PORTALS FESTIVAL

THE DOME, LONDON

Billed as a weekend of experimental rock, Portals Festival allows techy aficionados to disappear down the rabbit hole and get lost in math and post-rock’s idiosyncrasies. Sunday’s line-up is peppered with a smorgasbord of heaviness, although death gospel queen

A.A. WilliAMS kicks things off, proving you don’t need riffs that can crush buildings to be ‘brutal’. As she strikes the first hushed tones of Cold, it creates a dark atmosphere so thick, it seems to suck all the air out of the room. Compared to the other acts appearing over the weekend who aim to cram a million notes into one mind-bending chorus, A.A. excels at playing with dark yawning spaces that threaten to blow up and swallow you whole. PolY-MATh admit they’re fighting the mother of all hangovers but you’d never know it from the way they navigate every twist and hairpin turn of their instrumental, demented rhythms. The Brighton trio defy genres: they could be math, they could be prog and there’s a generous dollop of psychedelic synapse-frying going on, but Ink Of Scholars and a thundering Medicine make you realise how unimportant those labels are. The bass on Castrovalva shakes the floor of The Dome to such an extent that by the end, our intestines have shrivelled up and been drawn down Poly-Math’s Technicolor wormhole. Post-metallers

TelePAThY are the heaviest band playing across the festival by some way. As opener Smoke From Distant Fires rumbles into life like a dormant volcano waking from a deep and dangerous slumber, heads bang in hypnotic unison. Over the course of their set, the Londoners immerse the room in a thick layer of crushing, molten sludge, awash with cinematic dynamics, piquing our excitement for the upcoming follow-up to 2017’s excellent Tempest.

The day closes with an incendiary set from PAlM ReAdeR, who are on excellent form despite not being given quite the rabid reception they deserve. Frontman Josh Mckeown spent the early afternoon having a Sunday dinner with his mum and turned up literally as the band were soundchecking. “I’m not stressed at all,” he laughs before pummelling every drop of that anxiety into a gut-punching Internal Winter.

In their most jagged moments, the hardcore mavericks are ferocious and razor-sharp. Yet they’re not afraid to pull it back and expose their vulnerabilities and closer A Lover, A Shadow rides the peaks and troughs of bleak melancholia with staunch and unwavering confidence.