Roadburn broadens one’s view of a slice of the music scene, which reveals its comprehensive spectrum in Tilburg.
There is a scene in the film The Teachers’ Lounge’ from 2023: a teacher comes into the classroom, tired and annoyed by a situation that is currently happening in the school, offering the students to shout out their anger. The whole room fills the space with a massive noise as if on cue, and emotions are discharged. After this year, Roadburn, I find it hard not to look at the heavy music similarly. The heaviness it brings and the release, a catharsis, can be achieved while listening to it, especially live. Because hardly anyone teaches us to talk about emotions, music helps with that.
Walls of sound, heavy beats, trance, repetition – these elements make it possible, at least for a moment, to move into a slightly different dimension, to experience reality differently, to fall into a vortex of cutting guitars, shimmering cymbals, industrial or metallic beats. I feel this when I listen to a Ragana concert for the second time in a year. It is dense, intense, and maximalist in its loudness, but minimalist, as it is only played for guitar and drums. Emotionally transfixing, the songs from Desolation’s Flower have an unprecedented power. The massive wall of sound absorbs, and the vocals are overpowering. When they shout, “Death to America, Free Palestine,” it seems as if the band is playing as if the end of the world is about to come. Ragana originally meant fairy, and in the Prussians, a few hundred years ago, not far from where I live, it was the goddess of death and transfiguration. Is the concerts I’m experiencing here just such a borderline?
Couch Slut 
Ragana
Likewise, at a concert by Agriculture, who play in the enormous hall next door. It is a very emotional performance, with melodies hiding behind those walls of sound; it is a heavily moving experience. I take a photo, then watch it – the concert is not in darkness, but a fistful of colors. Roadburn is precisely how they ‘define heaviness’: in a non-obvious way, weight juxtaposed with ecstatic playing, shoveling beats with emotional riffs on guitars.
The spaces in which the concerts take place matter. Bands from the show unexpectedly play secret shows in the Skate Hall. In this installment, I watch Coach Slut the day before their album release – the band doesn’t play in the dark, but the whiteness of the halogens; some of the audiences are watching them from afar, standing on the ramps, some are nearby. It is a highly emotional experience, including when vocalist Megan Osztrosits sought catharsis in suffering, literally and physically, hitting her head with a microphone, making her bleed all over after a few minutes. A compelling experience, intense music, and the final track, when the guitarist, Amy Mills, reaches for the trumpet, is a surprising but remarkable culmination of this concert.
At the other end of the spectrum is Khanate, a band that, unlike most shows, slows down the revolutions to the maximum, playing long and slow doom sluggishly, returning on the stage after 19 years. Their stratified, meticulously strained metal stretches to the limit. A colossal sheet cymbal, strung out behind the drummer, is finally waiting for almost the entire gig to ring out—an unusual experience, especially in contrast to the Ragana that was played earlier.
Lord Spikeheart 
Khanate
There is also a heaviness hidden in the folk, in a concert by Lankum, who draw on traditional Irish music but serve it up in such strong, heavy, repetitive form. They may surprise many, but they fit right in with this program, as they play stately and heavy and show how to ‘define heavy’ from a different angle. “Hi Roadburn Weirdos, we wanted our songs to sound like Orcas going to eat hobbits,” they say at one point. They look at it from a distance but know that Roadburn stands for the extreme. These folk, shanty-like compositions take on a heaviness, a tranciness, and that metal repetitiveness, which drills into your head when you listen.
Forest Swords also presents the heaviness, whose trance-like, dense songs are given a very upbeat, bass-heavy, and intense version, accompanied by Andrew PM Hunt, who plays the saxophone and rattles – a peculiar musical mystery. The heavyweight is also Richard Dawson, who, admittedly, a bit of a joke, sings and plays only guitar, but his appealing music, rooted in British folk and linguistic playfulness yet simple, is far from light. What is also very interesting is that such music fits into the festival context.
Roadburn often dispenses with guitars, showing that heaviness is also about beats, industrial sound, and frontal attack. As in the case of the Body Void concert case, the second one I go to is an intense wall of sound, emotion, shoveling, and a very dark atmosphere. The first is the concert of Mirusi Mergina, an artist from Lithuania, playing rhythmically broken structures and growing electronic sound waves, which results in the most dramaturgically exciting concert of the festival. Industrial, dense electronic musical magma showed a story from swamps, drones, and dynamic industrial beats.
Also heavy is a concert by Lord Spikeheart, vocalist of Duma, which I saw two years ago at Le Guess Who. It was full of broken beats, heaviness, and intense and dense music from the periphery of metal and industrial. All were played from the laptop, to which the vocalist shouts, raps, and serves spoken words.
Blood Incantations 
Forest Swords
There are brighter moments, too – one of the two Clipping gigs, a lighter, more emotional one, with a guest appearance of Sharon Udoh. She plays piano and sings – a solid, intense moment at one point when she sings to a virtual noise wall of sound, which turns out to be a compelling, intense experience. Blood Incantations plays twice, and I also experienced their “lighter” set. They perform ‘Timewave Zero’ – sprawling spacey electronic forms immersed in cosmic music, whose darkness is also complete of heaviness, albeit in a very different way.
This is my first time at Roadburn. Although I started my musical adventure by listening to metal, I don’t necessarily feel like a metalhead now. In one of the groups, I observed a discussion about the events’ changes over the years – the search for avant-garde bands languishing away from the mainstream of what heavy music is associated with. The snag is that Roadburn takes an original look at this heaviness as if it were a lens – it’s a guiding slogan, defining heaviness and looking for it in different areas, not just black or doom, seemingly obvious, but on different fringes.
Looking at one day at the Wall of Fame, a listing of the lineups of all the editions so far, the first one where a few bands played and the last ones, you can see how strongly the program of this event is transforming, so much so that I, a person not connected to this musical bubble, am interested in this program and finally managed to attend.
Roadburn shows in a fascinating way how this musical weight can give vent to emotions and experiences and allow itself to find reality in its own way. It also broadens one’s view of a slice of the music scene, which here in Tilburg reveals its extremely broad spectrum.
