SUMAC – Whammy Bar: January 30, 2026 (13th Floor Concert Review)
SUMAC is an American/Canadian avant-metal supergenus comprising of Vancouver based Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists), Seattle based Brian Cook (Russian Circles) and Vashon-based Aaron Turner (ex-Isis).
The trio have been rupturing the tectonic plates in the metal genre since 2014, releasing five unnerving albums since 2015, the latest, 2024’s The Healer, the third in a trilogy, described by Pitchfork “as a catalyst for bringing something else into being.”
Live, SUMAC can be a foreboding, confusing experience, with some songs lasting up to 25 minutes. As one poster on Reddit wrote, at a SUMAC concert, he noted his girlfriend assumed the feedback parts were the result of them having gear issues rather than part of their deliberate orchestration.
RST-K
Describe themselves as Aotearoan garden shed psychedelic space drone, and are the combined talents of Andrew Moon (RST) and Paul Toohey (-K), two of Aotearoa’s premier drone merchants. They released a recording – RST-K Live at OFA (old folks Association), last year, and tonight is one of the rare moments to see and hear in the flesh.
Already onstage as I arrived, it seemed the show started 30 minutes after doors, a rare and unexpected treat. The room is comfortably full, and RST-K are in the midst of creating a droning guitar based tumult. Mostly, encapsulated in their own guitar mahi, there is an underlying symbiosis, the occasional glance and acknowledgement of each other’s existence can be caught if attentive.
Subjectively, SUMAC are selective when deciding on their opening acts, and tonight RST-K have obviously been selected in keeping with SUMAC efficacy in being a genre outlier. RST-K’s noise-ambience approach to music is a rarified extension, or an analogy of PUNK, in the same way SUMAC dilate what metal, even post-metal is conceived as, by the aesthetic innovation and creative adherence of the catch-all genre.
SUMAC
Bodies kept piling in, though, fortuitously, Whammy was not rammed, visually the ‘dance-floor’ was a mass of black, and the south of ten dollar Gisborne Golds flowed like a river. Brian Cook wore a Belle and Sebastian t-shirt, a signifier of the band’s wide influences, and 9.30pm, precisely SUMAC rewarded the steadfast and curious.
With many of their songs running from between 10 and 25 minutes, the night’s set list could fit on a beer mat. Tonight, in the precise 60 minutes on stage, SUMAC performed perhaps five, maybe less, maybe more compositions. Compositions that may have been all, some, or none of these – Arcing Silver, Yellow Dawn, World of Light, Image of Control. The dialect of individualism was lost tonight, the creation of space, tonal peaks and troughs, blurred, misread, tempted endings and startings – effecting a blurring of time.
Together, the three, drummer, guitarist (& sole vocalist) and bassist, elicited not just the expected, but also the unforeseen, from their tools of trade, Nick Yacyshyn manipulated and finessed all parts of his guitar, creating space and sound, sounds faint and ferocious, whilst, Cook and Aaron Turner symbiotically created a rhythmic undertow, which acted as pylons for Yacyshyn’s machinations, during the chaotic walls of noise, or added ephemerol repetitions during gentle flows.
SUMAC, tonight took their audience through a complex experience that, while rooted in a genre, that wide catch-all METAL. Revealed the band members’ discharge from expectations, as they drew on genres-a-wide. Achieving by using their mechanical extensions to create industrial-like soundscapes intermittently between thrashing, growl-vocalised outbursts, and rhythmic distillation, all encapsulated in an orchestrated delivery.
Simon Coffey
Click on any image to view a photo gallery by Ming Lyu
SUMAC:
RST-K:
