Legendary Australian composer Mick Gordon is to perform his seminal Doom video game soundtrack live for the very first time when he headlines the UK’s RADAR Festival in 2027.
For a generation of metal guitar nerds weaned on the claustrophobic brutality of the first-person shooter, this is like not only finding the Ark of the Covenant but breaking its seal, opening it and finding all of the secrets to his Meshuggah-through-the-event-horizon sound.
Gordon will be joined by a full band – and an orchestra – and of course he will be bringing his Doom Machine along for the performance.
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“This isn’t a DJ set, and it isn’t a tribute act,” says RADAR Festival. “It’s the actual composer, the actual score – the riffs played properly loud in a room that can withstand all the ripping and tearing.”
We predict that sales of Schecter Damien 9-string guitars will rocket in the Greater Manchester area in the weeks following Gordon’s performance (though an Ernie Ball Music Man John Petrucci JP7 and a Mayones 8-string guitar were just as important to the Doom sessions).
Gordon’s Doom soundtrack is one of the foundational texts of progressive modern metal. It’s ugly, brutal, rhythmically audacious, super aggressive and yet still manages to send a chill down the spine with its post-apocalyptic atmosphere.
It’s the kind of headphones record that has you checking the corners upon entering a room. Heck, it’d make a municipal parking lot complex feel like hell itself.
Gordon probably won’t take to the stage in a powdered wig, red velvet jacket and gold brocade but he nonetheless has a Mozart-esque command over his sound, and an electric guitar tone that is far beyond electric, squished through layers of compression (the Origin Effects Cali76-TX was used extensively when making Doom).
He told Origin Effects that he saw “guitars as a flavour rather than a genre”. In his pursuit of modernism he had to almost destroy tone to reconstruct it for the Doom world.
“Well, you take angry 7, 8 and 9-string guitars, vintage Soviet synthesizers and punch-knuckle-smacked drums,” he told Bethseda. “Then, you spice it up with burning valve distortion, electrically starved transistors, dusty ancient reel-to-reel tape machines, bleeding feedback arrays and gut-grinding sub-woofers. Finally, you smash all these elements together, give the player a shotgun and let the hunt begin!”
Earlier this year, Gordon famously did give away all of his secrets, or at least those he saved down onto his Fractal, when he sold the Axe-Fx unit he used on the Doom soundtrack. The amp modeler also had his presets from Wolfenstein, Prey, and LawBreakers soundtracks.
So, gamers, djent-heads and fiends for quasi-mechanised chug, the time is almost nigh when you can hear this all live and in concert. Let’s just hope it isn’t a harbinger of things to come on this Toilet Earth of ours. We’ll keep the chain gun locked up in its gig bag for now.
RADAR Festival 2027 is hosted over the weekend of July 30 to August 1st, and Super Early Bird tickets are on sale from August 7. Sign up at RADAR Festival.
