In the tote doors, beer upstairs. Romansy pummel up pummel back down pummel back up. Room is full of bodies in leather but i know watching romansy is like when they drop the two hours of harsh noise at the frozen outdoor rave and you either buckle down and figure out a way to dance to it or you go back to brunswick to LARP the underground. Tap on the shoulder from Morgs. Catch Spider out the corner of my eye, Love and Revenge record tucked under arm. Scent of sandalwood in the air.

ROMANSY. Think about coco talking about punk-folk tradition. Black metal sonic ideology swirls out the iPad, archaic knowledge shrouded in secrecy through walls of annihilated tormented toiling growl. Room withers. The band paws at the ground of genre, taunts accepted reaction towards the extreme catbraingutnerve hurt care love emotional vagus. Think about devotion to cause, to HardCause. Think about the years of cutting and restitching this nerve has had to wear. Think it’s easy to be a fan but how much are you willing to back it all up when it’s on the line. Think about the borne origins of this religion we do, fractious poor and angry-to-not-be-sad. Remember hours before Hijokaidan, weeks in front of Masonna, the nights frozen before Heroin Makes Happy as the feral-cat mix scratches against the wrought brick cathedral/ironbound upstairs hovel. Tiptoe to the front, five of us respectively spread, warming hands on the fire.

Outside send the message ‘romansy are sonically political band’. Be unable to elaborate. Talk to Addy and Tully talk about sound and person and tattoo history and history in arms and about the jewels worth guarding. Hear No Future through the wall. Sounds pretty good. Hey what time is it isn’t that band you want to see on real soon? Scramble in. i’m gonna stay towards the back i’m going in you’re going in i gotta go in. i gotta go in and cling onto that foldback for dear life.

STRAIGHTJACKET NATION. Sea of suppressed closed-fist glow, their clouds caught red in the angled front lights. Much deliberation over at the bass head. Empty Melbourne Bitter can, crush, post under monitor. Statue still, but all conserving, ripples of drunk marble shivering thousand years trapped beneath chisel point. Advancing army assumes posts. An upswing like conductor and the orchestra begins. Waves like shoe-stealing Apollo Bay surges charge up and back hurling arms like sticks to be swept back to shore and fuck... my fucking....my glasses        anYwaY.

A moments ceasefire tap on the shoulder turn around lifted off the ground embrace Al, spin back around arm in arm three-legged racing fists into the air the upwards punching opening chords of Power It Up. DX animalian, microphone slung around neck, Emily’s cymbals pacing syllables through the swamp-sludge, clawing like Artex through the mud. pushed up and around darting and ducking and smiling and hammering on the edge of the stage and lunging deep into backwards swells from the Muladhara.

Emotion swells security, the ability to connect deeply to others and rapidly swinging back and forth the Sahasrara, flinging hoop earrings into the communal maw, the lotus of a thousand petals, the opening of all petals in the body flying much. And smiling. A white shirt launches into the crowd. Get one good left-arm push on DX as he thunders past into the raised carpet. Capitulated and held and bruised and really is not the gospel section why people go to church, grinning like Scott Morrison at the Hillsong meeting where they finally announce the Great Fire has started, watching friendships forged before I had any knowledge this place existed close the gaps between them and goddamn it i can’t see. Not holding much hope for the glasses but find them and with gentle hands work the crooked arms to feasible use. And go outside.

Cigarette?...nuh, gone too.

In the beer garden considering. Discussing extremity in origin, trying to sound intelligent though unable to hear the words coming out of my own mouth or anyone elses. Working streams of nonsense into sentences with the grace of plaiting snot into rope, just mentally revving. I feel like a car spinning its wheels in the mud, waiting for the gate to open. Finally time to go inside.

Back up the front, watching the same faces as before stare at the sea of black clothing on stage. Proud banner behind the band like the flag of a stolen ship, Masaky steps forth to announce : We are KRIEGSHOG from Tokyo Japan. The following are the only solid memories I have, the only red strings on the board to connect me to ever having been there. The police transcript reads:
Interrupted eyes closed turn to the woman next to me and smile into each other like idiots.
There’s something sharp on the edge of the stage. Get a cut. Ignore it.
Hand is wet, liable to be spilled drink. Wipe on face. Choice of location questionable.
Coco hits the deck again.
My left hand is pissing blood right out the middle of it. I momentarily think about resurrecting the Palmyrian church.
Stroll through the crowd hand aloft like a flag. Pass Lex, blonde-hair bouncing in the light. Punish the bar: Hey mate do you have any paper towel ive got a bit of a cut on my hand. Take towel go back to foldback lose towel.

