The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Listening to Burial Hex on record might lead you to expect four or five sepulchral riveters to be the source of this intense, scabrous noise. Instead, the multi-tasking sexton/witch turns out to be an unprepossessing paunchy geek called Clay Ruby, armed with a Pandora’s suitcase of wires and gizmos designed to make a mordant racket. Standing to the rear of the non-stage at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, I’m able to get a sneak view of what creates Ruby’s “astral-industrial horror electronics”. Inside the pensioner’s portmanteau, a small candle illuminates rubber bands in a metal tin. These are twanged and fed through effects to make deep and chilling rumbles, and wires are plugged in and out as Ruby vocalises into a cheap-looking microphone. It’s a superb cacophony, even if the Hex’s set is disappointingly short.

Still, at least that allows time for Ruby to team up with Sylvester Anfang (named with the ‘y’ for an ‘i’ after a Mayhem track) to close off proceedings. Sylvester Anfang might claim to have invented some genre called ‘Pagan Belgopsych’, written in offertory to their almighty overlord Brohll but, like Burial Hex, their appearance confounds expectations. Certainly, a Viking acquaintance says that certain people of the hairier metal community are getting het up at this ‘hipster metal’ - handsome young gents getting together to make a horrible noise. More fool they, for the meandering psychedelia of Sylvester Anfang is something to behold indeed. At the final moment, the floor becomes a seething mass of Anfang and Hex banging on drums and hammering pedals and three voices screaming into heavily distorted microphones as if the sprites of a midsummer night’s dream had descended all at once.