flings from one side of the stage to the other. The crowd may be withering in the heat, but their “hardcore for freaks” is so ferocious, you can hear it clearly down the road.

[Photo Robert Hein]

Although Oblivion Access is rife with underground heroes, experimentalists, and metal shredders, Chat Pile feel like one of the bands that embody the festival’s ethos the most. So much so that they played twice on the strength of their brutal debut album, God’s Country. On Friday, right before the group are slated to go on, a thunderstorm threatens to ruin their second act. As the crowd heads back inside, someone remarks how “sick it would be to see Chat Pile in a lightning storm.” It’s hard to disagree. The interim is agonizing, though the music flipping from soul to nü metal seems to foretell that they will go on soon. When Chat Pile do finally make it on the stage, they open with “Why” (“Why do people havе to live outside?/In tents, undеr bridges/Living with nothing and horribly suffering”). It’s wildly on the mark in a city like Austin, where the homeless population exceeds 5,000. People walk around the city with pillows. Every underpass presents an opportunity for an encampment. It’s common enough to walk by someone passed out on the sidewalk, baking in the heat, it’s sickening. In between their sludgy noise, vocalist Raygun Busch recommends Toni Morrison’s Beloved and suggests the city erect a statue of Tobe Hooper.

The thrill of ’70s Germany came alive on Saturday night with back-to-back sets of genre descendants Beak> and krautrock OGs Faust, who were ringing in 50 years of pushing boundaries, convention, and tastes. On record, Beak> are tight and intentional, with their songs rarely breaking six minutes. Live, they are a completely different band. Their jams become longer and unbridled, leaning into their ability to make crowds move far more. To be fair, this lot isn’t as nearly animated as it should be for a group this great, and others take notice. “Are we gonna stand around, or are we gonna dance to this shit?” someone asks between songs. The music gets groovier, trancier, more mystifying. But as quickly as the trio arrived, with drummer Geoff Barrow harassing his crew lovingly (“Slower, bit faster, no, yeah that’s it,” he taunts as his bandmate struggles to achieve the right tempo), they descend the stage.

[Photo by Robert Hein]

Faust, however, are objectively strange. During their hour-and-a-half performance, a woman sits onstage reading Wall Street Journal. At one point, founding member Jean-Hervé Péron takes a chainsaw to a barrel. Toward the end, a member of the crowd is invited to bash that same barrel until he has nothing left to give. Look a little deeper, though, and you’ll find a band that have trodden their own path for half a century. Even their frontwoman Jeanne-Marie Varain — a newer addition to Faust and Péron’s daughter — possesses the same flair for theatrics as the band that were “naked and stoned a lot” in the early ’70s. She transformed from a woman slinging their own merch prior to the show into an enchanting, wicked creature not of this Earth. She regales the crowd with stories of her haunted dreams, laughs manically, and sticks her tongue out savagely.

But at their core, Faust lay down an experience so gripping, time slows. “We don’t play rock ’n’ roll. We play krautrock,” Péron repeats for the third time in the evening before launching into the song of the same name. At this moment, the band surrender to the warped pulse that defined an entire movement, created new doorways, and made people think differently. You hear it in Radiohead, Joy Division, and Sonic Youth, among countless others. But while they point to their own grand past, it’s clear that Faust immerse themselves in the present. It’s all there is, really.