Posted in Whathaveyou on October 24th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It is not lost on me that the last time I posted about long-running Japanese heavy rockers Eternal Elysium, band founder Yukito Okazaki was welcoming a new lineup to the group. Bassist Tim Togawa joined at that point — it was July 2024, if you don’t feel like clicking the link — which makes drummer You Nakashima the latest addition to Eternal Elysium, who will reportedly be part of a four-way split release on Things From Beyond sometime presumably in the New Year. Live shows are in the works, too.
If you like good news, that should resonate. Eternal Elysium‘s last studio outing was Resonance of Shadows (review here), in 2016, which they followed with the 2019 live album, 末世の葬礼 贰 现场 . Reissues through Robustfellow also came out earlier this decade. I will not speculate on the likelihood of a new LP at any point, but would be glad to hear one when and if it should happen, as Okazaki has always had his heart in Sabbathian groove and brought a sense of homage to the band’s work while retaining a bluesy individualism. Fingers crossed some recording leads to more.
The following comes from social media:
***ANNOUNCING THE NEW ETERNAL ELYSIUM LINEUP! ***
You Nakashima (ex. Bloodshot) joins as the new drummer, adding fresh resonance to the band.
We started rehearsals last month, and two tracks have already been recorded.
His energy generated new vibes and waves, and EE resumed our journey into a new dimension.
The two recorded tracks will be included on a 4 bands split LP released by the US label THINGS FROM BEYOND.
More details later.
Live performance will happen around next spring.
Thank you all for your interest and support for EE.
Cheers, ETERNAL ELYSIUM
Yukito Okazaki ＊ Vocals, Guitar Tim Togawa ＊ Bass You Nakashima ＊ Drums
I don’t know what it was that Agriculture were soundchecking when I walked into John Dee from upstairs at Rockefeller, but it sure sounded a lot like CKY’s “96 Quite Bitter Beings,” which was cool because I just got that song out of my head last week for the first time since like 2003. So I was due.
Sleep did happen — the state, not the band — and I woke up two hours after my alarm to discover I hadn’t actually finished setting it. Didn’t matter; plenty of time to sit around and be anxious for the start of the day. I video called home — the house is a mess, which very much is how it goes when I’m gone — and all is well. Ate a couple bites and tried to sleep a bit more, but the three double espressos tearing ass through my bloodstream weren’t having it. Sometimes living in the moment means calling yourself dumb later.
Agriculture’s lights were going to be too much for my brain. I knew that going into the set, because soundcheck, but when it happened, it was still punishing. The overwhelm is part of it, purposeful. Part of what you sign up for. But the sandblasting and the immersion, coinciding, is why you stay. Watching them, I couldn’t get the parallel out of my head between the traditions of Norwegian black metal and their subversion in terms of weather. That is, if the ‘trvest’ of black metals was born in this place — and they have it scrawled on that basement wall for people to take pictures with, so it’s arguable — in the dark and cold of winter here, then the aural brightness of Agriculture, the natural-light-reflecting-on-water of their post-rock-style guitar floating above all the pummel and screech, feels correspondingly climate-born to Los Angeles, where the band are from. To paraphrase George Carlin, the sun probably sets 10 minutes from their rehearsal space. Of course they’d make black metal beautiful.
That’s a generalization, obviously. Broad strokes to cover lack of insight. The truth of their presentation is more emotionally complex and less niche-declarative, but transgressing just the same, though maybe black metal is used to it by now; a punching bag catchall genre to push against the borders of. The tie with Agriculture is in tonal heft and the honesty of their scathe and the atmospheres they build around it, and they’d be a sore thumb in the lineup if Desertfest was stoner-only, but neither day was. It’s all one big heavy melting pot, and genres evolve. Always cool to see it happen on the stage right in front of you, though.
But the lights got me, so I headed upstairs to the Rockefeller balcony ahead of Slift. I know. Not like Slift were going to take it easy on visuals. Still. The French heavyspace trio are riding the course of 2024’s Ilion (review here), and the fact that they’ve spent the better part of the last three years touring was not lost on their stage presence.
The story of their set was kind of that I blew it there as well. Got my photos and moved on. I was dragging, had basic human needs to attend to in food, water, bathroom, so broke out of Rockefeller a bit into the set in an effort to get my head right. I was saving the second half of Friday’s weedy muffin for later in the day, but there’s nothing like when the check-into-your-flight notification comes in while you’re trying to enjoy a busy afternoon of writing, taking photos, and general sonic obliteration.
