Bismarck Post Oneiromancer Live Playthrough
They recommend watching in 4K, but I think even if you’re slumming it in 1080p the focus on professionalism comes across in Bismarck‘s whole-album playthrough of their 2020 sophomore full-length, Oneiromancer (review here). The video, which trims the 35-minute long-player down to just under 32, was reportedly shot in one take and features pro-shop sound and lighting — there’s even a fan on frontman Torstein Tveiten — as well as three working cameras throughout. Lights flash, cuts are sharp, and the band themselves waste none of their or the audience’s time. Clearly it was a show-up-and-get-down-to-business kind of affair.
With it, the Bergen, Norway, five-piece give an impression of some of the intensity they might bring to a stage show, the darkened hammering of their rhythms bringing together post-metal’s claustrophobia with the sheer bite of aggressive and extreme sludge, and unsurprisingly, their performance proves worthy of the presentation they’re making of it. When I reviewed the album, I called it thoughtful, and the same applies here. Aggro as they are, Bismarck know exactly what they’re doing. The low lighting during quiet stretches, the attention to detail in the camera swaying, the balance of ambience and crush that pervades — it all serves the experience of the record as whole, and if the underlying point of Bismarck playing the thing front-to-back is to emphasize just how well it functions in that kind of listening context, the message isn’t at all lost.
Obviously the intent here, aside from maybe telling you to put in the entire and eminently manageable 35-minute ask that Oneiromancer is making, is to capture a live feel, and in that sense, the manner in which they do so actually runs against the current expectation born of so much of the live-streaming happening by bands around the world due, duh, to the COVID-19 pandemic. This may be Bismarck‘s answer to such a thing, since they are playing live and all, but this is professionally filmed and edited, wasn’t premiered live at the same time it was played. Thus it’s more like a concert video than a live performance being aired at the same time it’s played.
In either case, Bismarck crush it.
To wit, the video:
Bismarck, Oneiromancer live playthrough
This is a 100% live, one take playthrough of our latest album “Oneiromancer”! Performed, filmed and recorded at Carte Blanche’s Studio Bergen!
Bismarck is
Torstein Tveiten – Vocals
Eirik Goksøyr – Guitar
Tore Lyngstad – Drums
Trygve Svarstad – Guitar
Leif Herland – Bass
Lights by Thomas Bruvik
Filmed by Martin Borge & Lars Inge Torp
Edited by Martin Borge
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Leif Herland in Polyfon Studio