Dance harder than I thought it possible to dance. Snap the heel off my shoe. The triumphant end of Kreigshog is heralded with both Coco and Al hitting the floor behind me.

Stumble outside half-shod and bleeding. Wrap my hand up on my jumper. Addy and Tully close behind, a quick flash of the hand and then the search for a smoke. Admonished by the both of them: you need to dress that. Nah mate it’s fine. Boss high-fives me right in the blood pool before either of us realise what’s happening. Sure enough there we are, slumped on the stairs, expert hands dressing the big red hole that’s opened up under the skin. I need another drink to deal with this bullshit. Crammed cheek to cheek in the beer garden i’m rambling through my beer about the stones in my shoe, and about the power dynamics of injury, and about all the ways my friends have broken my heart with their softness. The sweat starts to dry cold on my back. Surely there’s more bands right? Try and dance on the way out to The Cars (band), kick out a leg and slip back on the snapped heel. The Cars (vehicle), in the door ears singing. Fuck I feel gross. Roll over and stretch, old broken ankle snaps tormented back into place. Cursing the idiot who put me in heels last night. Really internally fighting for it, sitting outside with no pants on sucking down lemon mint battery and staring bloody murder at the people waiting to inspect the townhouse next door. Soon they’re gonna knock this house down, with its bloodstained walls, turn it into a carpark so these people can send their children to childcare, better that than spend any time with them and then they can sit in these little black boxes and fry their brains behind white hot screens and scream, adopt a little dog to terrorise until the bastard barks itself mad in the tiny hot room or shits on the carpet and some maladjusted corpo kicks it within an inch of its life one day after a few too many craft IPAs and tells his wife he has nooo ideeaaaa how it haaapppeeennned.

Unwrap the little treat that is my hand, slip on some old patch of wetness in the bathroom, smack the growing blue stain right on the edge of the bath. Vomit. Sweaty jeans, housemate pulls up as im wrestling into my sweaty jumper, ask if theres too much blood on my clothes, as if I dont feel honoured by this annointment, as if this isnt a badge of honour. Where you off too? HARDCORE VICTIM, its like festival weekend if you’re disgusting. Long overdue cigarette tramping up to the tram. Should eat but every possible outlet of sustenance halates with that weird Soviet animation glow. Cigarette in the gutter, Low Life pounding in my ears. On the walk to the front bar I wonder what happened to the little side door they used to use and when they gave up on that, and doubt if they ever used it except certain I walked through there once. Walk right into the normal doors and thank almighty Sun God Ra they’re blacked out.

SHOVE and I have a complicated history.Whether it was just my ratty post-pandemic desire to right off anything that didn’t immediately make me feel as though I had just skated down a concrete hill into a brick wall, or whether it was simply never the right place nor the right time. This is not to say there hasn’t been a clear evolution in the sound among this lot. Shove have left behind the somewhat tired and over-played tropes of garaж-rawk and hit the ground full-pelt, spinning like an awol meat-grinder right into the melee of capital H capital C. Gimp masks donned, furious squealing guitars churning up through the foam of viscera to meet Bella’s harsh vocals stubborn like a donkey facing down a lion. This band harkens towards the earliest Motorhead if you strapped them to a metronome fashioned leather-strap water wheel powered like Count Rugen’s Machine and didn’t stop until they pumped out ‘Excess”. They retain that sheddy scum on them but have beaten back against the great rip of the four-track and produced something which goes down like a cup of burnt instant when you haven’t slept in three days. Wasn’t sure if I could face another day, but right here right now I feel like I could smash through that brick wall and come out doing that silly skater clap.

PERSECUTOR come roaring in, flaming off the back of the just-released ‘Global Prison Experiment’ EP. This is Molotov-cocktail music, Tyrone a beaten preacher for the fallen. The riffs are dark and heavy, and I feel the crowd of bodies muster a small heave like seafarers of the Sarimanok. Beatdown blares across the small room, and I find myself giggling as the egregious breakdown at the end of the titular track comes snaking out through the blasts. The walls rattle with vehement thunder smacking up against the wall of white crowd and collapsing into blistering heat-death annihilation of Babylon. Tormenting polite society, genocidal ignorance with a sawn-off shotgun, trapping everyone inside short of bolting the doors and declaring mutiny. People are scaling walls to catch a momentary glimpse of the moment when the front bar Catches Up to the Bandroom and Overtakes the Tote and rockets itself on re-soldered revolutionary pig iron into a sonic boom capitulating the bounds of the space-time continuum. No one dares breath nor move a muscle, people are pulled in off the street for a chance to witness the lighting of the pyre. No sandbag stands against the flood. New Collingwood New Vietnam gas cloud nvlcear thvunder.

