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The Atomic Bomb Audition (metal)

What:

With roots set in the convergent space between doom metal, film music, and apocalyptic comedy, The Atomic Bomb Audition has fashioned its own expansive voice. The Bay Area quartet constructs deafeningly loud yet meticulously detailed sound worlds using a film director’s sense of scene, each element chosen to serve the whole. The sound is a 21st Century post-metal amalgam of myriad elements: excoriating guitars, haunting bowed contrabass, Moog synth trickery, thunderous percussion mosaics, feedback melodicisms, dulcet gamelan, and moon-governed anthemic crescendos among much else. With pieces clocking in from ten to twenty minutes, the band elaborates a wide arc of deliberate sonic architecture through theme and variation rather than indulging in exploratory jams. Sounding at times like Neurosis interpreting The Cure’s Disintegration, their artistic touchstones include The Melvins, Mulholland Dr., Bohren und der Club of Gore, Jerry Goldsmith, Bill Hicks, Brian Eno, and Pink Floyd’s Animals. Like these artists, The Atomic Bomb Audition does not restrict itself in using the appropriate means to weave a specific and emotionally resonant structure with a populist bent.

Their 2nd full-length album, Light Will Remain, is an immense work that represents the band at a creative apex. The album is an evocative document of the art of memory and the evolving significance of events through time. The desire to illuminate and darken aspects of our psychic apparatus based on the indeterminate verity of belief and sense drives this collection of narratives. Peaks of crushing psychedelic metal are buried under ebbs of seasick chords and gently whirring vibraphone. A stoic black hole guitar and bass maw repels celestial debris of processed percussion and voice towards the horizon. The band forges sound like aural filmmakers evoking waves of synaesthetic images. To paraphrase David Lynch, only adherence to the clear vision of an original idea dictates the true form of a work of art.

Formed in 2004, The Atomic Bomb Audition has performed in clubs, warehouses, galleries, co-ops, and colleges in the Bay Area and throughout the Western Seaboard. They have shared stages with a host of ungodly talents including Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), GIRTH, Dub Trio, Gregg Kowalsky, Barn Owl, Lesbian, Wah Wah Exit Wound, Jesse Quattro (Secret Chiefs 3), Dysrhythmia, Aspects of Physics, New Thrill Parade, Rye Wolves, SEAN, Two Ton Boa, and Diminished Men among others. They have collaborated live and on record with Braden Diotte (Tarantula Hawk), Jesse Quattro, avant-garde percussionist Shayna Dunkelman, and folk singer Erika Pipkin. The band has completed several tours of the West Coast, recently completing a tour of the Pacific Northwest in August and several other tours over the last year in support of Light Will Remain.

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