Occult heroes Cult Of Fire and Saturnalia Temple make their UK debuts

For those of a sulphuric bent, The Boston Music Rooms in Tufnell Park is about to become an unholy Mecca this Saturday September 12 as two of the underground’s most revered and occultic bands, Czech Republic’s Cult Of Fire and Sweden’s inter-dimensional doom voyagers Saturnalia Temple make their first live appearances on British soil.

Enigmatic masters of the ceremonial, Cult Of Fire are as much a dazzling visual feast as they are a headspinning black metal quest for enlightenment. Clad in robes and elongated hoods that make them look like some Jawa/Xenomorph hybrid priest clan who recently passed you a goblet full of ayahuasca, their 2013, Sanskrit-entitled full-length (Ascetic Meditation Of Death in the the common tongue) left a host of dropped jaws and dilated pupils in its wake, the band’s Vedic philosophy translating into a series of expansive and savagely atmospheric rituals that sounded as though they were flooding from a newly discovered rent in the fabric of the universe. Last year’s Ctvrtá Symfonie Ohne seven-inch brought in even more luminous layers of sublime, apocalypse-heralding beauty, and their set will no doubt make 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Stargate seem like rush hour in the Blackwall Tunnel.

Taking their blackened doom into equally cosmic realms, Saturnalia Temple’s reality-melting pilgrimage to the gates of the Underverse is a mesmerising trawl through monolithic realms measureless to man. Blending lo-fi aesthetics with reverb-heavy psychedelia, their set is guaranteed to batter you into an an exhilarating, if spiritually bruised, out-of-body experience.

Extra support comes in the progressive mindfuck of Voices renegades, Shrines, and Texan black/death masters of devastation Skan.

Tickets for this unmissable raising of both claws and consciousness are £16 in advance, and available here, and may the Lords Of The Outer Darkness grant you mercy!

Enter the portal of the events page here

Bring your torch to Cult Of Fire’s Facebook page here

And offer alms to Saturnalia Temple’s Facebook page here

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.