Photo gallery: Gaerea w/ Wolves in the Throne Room and Blackbraid

Photo of Gaerea by Zach Johnson

There’s suffering for one’s art, and then there’s Gaerea: for their latest music video, “Dormant” (a “ghost track” only available on a handful of physical copies of the band’s most recent album, Mirage),one of the members of the masked, anonymous Portuguese quintet was filmed being waterboarded for nearly eight excruciating minutes. Though not graphic, it’s also not for the faint of heart (if you must, you can find the whole “torture video experience” here), but it speaks to the harrowing nature of the band’s “cathartic black metal” sound, which they brought full force to the Red Flag stage. Headlining this tour, dubbed the Crypt of Ancestral Knowledge Tour, is Olympia, Washington-based atmospheric black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Also featured was Blackbraid, Native American rocker Jon Krieger’s folk metal project pairing black metal might with traditional indigenous instrumentation. | Jason Green