Hippie Death Cult ruled last year at Desertfest New York (review here) and with their new live album, Live at Star Theater (review here), it felt like half the point of the damn thing was to argue in favor of showing up when the band inevitably comes through where you live — Parsippany, New Jersey, if you’re tour planning — when the opportunity presents itself. So there I was. I’d already bumped into guitarist Eddie Brnabic and drummer Harry Silvers at the hotel, and they and bassist/vocalist Lauren Phillips would soon take the stage to unroll a blanket of riffs onto the crowd, roll that same blanket back up again with the crowd in it, and then send it careening down the side of a mountain. I’m really, really looking forward to their next album.
Nothing against 2023’s Helichrysum (review here), mind you, but — and I think this is something the live LP posited as well — they sound like they’re just getting started. The lineup change that resulted in Phillips taking the lead vocal role, plus bringing Silvers in on drums, made them a different band. On the record and live, they’ve explored harsher, more direct and classic feeling ideas, but at the same time, begun to develop a character for themselves separate from what it was just a few years ago. This is a strength. Some bands would just fall apart. Hippie Death Cult have figured, are figuring out, how to make it work and progress from their new starting position.
And since much of this work has happened on tours, yes, I am very much convinced their best work is ahead of them. They can be warm and bluesy — Brnabic’s shred suits all sides — or sludge-nasty and it doesn’t matter. Songs like “Arise,” “Red Giant,” “Toxic Annihilator,” as they’re playing them now, are paving the way for a band who can crush or boogie or gallop at a measure’s whim.
Phillips let out a couple Tom Araya-esque screams while Silvers was on the double-kick, and they’re getting more comfortable bringing that kind of metal into their foundation in capital ‘h’ Heavier groove. They’re a monster band. They should get monstrous, and I think they just might continue to do that. This was their first time in Norway. Someone in the crowd shouted, “What took you so long?” Near-total reset takes some time, I guess, but it’s done Hippie Death Cult well in terms of the intensity level. They finished big and noisy — at some near-final point, I looked up and Phillips’ mic stand had disappeared — and I watched the whole set and wouldn’t have wanted it another way.
Back upstairs to Rockefeller for Finland’s Oranssi Pazuzu. True, I saw them a couple weeks ago, playing their latest album, Muuntautuja, in full, no less, but whatever. I dug it then and wanted to investigate the band further. Seeing them again felt like a half-decent way to do that. The balcony was full before the floor, which the lightshow would soon justify, but the room was full by the start of the set.
The thing was, they’re a name I’ve seen around for well over a decade, and a band I’ve listened to before and appreciated for what it was but soon enough moved on. But after that Muuntautuja set at Roadburn, they kind of took up residence in the back of my head. I was glad to recognize a few songs from one show to the next, including the opener, and while they’re not usually the kind of band I’d go all-in on, and I’m positive I don’t know enough of their music to call myself a fan, after seeing them these two times, I do feel compelled to dig further.
There’s enough going on at any given moment in their songs to trace threads of influence and constantly end up in a different place. That’s black metal, straight up, but then there comes a synthier part, or a drone stretch, or some Ministry-style keyboard thrash. Krautrock guitars might meet up with some soul-grinding ferocity, and the band seem to delight in precisely that manner of fucking with norms; picking apart ideas about style and what the rules are, cherrypicking which ones they want to uphold and which they want to break and then breaking most of them anyway. Like Agriculture, they’re in-genre outsider art, but whatever the stylistic cast, Oranssi Pazuzu refuse and refute pigeonholing.
My scheduled break was next. I went back to the room, had that half a weedy muffin — I could not tell you the last time I ate an actual muffin; nine years at least; I don’t normally do breadstuffs — drank a bunch of water and took some ibuprofen, tried and failed to check in for my flight because my town has both a different mailing address and a hyphen in it (not joking) and confirmed an earlier decision about the course of my night.
Chat Pile were sub-headlining the Rockefeller, and Whores. would be on at 22.00 in John Dee. I skipped both in favor of Villjuvet at St. Edmund’s Church right around the corner from Revolver. I had gotten to see the inside of the church earlier in the day — it was active-catholic enough to give yer boy eucharistic flashbacks — and been told a bit about the project, the visual component and the work of Ruben Willem, who in addition to operating as Villjuvet is a producer and has either mixed or mastered releases for an entire slew of bands from Lonely Kamel to Håndgemang who were in Friday’s lineup, to Gluecifer, Suncraft and Kal-El. I could go on.
