Sometimes you can get pleasantly surprised by Amsterdam if you know where to find the nice places. When I am visiting Amsterdam, I prefer to go around as if I am living there and avoid your average tourist places. I am not that much interested in the city center anymore and most of the times it is just to freaking crowded to even bike through it. Yesterday was one of those days where I felt lucky for finding out about a place I hadn’t been before and discovering a great band I had never heard of before.

There is a place in Amsterdam called OCCII. It used to be a squat and nowadays functions as a venue for alternative and independent music, theater, movies and parties. It even has a restaurant where you can eat good food for little money. The location is a bit out of the center of Amsterdam, but if you have a bike it takes about 15-20 minutes to get there, which is totally worth it.

Master Musicians Of Bukkake is a group from the Pacific Northwest, Seattle I believe, and they totally rocked my socks of yesterday. Their performance was like a ritual and I felt like I had taken a drop of acid and got taken to a strange place I haven’t been to for ages. For those who don’t know either Kyuss or Coil might not understand this but if the members of Kyuss would have a baby with Coil and then the Kyuss members would fuck this baby to have another baby, then this baby would probably be playing in Master Musicians Of Bukkake.

The 4 headed band came to stage yesterday dressed as if they came straight from the Moroccan mountains; long dresses, faces covered and the lead singer even wore a dear mask. The moment they stepped on stage they manage to transform the space in to a dark wave of loud drones and deep ritualistic sound as the smoke machine did the rest. A live drummer, two guitar players, and the singer with the dear mask smashing his handheld cymbals together, managed to immediately convince the audience to shut up and surrender themselves to the thick opening song. The sound and the fact that the smoke in the room was so thick you couldn’t see anything anyways, made you just want to close your eyes and allow yourself to dwell in the mysterious ritual the band seemed to be performing.

The second song was as thick as the first one and when the distant drumming and the long guitar drones slowly turned more into stoner-rock-like waves, it felt as if the band was taking a different turn. But when one of the guitar players putted aside his guitar and started making sound on his analog Korg, they brought it back to an even deeper flow that reminded me of Sun O))). The dude with his synth is a serious master on the Korg and seemed to really know what he was doing. He somehow pushed my highness from the joint I smoked before the concert to a new level and totally pushed the sound of the whole band together to a nice mix of experimental noise and stoner rock.

The whole concert was a flow of one great song after the other and the audience seemed to not want to get of the ritualistic ride. After the last song people slowly woke up from the deep trance the band put them in and started screaming for an extra song, but the band left the stage as mysterious as they entered it. Great band, great place. Thank you Amsterdam.