When I got down to the Exchange, there was already a decent crowd building. People of all stripes were there – I always love it when you get someone’s dad in a Ted Baker jacket losing his shit to some insane heavy music. It felt like the kind of crowd that was open to whatever the day was going to throw at it, which was just as well, because this was a full day of music that pushed everything to its limit.
David/David opened the day, and their set was unique even among the genre madness that followed. One of the Davids was improvising on the drums, playing insane technical parts off the cuff with influences from free jazz and hardcore, while the other created electronic sounds live. Each seemed locked into the other, with a call-and-response dynamic where each response became another call, propelling the set through sounds adjacent to ambient, IDM, and even a brief section that morphed into something like UKG.
The Davids’ act felt like a statement of intent for the day: it doesn’t matter what you think today is going to be, it’ll be stranger, more extreme, and more left-field (left-fielder? lefter-field??) than you would have imagined. Far from a mere genre showcase, this felt like a test of how far you can stretch a scene without breaking it.
From there, things got heavier. Cryptbreaker and Breathe/Rust pushed things into blackened and metallic hardcore territory, before the run of bands that Eggy Tapes founder Craig later referred to as the “grind bloc” kicked off.
It’s a perfect description. From Carthage Must Be Destroyed through to KnifeyxSpoony closing out the pre-dinner programme, we were in for something seriously punishing. But there’s something about grindcore that makes that kind of intensity work. After the weight of earlier sets, the sheer speed almost felt refreshing.
There were some truly fantastic and sometimes, dare I say, funny moments. FilthxCollins casually mentioning they had “about 40” songs left to play. Priest Crippler’s frontman charging into both the crowd and members of the crowd. Thumbsucker brought a heavy dose of hardcore into the mix.
Craig was a constant presence throughout the day. When I first saw him behind the merch table, his answer to “how are you?” was a single word: Busy. Later on, outside, he joked that the whole thing was a complete racket, that he basically got to see all his favourite bands and all he had to do was put on a festival.
Billed as Bristol’s last surviving noisecore band, and playing their final set, KnifeyxSpoony was exactly as ridiculous as you’d hope. Folding chairs were wielded in combat, stages were dived off into a ravenous crowd, and trestle tables were choked-slammed through, in a fitting send off to a band defined by total madness.
The second half opened with something completely different. Hopeless Death took to a stage stripped of guitars, replaced instead with a reel-to-reel tape player and a small collection of electronics. After hours of intensity, much of the audience sat on the floor, sharing a quiet moment of comfort.
The set was built around tape, a medium he clearly has a deep relationship with. His reel-to-reel is over half a century old and in a state of gradual decay, and the tape itself is second-hand, worn, and often layered with countless overdubs. That physical fragility introduces a constant element of unpredictability, especially in a live setting where something can easily go wrong. Rather than avoiding that risk, he leans into it. It adds tension, a sense that the system could fail at any moment. In his words, it becomes “less like working in a controlled environment and more like choosing to swim in the sea rather than a pool”.
Insatiable Wound’s set was brilliantly constructed, beginning with something close to ambient before collapsing into pure noise, with distorted, unintelligible vocals cutting through the sound. By the time Plague Pit took the stage, the room was fully locked back in, their constant lashings of what felt like heavier and heavier riffs setting the tone for the final act of the night.
Fleshlicker closed Eggfest with something that felt less like a set and more like a ritual. A slow walk on to an unlit stage came first, before Fleshlicker flicked on a stack of amplifiers, and knelt before a rapidly flickering red light. There was a brief pause, before the entire room was enveloped in a solid wall of noise, as Fleshlicker’s body contorted and writhed.
Eggfest is one of the more truly unique days of music I’ve seen in my life, but what else would you expect from a programme put on by Eggy Tapes? One of Bristol’s most genuinely unique labels, the intrigue and fun with which they approach extreme music bucks the unfortunate stereotype of more fringe scenes calcifying as they age. The scene in Bristol for this material is small, cohesive, and hard to imagine in its current state without events like Eggfest.
//Words: Maik Keefe // Photography: @jh_media//