Last week, I urged all of you to scrounge up some tickets to last night’s Fever Ray show. If you ended up taking heed, you’re welcome. And, if you didn’t, you missed one hell of a production. I hesitate to call it a concert because it was more of an art performance staged in a haunted house (with lasers!).
For a good 45 minutes before Fever Ray took the stage, smoke was continuously pumped into the Regency Ballroom — an already mysterious location in the Kubrick sense. Just as the crowd (a large percentage of which was decked out in skeletal face paint) was getting restless, a hooded man emerged and lit two separate chunks of incense on either side of the stage. Andreas Nilsson, the director of the tour, clearly had a specific aesthetic in mind: one that hints of mysticism, tribal rituals, and the Old World’s bloated fear of the unseen.
As the incense merged with the thick fog from the smoke machines, two lasers were lit up, reflecting off a number of tiny mirrors strategically placed on the walls and stage. Soon, Karin Dreijer Andersson appeared in the fog, a shadow shrouded in a hooded cloak with a shrunken head adornment. Her bandmates brandished staffs and other tribal regalia, one was even dressed as a whirling dervish. What ensued can only be described as a nightmare I never wanted to wake from. Here are some photos from my trip to the underworld:
