GORGON ELECTRO MINI FEST III -COMBICHRIST, Aesthetic Perfection, Virgins o.r. Pigeons, Shemale Zero
29.03.2009, 'Blue Box' club, Sofia - Bulgaria

words byВ Nick The Stripper, photo: Dee Dee

Sunday is a day for lying around and, in the words of Jack Kerouac, practicing "do-nothing". Tis a day to be competely and utterly and wonderfully lazy...unless you're an orthodox Jew that is...

This Spring, 29 March, 2009, our dear mother Bulgaria witnessed a Sunday of heavy concert activity as two quite brilliant shows served as a timely reminder that this isn't, after all, a country completely obliterated by what most of the natives call "pop folk" - a rather vile and abhorrent form of local music, which is nauseatingly popular with a large portion of the population.

Sofia - home of those "flash soft bastards from the capital", was once again greedy enough to not only lure In Flames, but also host the third edition of the Gorgon Electro Mini Fest!

Yep...as Lou Reed (one of the first musicians to ever use black nail varnish) once sang: "life's good, life's good...but not fair at all!"
And there you have it! On the other hand, everyone was given an equal chance to get their tickets and ample time to do it too. So we can't be bothered listening to excuses garnished with cliched phrases like "credit crunch" etc. Fuck off! How many times had the ultra-hip Combichrist been to Sofia prior to this gig, eh?
Frankly, I expected a much bigger crowd at the Gorgon Electro Mini Fest.

The Blue Box club has become something of a bridge between smaller clubs and the larger venues, with a capacity of around 800. About 400-500 colourful creatures turned up for this rather wonderful festival. So, if you were really skint or just happened to wake up in some obscure hotel room with your kidney removed and the phone number for the local ambulance service left by your bleeding body, then you're excused!В  In any case, now that I've got the opportunity to gloat, gloat I will, so here goes - YOU MISSED OUT BIG TIME!

Here's what happened at the Gorgon Electro Mini Fest 2009:

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The doors opened at 8 pm, in a Vlad Tsepes-"welcome to my home"-manner and we filed in, filled with trepidation. A short while after, with the crowd still gathering,В  two sailor boys appeared onstage, one of them a whacked out semi-deranged-semi-Tom Waits-meets dirty old man weirdo, the other - a young unisexappeal freak! They go by the name of Shemale Zero and they were definitely not there for some fancy dress party. Old Sea Dog, plastic beard glued on, hammered out heavy bass parts on his synth, to go with the raw backing track beats erupting out of the ever inventive, black lace adorned ass of frontman Stefan von Fleisch.

"Wake the fuck up!" - growls herr Fleisch, stomping in stiletto boots and black corset. After the initial shock, the crowd get right behind him and his foil. "We are queer!" - shrieks madame von Fleisch. Oh boy, they would go down so well in Soho!

After getting the latex crowd in the mood for sonic debauchery, monsieur Shemale Zero and his companion say adios, showering us with inflatable balloons, which I'd take over a downpour of frogs any day!

Next up are Virgins o.r. Pigeons from Greece. They hit the stage with plenty of fire and enthusiasm. There are three of them and they have more white paint on their faces than Buster Keaton did throughout his entire career. This is their second visit to Bulgaria and a sizeable portion of the audience seem well acquainted with their music already. The music itself is a somewhat generic electro/industrial/goth/ebm mix that's been in vogue for quite a while now and is anything but original or interesting.

Having said that, the crowd lap it up and one happy punter next to me at the bar could not stop raving about how the final two songs of their set blew his "fucking mind away".
Time for a short break...a fag or five....beer in warm plastic bottles...a browse around the plentiful merch stall...

Meanwhile festival promoter Separevski, who has worked his bollocks off to make this happen, is mingling with the crowd bearing a large grin and even larger camera, taking snaps of the more ravishing women about.

Next to hit the stage were Aesthetic Perfection!
To say the American duo were bloody brilliant would be an understatement! They were, quite simply, amazing (as them Yankees like to say)! It was melodic and dancey, it was also rough and we loved it!

Daniel Graves' Aesthetic Perfection have been going since the turn of the century and their sound has often been described as aggrotech, but that's not even half of it. They simply ooze energy and the vigour of Life! Not to mention an impressive visual arsenal of tattooed muscles and certain gay elements in their attire. Solid, bangbass beats, maniacal pseudo-political rally chants, catchy melodies, synth-pop, commercial-meets-rebellion chaos!

We dance, gyrate and holler bravos at them.Their opening track echoes Leftfield's "Open Up", the crowd goes ballistic and mental with more alarming regularity than Norman Bates and that, surely, must be a compliment for Aesthetic Perfection - ole!

Up to this point the two drumkits onstage were untouched, as the first three acts all used backing tracks. This meant that headliners Combichrist would attack us with two skinbashers and what glorious madmen they turned out to be! Think Gary Glitter, Adam and the Ants, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and twist, pervert and brutalize by a million notches more and you might just get there!
Andy LaPlegua is a hybrid between Keith Flint, the Joker and God knows what else...Whatever it is, it's wicked and works extremely well. He attacks the stage along with a deranged trio made up of drummer, percussionist and some crazy nutter on synth. They produce an almighty thunderstorm of techno/industrial/punk/metal/noiseTBM fabulousity to rip our fucking heads off.
"This is the very first time we're playing in Bulgaria...and it's amazing!" - annonces Andy in between songs, moved, if not to tears, then at least to a menacing growl. A mass of dyed hair, corsetry and platform boots bounces ecstatically down below.

Combichrist then proceed to devastate us with "This is my Rifle" - a relentless audiovisual barrage, which pays homage to Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket".

While Andy was flying about the stage, the group of triumphant weirdos behind him were smashing the fuck out of their instruments and lobbing bottles of mineral water at the audience. The frontman himself poured about 5-6 of these bottles onstage and proceeded to happily slide on the wet surface.

Then came the encores - 'This shit will fuck you up' andВ  'What the fuck is wrong with you people'! Get in there! The band then smashed up everything within their site and left amidst debris of drums and synth stands, proclaiming "Welcome to the Church of Combichrist!". leaving us with eyes and mouths wide open, feeling completely and utterly raped, by our own accord...

GALLERY