Meshuggah at Knotfest Buenos Aires: Open Portals at Parque de la Ciudad

Cristian texts me: "Hey, are there portals for Meshuggah?" I tell him I'll check, but there should be something. On Friday I get the second press pass to go to Knotfest 2024 and we proceed: "Let's meet in the afternoon at Emilio Mitre," he says. On Saturday I arrive at Parque Chacabuco around four in the afternoon and we take the E subway line to the premetro. Every station on the line is half-empty, their interiors seem anchored in the same era as El Palacio de la Pizza. It feels like Alfonsín is still in office.

The name of the terminal station, Intendente Saguier, somewhat confirms the intuition that this entire area is somehow anchored in the Unión Cívica Radical era. We board the premetro as the afternoon sun slants through the window. I immediately think of the train cars in Tokyo-3 and the Shinji Ikari memes. He could easily be just another passenger. The tram ride transports us straight to some European capital. A tremendous irony considering it runs through one of the least developed neighborhoods in the federal capital. As the tower of Parque de la Ciudad comes into view, we confirm the feeling of being in East Berlin.

We get off at Escalada station, right at the entrance of a huge Jumbo supermarket. We head down Escalada and walk to Roca. On one side there's a huge golf course, on the opposite side a series of fancy new buildings, constructed for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, which reinforce the idea of East Berlin under reconstruction.

We walk about fifteen minutes until we reach the park entrance, where we get held up by two bouncers who won't let us into the grounds. We continue in the shadow of the rusted roller coasters, the cable car cabins piled up on one side, and immense skeletons of what was once an amusement park. And as we advanced through the ruins of radicalism, in the background roared a steamroller of blast beats and riffs that sounded like they were coming from chainsaws.

I had never paid much attention to Meshuggah. I'm not a meticulous person when it comes to the branches of extreme metal, I don't even have a precise timeline of the important stuff. I've always listened to everything in a messy order, following whatever my intuition pointed to. It happens to me with many bands — knowing them by name and having heard a few tracks, but only truly getting hooked after seeing them live. This was the case. The afternoon sun wasn't hitting as hard anymore but still made itself felt. The aged concrete beneath our feet radiated heat. We felt on the backs of our necks the presence of those extinct giants like skeletons of an Evangelion angel that hadn't been fully removed yet. The scene was truly perfect.

Under the chords of "Broken Cog" we lit the first joint of the afternoon and surrendered to the rhythm breaks, the murderous pounding, and the technical perfection that the Swedish band exhibited with understated calm. That's what metal sounds like in the land of ABBA. The band continued its run without a hitch, and I was increasingly astonished by the technical precision and the impassive stance of the vocalist, Jens Kidman, dressed like just another heavyset guy in the crowd with his skinny jeans and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but with the voice of a cave troll.

Cristian and I would look at each other at the end of every song to verify that what we were hearing was real and that we hadn't gotten lost in the dreamlike landscape of the extinct post-industrial city. With the show reaching its climax, we finished the joint. Up to that point, everything had been spectacular. We felt there couldn't be much left after hearing Future Breed Machine.

Until Bleed and Demiurge hit back to back, sending us into a pit of destruction with no return. The sensation of falling into a bottomless abyss, in broad daylight, while the sunset colors shift toward amber tones, is hard to convey. You don't understand the power of guitar riffs until you're standing in front of a truly great one. There's something about the systematic repetition of certain notes that seems to send you to another dimension — in this case, into an endless abyss with absolutely no way to grab onto anything to stop the fall. Power, sheer power.

With the last two songs finished, Cristian and I walked to the back, looked at each other, stood in silence for a while, and lit another joint. We knew the best part of the day had just passed. We lingered staring at the skeletons of what had once been an amusement park. The silhouettes of apartment buildings on the city's edge. We knew we had scored a goal from one end of the pitch to the other. This time, the portals had been flung wide open.

(*) The main photo of this chronicle is courtesy of the Knotfest 2024 press team, taken by photographer Cata Almada.