[ATTENDED: March 1, 2024] Cementation Anxiety
This night of shows was curated by Luminous Abstract, “a production, design and artist collective” who do “audio visual events and projection mapping antics.”
It’s hard to find very much about them (aside from their instagram page, but they seem to occasionally curate a Sonic Mass (I believe this is the fifth one). The events are listed as
Sonic Mass: An Audio Visual Experience to benefit the Trinity Church’s well being Program.
Donations were appreciated and they raised $500 for the Food Justice Program at Trinity Church, which strives to meet the immediate needs of hunger in Asbury Park and to organize within the community to prevent hunger and injustice in the future.
So that’s pretty awesome.
Cementation Anxiety was added to this bill just before the show started, so I didn’t have time check them out.
I have since discovered that the band is basically the solo project of Kyle Nelson from the punk band Bodiless (who I didn’t know).
Spotify says the band is a
sonic departure from the intensity of Bodiless, Cementation Anxiety still endeavors to explore the catharsis present in both genres—predominantly through guitar—but also field recordings, oscillators, noise machines, and hardware tools.
It was pretty bizarre not being able to see the musician at all. Occasionally when the projections were more bright, you could see Nelson with his guitar, but I had no idea how the rest of the sounds were being generated.
So it was a kind of wall of sounds. He played guitar (which may have been a tweak too loud, especially compared to the other bands) but it was really interesting to watch (when he was visible) because his strumming didn’t seem to directly relate to the music that we were hearing. There must have been effects galore on his guitar because he would strum really hard and the you couldn’t hear the individual strums like you would in a punk show, it was like the intensity of the wave of music just got bigger.
He switched guitars a couple of times and that changed the timbre of the music. It felt old school industrial, but not. It was powerful, bordering on overwhelming.
I later chatted briefly on Instagram with Kyle and he told me that the first half of the set came from his EP Liminal Instability and the second half was from an unreleased album coming out in May.
It was a cool way to start the night and the visuals were a great accompaniment.
Much applause goes to Luminous Abstract and the three bands.
I Just Read About That... 
Leave a comment