Five The Hierophant + Wyatt E.

“When you look into the abyss, it also looks at you,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (a.k.a. the sage Alaundo) in his account of the Five The Hierophant concert.

This dark immersive concept was born in 2014 during the London jam sessions of Krzysztof Włodarczyk (Witchmaster) and Chris Hancox. Musicians explored jazz at the time, trying to drown it in liquid metal. They quickly moved their experiment to the studio. From the groundbreaking debut “Over Phlegethon” (2017), to the well-received album “Through Aureate Void” (2021), to the latest “Apeiron” (2024), they have consistently built a community of listeners around them who recognize more colors of black than an OLED matrix.

The hierophant in the tradition of Ancient Greece is a priest who explained to the faithful the sacred secrets of the world. And in fact, the Five are called psychedelic shamans, although any attempt to categorize the music of Londoners in advance is doomed to failure. Theoretically, their roots lie in metal, but in practice, the priests weave for their acolytes a web of dense, almost cinematic sounds, in which you will be happy to suffocate. It's a genre avant-garde, decadent borderline music in which bleak dark jazz collides with post-rock space and immersive, drone-like trance.

But before we fully immerse ourselves in this British abyss during a concert at Drizzly, Belgian trio Wyatt E. will take the stage and take us right into the middle of the sun-scorched desert. Their performance is painstakingly constructed sound structures, reminiscent of heavy steps taken in the sand. The band takes the heavy weight and slow pace of doom metal on their shoulders, but instead of classic, rock solutions they rely on hypnotic drones and traditional instrumentation of the ancient Middle East and Mesopotamia.

So we will begin the dark evening with an exile from paradise.