I’ve seen Chat Pile, again recently. It was cool. I’ve never seen Whores., and frankly part of the reason why is the danger of liking them and then having to admit to myself I like a band with that name, but I know people who swear by them, and I actually did end up watching them for a few minutes and they were killing to a packed room. But I was told ahead of time, “Villjuvet might be just your speed,” and was happy to take the recommendation to a path less traveled before finishing the night off back at Rockefeller for Elder. Slow and weird, you say? That sure does sound like my speed.
At 9PM, it was still pretty broad daylight, but the church was dark, the door ominously left open. I took a seat in the second pew — was not at all the first one there — and waited as more people came in. There was some white noise drone, but I’ll be honest and say a big part of me wanted to hear “Holy Diver,” though that went away when the actual show started.
You could follow the projections — branches and the like, nighttime ambience, loosely creepy but mostly for the soundtrack — up the white wall with the stained glass windows onto the wood ceiling as Villjuvet turned out to be very much indeed my speed. Willem played facing the projections before a sprawling pedal board, often kneeling as if to a true god being revealed. His drones came through in looped layers and hit high and low through guitar and bass amps. It was not a tune to take out earplugs, despite the lack of percussion. A couple popes later, church has really changed since I was last forced to go, probably around three decades ago. I recall a good time this January sharing religious traumas over a breakfast in Las Vegas. Life takes you weird places when… you expressly make it do that because you enjoy it.
Rockefeller was filling up quickly for Elder and I knew the second Whores. finished downstairs that crowd would flood out, which was exactly what happened. I was at the bar at John Dee at the time, chatting amiably as one does, and then it was time to head upstairs to cap the evening. A 6AM wakeup loomed large over the 11PM start-time — hazards of the trade at the end of a fest; it’s part of the thing — but with the band celebrating the anniversary of 2015’s Lore (review here), and having missed them when they came through Brooklyn with Sacri Monti, there was imperative.
I could go — and have gone! — on about Lore as both a creative statement and a breath of daring fresh air operating in an underground genre that can at times pride itself on traditionalism. I’ll gladly argue its influence is still felt and spreading, even as the band have continued to move forward. But there’s no denying it was a special moment for them, a progressive breakout in craft to which their work before had been leading. So, 10th anniversary it is. Not unreasonable.
Guitarist/vocalist Nick DiSalvo got on mic before they started and thanked the crowd, thanked the fest, said it was an honor to close it out, and explained what they were going to do, and soon enough they were off into “Compendium” and on from there. I always loved “Deadweight” but I knew I wouldn’t make it that far into the set and I didn’t. I was glad to see them though, even briefly as I felt the pull of getting back to finish work and crash out ahead of the early start. The responsible thing. The me that knows I can’t sleep on planes would thank me in the morning, but it was a hard sell to the me looking down the ramp to walk out of Rockefeller and be done with the night and Desertfest Oslo more broadly.
But I did. If I’m fortunate enough to come back next year, I’ll try not to make it so tight, but that’s kind of how it has to be for me to be here in the first place, and a couple Elder songs is better than no Elder songs, so I guess my old-ass punk-rock guilt can fuck off. Time to crawl out of my own head a little bit.
Thank you to Desertfest Oslo for having me. Thank you Ole and Preben for the invitation and thank you to everyone who has worked here to make this happen. The sound, the lights, everything has been spot on, and for this being the second year this festival has taken place, they’d be entitled to a few screwups. I saw none. I did, however, see a bunch killer bands, a bunch of old friends, and some things I wouldn’t have been able to see anywhere else. I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity.
It is not lost on me that in the US this weekend, today, is Mother’s Day. Thank you to The Patient Mrs. for the work she does as a mother always, and for the sheer indulgence that allows me to exist as I do both at and away from home. She is so much more than the love of my life that is humbling she would deign to be it. I know I’ve said this before, but I am the luckiest boy you know.
Thank you to my mother, Pamela Koczan. Thank you to my sister, Susan Wright. Thank you to Cate Wright and Samantha Wright.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for saying hi, for giving a shit after so many years and so many typos and run-on sentences. Dumbassed blocks of text, just endless. Thank you for being here for it in some way at some point, maybe now. The support this site gets is what sustains me doing it. One more time, thank you.
More pics after the jump. No posts tomorrow (Monday) while I get caught up writing/living. Thanks again.
