Seven Stories…Chase Stevens

Photographer: Chase Stevens
Site: Gloomy Sunday Photography
Based in: Las Vegas

ONE

If you’ve ever had the chance to witness Pentagram live, then you’ve surely seen the awesome facial expressions that frontman Bobby Liebling has made. Needless to say, any concert photographer should be excited to photograph him, and once I found out that I was able to make it down to Los Angeles for Power of the Riff, I was ecstatic. After four or so hours of waiting front and center (there’s a very small barrier in front of the Echoplex stage, but not enough to move around, so I decided to stay where I was), it was finally time, and Pentagram entered the stage. The lighting was shit at first, I was pretty disappointed, and even a little worried, but just moments in, guitarist Victor Griffin headed over to the mic and yelled out (in deservedly rockstar fashion, I suppose) something along the lines of “Raise the fuckin’ lights!” And so they did, and so the fun began. After a few minutes in I started going for closeups with my 70-200mm, and fantastic shot after shot, with click after click, but kept watching, and waiting for the perfect moment. Then I got this.

TWO

Free metal festival with bands ranging from Morbid Angel (the shitheap of an album wasn’t released yet), Immolation, Cough, Woe, Anaal Nathrakh, Agalloch…. And Dispirit? For those that don’t know, Dispirit was formed by John Gossard and co. out of the ashes of Weakling, and up until the past year or so, had hardly been playing any shows, and had only released a demo tape as well. I talked with Gossard earlier in the day (and later interviewed him for The Inarguable) and although he didn’t seem to excited about the whole corporate aspect of the fest (which surprisingly seemed to involve the Scion logo and little more – there wasn’t a car in sight!), was looking forward to playing later that night. When Dispirit hit the stage, the fog was totally dense, and combined with the layered black metal drones, the atmosphere was perfect, and I think this represents it excellently.

THREE

I’m still in a state of awe after witnessing stoner doom legends Sleep play live. Sleep had played a few shows in the past year or two, and already once in LA, so I wasn’t really planning on them playing there again. Three dates for 2011 ended up getting announced, one in Los Angeles, at the Wiltern, and as soon as I could get the days off from work to head down there, I got my photo pass secured. Not only was it going to be awesome photographing Sleep, it was at the largest venue I was going to shoot at yet, which usually translates to awesome lighting. Unfortunately, when I got there, I and other photogs quickly found out that instead of shooting from the pit, we would be shooting about 30 or so feet from the stage on some sort of ledge/walkway thing. I was lucky enough to have my 70-200mm f4L on me, as some others didn’t have a telephoto zoom, but of course, it was only the f4, and as I looked down the row of nearly 15 or so photographers, a good portion of them all had their 2.8s. Luckily enough, at 1600 ISO and shutter speeds around 1/80-1/100 I was able to pull everything off pretty well.

FOUR

Prior to the band lineup for Power of the Riff, I hadn’t heard of Harassor, but upon listening was immediately excited at the possibility of seeing them live. For those of you who haven’t heard Harassor, they sound somewhat similar to black metal/punk/oi band Bone Awl, though visually, they appear much different. As I stood in front of the stage waiting for the band to begin, vocalist Pete Majors walked near the front of the stage, he pulled out some sort of weird can type thing, put it above is head, and thick blood began to ooze downward. Yeah, this was gonna be awesome. I had also been wanting to try the ghosting effect – where you lower your shutter speed (and ISO as well, for once) get the flash ready, shoot, and then shift the camera during the exposure. Done properly, you freeze the subject, but the stage lights combined with the camera movement create the “ghost” effect, and as you can see, it looks pretty damn cool.

FIVE

As I mentioned in the review I wrote of this show – it’s not often you get to witness the creators of a genre live, but I was able to do so when Earth played this past July at the Echoplex in Los Angeles. The lighting was pretty low, and it was a bit of a struggle in that sense, but luckily enough Dylan and co. didn’t move around much (after all, this is drone). One pretty cool thing about the Echoplex is that there isn’t a 3 song limit, or any limit, you can shoot the whole show pretty much, so I didn’t have to worry about getting my shots in instantly, though, given the song lengths, I suppose it wouldn’t have been to bad. Anyways, I decided to try out something different, and raised my arms up in the air, did my best to focus on Dylan, and managed to get another unique angle of sorts (compared to the other shots of this show at least). It came out pretty damn well in monochrome too.

SIX

Out of the USBM around today, Arizmenda stands out among many, and live, they are more intense than any grind or powerviolence band I’ve seen. I witnessed them two days in a row this past April, at a house show courtesy of Ecophagy Records, and also in a cave in the outskirts of Las Vegas. Anyways, during the house show performance, the vocalist started crawling around on the floor and cutting himself in an ultimate macabre fashion, and then turned on his back and continued to scream into the mic, interspersed by occasional sips of beer, all as blood dripped onto the floor. I crouched as low as I could, then lowered my camera even further, and ended up getting this.

SEVEN

In a fairly different area of the USBM spectrum comes Deafheaven, also out of California, though, from the bay area. They play a style of black metal that sometimes contains remnants of hardcore and even shoegaze, and live they are pretty damn awesome. I saw them for the first time in the beginning of this year at a local venue here in Vegas, prior to buying my camera, so I didn’t have the chance to photograph them, but it was awesome none the less. Luckily for me, they were playing a free show at Vacation Vinyl in LA the day after Sleep, and I still had time in LA so I headed on over. Vacation Vinyl is pretty damn tiny (though stocked with an indeterminable amount of goods) but somehow I think over, maybe, 40 people fit inside? It was totally packed though, and I was right in front of, well slightly to the side, the band (about an arm’s length from the guitarist). It was fucking hot (and again, I come from Vegas), I don’t think I had ever sweated more, but that just added all more to the intensity of it all. Anyways, towards the beginning of the set, I moved towards the center, got as low as I could, then started taking pictures of the vocalist as he screamed away into the mic, and managed to get this totally weird but awesome angle.