Fantasy is an essential aspect of Metal. Album titles and sleeve-designs, promotion photos, texts and stage-shows all pay homage to the power of the imagination: black romanticism, pre-modern mystic naturalism, forests, wolves, the fascination of death and the un-dead, violent fantasies, zombie fantasies, dismemberment, necrophilia, rituals, medieval cults, Nordic myths, paganism and satanism. A lot that is forbidden elsewhere here finds its home. Metal tends to make itself familiar with all that is repressed, artfully sublimating it in precise musical forms and polished iconography. Whoever sides with those excluded need not fear their return.
 
Yet to be programmatic is not necessarily to be formulaic. Metal is unwieldy, idiosyncratic and rebellious. Nobody in recent years has made this so impressively apparent as the Metal avant-garde. In the raw power of Drone Metal, the atmospheric intensity of Doom, the cutting malignity of Black Metal is revealed a tonal quality and love of musical experimentation that one often looks for in vain elsewhere, not least due to increasing crossovers between Metal and Noise, a genre similar in content and sound, albeit more overtly political.
 
The experimental drones of Birchville Cat Motel fill space and envelop one's spirit like a psychoactive substance. Using connected breath techniques and a whole battery of guitar amplifiers, Antoine Chessex draws discordant tones from his sax that are mightier and deeper than a ship's foghorn. The Burial Chamber Trio – Greg Anderson, Oren Ambarchi und extreme-vocalist, Attila Csihar turn up as an unholy alliance, and submerge us in destructive subsonic soundwaves. The Noise-Duo Jazkamer (Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre) are a bombastic sonic experience in their own right, but they've now joined forces with Manngard, and Enslaved to record the Metal Music Machine album: the ultimate combination of electronic Noise and Metal. Two drums, three guitars, tons of feedback and Lasse Marhaug's electronic Noise are bound to bring the house down.
 
A night of innovative projects from the fields of Noise, Metal and Drone is a long-standing tradition at the CTM, but this evening goes one step further - with a line-up of hitherto unheard monster-sounds that may well cause nausea, narcolepsy and rigor mortis – You have been warned!