My ass is wet and I wonder if this is the moment I’ve finally pissed myself but it’s actually a cracked beer can urinating up my back from the lurchy bus ride. I have a visceral desire whenever I’m in Footscray to subject my phone to a Viking burial in the Maribyrnong. My brain’s lurching like a vomiting cat full of mis-digested fur and rat viscera. I am made up of rat viscera, it’s in my brains, and I can’t remember what I did yesterday because it is reconstituting in my meninges and eating away massive chunks of time. As we arrive I’m swilling back a huge premix rum thing which tastes like regret and reminds me of waiting in line to be tested for venereal disease. The park is full of gamboling dogs. Unfettered by the terror of social interaction they fling themselves upon Addy and I as we park ourselves on the grass. A task in and of itself is staring out into the dark, attempting to clock the presence of anyone you might be looking for. They’re playing Aus-Rotten over the PAs and Addy asks me for my opinion of them, however they occupy one of the many spaces in memory where the witch has robbed me of colour, and I can’t come up with much to say about anything. I’m distracted and anxious.

I am rapidly pulling beers out of my bag, attempting to front-load my alcohol consumption from the jump before I devolve into a cataleptic rigidity upon the hill. There’s nowhere I would rather be in the hypnic jerks of summer than right here watching Lindsay crack a Detente-style vocal whip over the carpet of bin-dwellers and barn-stormers lining the concrete floor. WHOSE REALITY step down into the mire of well-worked crust-narcho, Detestation and Lifeless Dark alembicating into the cocktail of terror at the encroaching beast of end-stage fascism. It’s a glorious full circle to have one of the most killer new bands farewelling a stalwart of the scene. You could even pretend it fated if they weren’t all friends. Yet no digression can decimate the realist brutality of the band. Fetid with familiarity of form and yet updated deftly for the unique apathetic denial of pretending we’re not also rapidly sliding backwards into the austere, the band remain by turns severe, sincere and sad yet still capable of kicking out a solid d-beat about it.

Someone has missed the bowl while under the spell of a particularly glorious case of tap-arse and so it’s become the parlance of the toilet block to reassure everyone it’s not your shit every time you come out. Watching PAROXYS is a bit like that elaborate piss-torture thing you do when you really need to go but for whichever origin of dysfunction you don’t, and simply begin to move at greater speeds to distance yourself from the siren’s call of the cistern. Absolute Sacrilege worship, inflamed crust if you could spark anything against the slight, perpetual damp of a dreadlock. Shoot me square in the chest if I don’t hear a slight Rapressaglia-ressurgence, I’ll be too distracted forcing my tongue hard against the forgiving gap before the wall of jaw in desperate search of what it is that aligns my centre.

I ask two weird noise musicians for a smoke, and they decide that, while I’m not worthy of being spoken to, I am allowed nicotine. I proceed to swallow half the inhale and come up resting against the deep, slow inhales of reality with my head between my legs staring at the ground, wandering down my vagus nerve to find the sign that will tell me if I am going to spew or not. The verdict is Or Not. Addy drags me away from staring at the roof like an imbecile and into the ensuing thrum of HACKER. Screaming hog wild chaos begins unfolding before us. Despite the cybernetic nature of their image, Hacker remain one of the last bastions in the sonic fight against the acceleration of the political techno-theocracy. Guerillas in the fight against genocidal AI fusing anti-landlord tirades into an assertion that we work the systems, they do not work us. Daring the nihilist with the prospect of belief, they rile us up like kids with dogs, darting in the unexpected direction, all the while goading out the conception of fun.

I’ve just rolled what might be the most embarrassing excuse for a cigarette you’ve ever seen, and am trying to put it out and return the unburnt tobacco to the pouch of the person next to me before they notice my shame, a feat I’m pulling off in about as convincing a way as this rather lacy pink top which looks like a day-to-night set for an infant ballerina, as suited to the introductory dance class as it is to forcing the little prick to get its ears pierced and thereby subjecting it to what is certain to be a life they will not at all struggle with. Knees knocking together like a freaky kid on the edge of a pool being goaded to jump over the edge, I bounce along the fringe like a repelled electron fuelled by Carlton Draught and a fear as sublingual as it is unfounded. People become themselves against the funeral bells of SEPSIS. Watching things pass by doesn’t always have to be sad, and here amongst the thrashy hyperlexia of crust, trees thundering beneath the cymbal crash, there is a triumph of folklore ricocheting from the roof of the pergola. What may be leaving is simply making way for something brand new. Guitar work reminiscent of motorcycling gives out against flaring bass riffs and brutal pareidolic screams. Hellbastards the lot of us, smashing ourselves together in idle touch. Though we may all move beneath the realities of maggotries born and deceased by various stimuli, what stands in most testament to any is the fleetingly unique nature of this trodden ground. Nothing truly dies nor is reborn, it simply mutates like a noxious strain into the obstructive fluke monster from The Host. As the band thunders on I return to goading people into playing hopscotch with me on the hastily sketched squares, safe within the cyclical regeneration of karma.