Posted in Whathaveyou on December 26th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
This post has been in the works for like a fricking week and a half, which has been plenty of time for Desertfest Oslo to put out the fourth of their four pre-holiday advent-Sunday announcements, completing the lineup for next May 9-10. The last two rounds are humdingers, with Lowrider, Slift, Dunbarrow, Årabrot, Gjenferd, Feral Nature, Akersborg, Wolfnaut and Villjuvet between them joining a bill that already includes Elder, Graveyard, Chat Pile, Elephant Tree, MessaTruckfighters, DVNE and more. For a two-dayer, it’s turned out to be pretty packed. Day splits are out probably like seven minutes after I post this, if I’m not already late on it.
Checking…
Not yet. Okay, I’d better post this as soon as I’m done typing then because I don’t want to already be late on something else. The following comes from two social media posts. I’ve been invited to this one. I’m going to do everything I can to be there. You should come too.
Here’s good reason why:
Desert Cruisers and Santa Clausers! 🌵🎅
Thank you so much for the support of our previous advent announcements.
It’s a trve holiday booster to see the shared excitement for Desertfest Oslo 2025 🪐✨💫
Today sees the third Sunday of advent, and we have four incredible acts for you.
Many of you have asked for them, and we can’t do anything but agree. Lowrider are making the short trip from Karlstad to Oslo to give us their soft lesson in flawless, melodic and dreamy stoner rock. This band have existed for what feels like forever. Maybe cause they have that rare ability to always seem current? As the stellar split release with their peers in Elephant Tree clearly showed. We’re stoked to have both bands coming to Oslo in May. Harmonies anyone?
Dunbarrow is coming. These local proto-legends have been a pivotal part of the Norwegian underground from their get-go, and they just keep on delivering. Tasty, riffy old school doom with a timeless sense for melody and aesthetics. Dunbarrow will do a VERY special show during Desertfest Oslo. We can’t wait to share more details around this at a later time. What we CAN share, however, is that you do. not. want to miss it.
On the other side of the musical spectrum, we are psyched to welcome Akersborg. As purveyors of anything cutting edge Akersborg fire on all guns, always, with their new skool, out of the box-leaning hardcore potpourri. They made their Desertfest debut in London last year, and we’re determined of their demolition of Oslo as well.
Last band out this Sunday is the blueprint template of what a new band with the right skill-set can accomplish in a very short period of time. Feral Nature, as well as Barren Womb, played our sister festival Høstsabbat in October, and holy motherfn’ shit. What happened? They deliver the kind of show impossible to ignore. The kind of show EVERYONE needs to see at some point. They basically seem like the future of rock, and we are stoked to show you what the fuzz is all about.
That’s it for now, folks, keep your eyes peeled next Sunday ☄️
Your merry Desertfest Oslo team 🎄
—
From all of us, to all of you! 🎅
It is with joyful excitement we can announce the last batch of artists for Desertfest Oslo 2025.
The full lineup for next year is all we could hope for and then some. What a weekend to look forward to! 🪐
Please welcome French psych sensation SLIFT to Oslo. What they have accomplished in their bare 8 years of existence is unparalleled. Every show as good or better than the previous. SLIFT is a fierce, burning flame of excellence, and we are dead proud to host them. 🇫🇷
Also, Årabrot is joining us.
This is a one-of-a-kind band, with a solid foot in every edgy subgenre there is.
With an Amish-erotic flavor to all their endeavors, they are a spellbinding spectacle to witness on stage. It’s delightful when a band knows how to put on a show.
We simply can’t wait to see what they’re bringing, alongside their upcoming album in May. 🎸
Wolfnaut
Sometimes, experience is palpable. Like on the latest albums III and Return Of The Asteroid, which sounds absolutely massive, and definitely have that zonked stoner feel in every wah, in every twang, and at every turn. It makes the fact that they record the albums live in studio even more impressive.
Do yourself a favor and check out My Orbit Is Mine and Raise The Dead to tap into some of that Elverum stoner sorcery!☄️
Gjenferd
Get lost in this proto-maze of amps and Hammond organs! It’s the classic 70’s psych dish, made extra spicy with a guitar virtuous, seared to perfection with haunting vocals, and beautifully tied together with harmonies. Another speck on the starry Norwegian musical sky is created, and it will grow brighter and brighter. 👻
VILLJUVET will be there, and he’ll conjure up a special show just for Desertfest. Ethereal, mystical and haunting, a sole guitar accompanied by a plethora of pedals will paint a dark and supernatural picture well worth beholding. 🛸
What a bangin’, absolutely slaughter of a lineup! 🔥🪐
Keep your eyes peeled through the Christmas days, as the daysplit is ready to go as well
