Artist Profile – KOLLAPS
by Sarah Kidd
Every so often there enters a band that once heard can never be forgotten. An artist that creates music that bonds to your skin in a symbiotic relationship while giving voice to the very nightmares locked deep away inside the recesses of your soul.
That may all sound rather unappealing or completely desirable depending on where your tastes lie; but one thing is for sure, Kollaps need to be both seen and heard to truly appreciate their unique language that by the band’s own admission is ‘DIY post punk – industrial noise’.
Hailing from Melbourne, Australia the band first crawled out from the shadows in 2015; through a serious of metamorphoses led by vocalist Wade Black, Kollaps have emerged in the form that we see before us today – a three piece that creates “industrial music intended for degenerates and outsiders” .
The Heartworm EP released in 2015 was a taste of what was to come; the four tracks bringing together a fusion of wretched vocals that tore at their own inner fabric of the mind, resonant bass lines and drums that semaphored unheeded warnings. Two and a half years later and Kollaps delivered Sibling Lovers, an LP that completely eclipsed their previous release in fierce brutality; Black confessing to “sabotaging many aspects” of his own life in order to truly achieve a feeling of “darkness and turmoil”. It is an album that will leave you broken and bleeding on the floor, the metallic taste of the very scrap metal used to create many of it’s sounds still languishing on your tongue like acid that you crave to partake of once more (for more in-depth details check out our review here). Sibling Lovers is addictive, each listen providing new pathways to a layer that may not have been heard previously, the very sounds themselves shape-shifting in form.
Attracting the attention of Leigh Whannell, both the tracks ‘Capitalism’ and ‘Sibling Lovers’ were included on the sleeper hit sci-fi/horror entitled Upgrade. While not composed specifically for the film, the tracks fit the aesthetic seamlessly. Their inclusion has also got the band thinking about the idea of “creatively contributing” to the art form of film and according to Black it is “an avenue of composition” that they in time would like to explore.
Currently on a thirty-date tour across thirteen countries in Europe, Kollaps will also be performing at the prestigious Wroclaw Industrial Festival; now in it’s seventeenth year the cult festival is a mecca for all those devoted to both industrial and experimental music. Kollaps will be performing alongside such artists as Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld, Pharmakon, Meta Meet and Monolith along with many others. A testament to not only Kollaps’s sound and vision but their all-consuming live performances.
No two Kollaps shows are ever the same. Period. While long standing member and drummer/programmer Robin W. Marsh provides the anchor from which Black loosely tethers himself, there is no way to predict just which direction Black will ultimately take. His lithe form, often perfectly contained within a black suit, a splash of red an almost symbolic gash through which he unravels his innards awash with introspective confessions, rallies against the constraints of physics themselves; where long ago Black would have been seen with a guitar, now the microphone has become both an extension of his arm and a conduit between himself and “a malignant world of slaughterhouses, incest and alcoholism”. On bass Damian Coward [Heirs, Ascetic, High Tension] who joined the band in 2016 not only brings experience and direction to Kollaps, but live can pull sounds from a giant metal coil that are simultaneously both of and not of this earth. The use of pieces such as these adding to the textural and visceral nature of their live performances, the wall of sound becoming larger as it surrounds you, the music almost folding back in on itself as it assaults the canal of the ear.
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Black’s savagery grows as the walls close in, his performance now a form of personal “moral exorcism” the violence of which is intoxicating in its complexity. In speaking about their live performances Black stated that “the stage allows us another medium to issue challenges to expectations of social conduct in Western civilisation” the result something that can only be described as vehement chaotic beauty.
With the promise of a new seven track LP entitled Mechanical Christ to be released in 2019, one can only wait and see where Kollaps takes us all next.
![The Full Tank [CD/DVD]](https://i0.wp.com/www.ambientlightblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/BandcampKOLLAPS.jpg?resize=300%2C157&ssl=1)
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