Strategizing like a Russian chess-player. Man slime-pressgangs me up against the wall on the thoroughfare through the toilet asks me what I was reading earlier like someone would ask you if you liked jazz. We’re all guinea-pigs in chemical warfare brother, we’re all guinea-pigs, they tested it on your uncles and your grandfathers, they’re testing it in the desert now, Aunty Sue, Kokatha country, you’re not fucking safe, no one’s every been safe, youfeelsafe? You’re lying. Chances a wave from the car-park as they sky smells like McCarthy’s Road to the coast. Four hours to kill.

Go and meet Max and drink and smash the big blue bruise on my hand, and get back and miss Phantasm. Idiot.

Hate myself for electing to be here, as if i’d be anywhere but here, as if i haven’t stared at the flyer on the fridge as if i haven’t told anyone nah you gotta see this shit go down. Sea full of people to talk to and instead flap circles like a drunk albatross. Nothing I drink or say is touching the sides of me.

SWAB. No chat. Straight to the point. Clean and crisp Philadelphianisms, songs structured like shaggy-dog stories, riffs like late-onset punchlines that you don’t get until its far too late, when someone makes a joke and too late after you go oh... i see why you said that now and they just look at you and go really?with that pity-look on their face. Swab play like hyenas in enclosures searching for food, starving and hysterical and always laughing, but they’re always genuinely in on their own jokes, Christina leaping like a game bird with wings improperly snipped so it can just get high enough to shit on you. This is a positive review, this is rock and roll on peptide-vitamin shots, this is condoms full of clean urine passed through holes in drug-testing walls. This is real joy shit, but only if you can dig it right. You know you gotta you gotta relate babe you gotta find the rhythm within now you get off your mustang Sally you ain’t going nowhere but you’re standing coughing in the fallout and the four horsemen are gone.

I’m not lining up to go upstairs for Dejector because I am a grown woman I will freeze to death in this beer garden vaping like man discovering fire before I abase myself on the tote stairwell. It’s all just waiting around now and I wanna go home and snot-rocket black gunk onto the pavement. No one has a cigarette to spare. What about peace and love man. Fuck you this ain’t Woodstock. Feel like getting on the tram and falling asleep and waking up on the Bundoora golf course when the sprinklers go on. Again.

ENZYME with the call-back crust like amoebas in the sewn-up ceiling asbestos hernia. Stade de punk, hands clapping. Topping lists every year and scowling out bone to(mohawk) frenzy I’m standing up on the incline near the door and watching feeding time occur in so far as it feels like i’m behind a glass pane with the sound off and its filling up with water and i cant tell who’s coming or going or moving around like they’re in or they’re out or they’re not really sure. Reliable d-beat smashes Chemical Brothers electroclash around in a Hadron Collider and spits out this place. I’m certain there’s a message in there but it’s like a Zodiac cipher and suddenly the glass smashes like a mirror and the house music is playing Rasputin at the same volume as the band and within the first two seconds of that balalaika intro everyone’s moving. More fists are up for Boney EM than ENzyme and the band is in it the most, bobbing and weaving around the stage.

People are on stools and tables grinning and waving and DAN-CING and if there’s one thing you can give the Hardcore Victim crowd it’s that they can fucking clap ! in ! time ! and I cannot stop grinning and I think FUCK cyberniticism Laborit’s a liar Oswald Weiner can suck it there is nothing that could have prepared me for this and if it had I wouldn’t have believed it. This is the most fun I’ve had since 9pm and I’m just glued to the spot I cannot move I cannot smile potentially even chancing a mouthing of the words. Everyone is moving. People are streaming in from across the venue to get in on this. All serious artifice, all notions of who’s what and where and who’s harder and who’s got more skin in the game, nothing unites the punX like a song about a Khlyst’s cock, and the song ends and I say hi to Spider and I leave because nothing will top this high.