Industrial music has always maintained a complicated relationship with conventional ideas of musical presentation. Its vocabulary is built as much from mechanical repetition, feedback, distortion, abrasion and noise as from melody or traditional composition, foregrounding the physical properties of sound and frequently challenging the distinction between music and noise. In this context, the venue is never simply a container. The room, its acoustics, equipment and physical limitations become part of the instrument.
That philosophy is central to Untitled Nashville Fest, the Nashville, Tennessee festival now entering its third installment. Conceived around secrecy, intimacy and discovery, the event brings together long-time friends, collaborators and artists from across the international underground to perform alongside one another. The first edition was held at a remote, deliberately undisclosed locations and operated on an invitation-only, word-of-mouth basis, creating an environment closer to private event than a conventional festival, where-as the second took place at Disctrix, the venue that has become an integral fixture of the program.
The first edition brought together Lussuria, Worth, Laureate, Unica Forma, Mindfold, Arzat Akia, Sewer System (Charlie Mumma from Sissy Spacek/Unexamine), Kakerlak and Hollow Serpent Tooth at the remote Prepper Cabin. The second expanded the concept with Lussuria, Deterge, Star, Yellow Gas Flames, Anal Birth, Knocking Teeth (a collaboration between Pain Appendix and Worth) and numerous others, with Anal Birth’s appearance serving as the project’s debut return performance. The bills created an intentional contrast between finer tuned performances and artists with more harsh and challenging practices. At the intersection of “higher-art” – perhaps academic sensibilities and raw underground expression, creating a space where established practices and more obscure, confrontational forms can exist in productive tension.
At the center of that ecosystem is Disctrix, the Nashville venue founded by Kevin Kilpatrick & techno-crew PHAASER. Its origins are deeply personal. “The idea for Disctrix started when I got a new place after living there for about twelve years,” Kilpatrick explains. “I was there for about all my twenties, had a bunch of experiences, good great and horrible, threw shows with my roommates for punk and guitar music for a few years around 2010-2012, rehearsed and recorded bands in various periods.”
The house was far from an obvious candidate for a club. “The house was pretty busted, much moreso than now, so it took about a month fixing things up and doing the initial setup with a bunch of free help from friends,” Kilpatrick says. “A lot of people came together to fill in the blank canvas, still feels like it was a stroke of luck to be able to build out the juxtaposition of the unassuming shitty-house facade with the rails for what happens inside.”
Photo at Disctrix from Untitled Nashville Fest 2
“Of course the primary side of things with this all in place is the curation,” Kilpatrick says. “Between Kurt (Blaine Mason), Hock, Reid, Pigue, Taylor and myself, we’ve scratched our varied itches with rave music, noise and ambient. Some bookings have been thrown off when they first see the house. But they get it when they get inside.”
That willingness to operate outside conventional expectations is also fundamental to Untitled Fest Nashville. Andrew Hock, the organizer (with some aid this year from Hospital Productions), alongside Andrew Pigue and Reid Barber, describes the original motivation as an attempt to establish a serious underground electronic culture in Nashville rather than reproduce an existing model. “We wanted to bring proper techno, industrial and noise shows to Nashville, a place that had next to no prior existing underground electronic music culture,” Hock says. “Let’s see what’s possible when we think outside the bounds of the algorithms and big cities and do something that is truly, truly DIY.”
For Hock, the festival’s deliberate obscurity is integral to its underlying ethos, rather than merely an aesthetic gesture. It is an attempt to recover something that has been diminished by formula-driven discovery and promotion. “It takes creativity and labor to even bring back some of that feeling that existed in this culture prior to its algorithmification,” he says. “There’s something that happened when everyone involved was engaged in the difficulty of discovery. There was an invaluable, collective energy of everybody around the world living inside of that maniacal process that is no longer reproducible. These days, you have to take few extra steps to invoke that energy.”
Pigue puts it more simply: “It’s not served to you on a silver platter.”
That ethos extends to the festival’s international network. Rather than functioning as a conventional showcase built around market visibility, Untitled operates through existing friendships, relationships and shared musical interests, bringing people who have known one another for years together from different parts of the world to perform in the same physical space. The deliberately mixed bills reflect that philosophy. Recognizable underground figures appear beside lesser-known artists because discovery remains part of the experience, and because the organizers are interested in the underground as a community rather than a ranking system.
Hock sees the location itself as part of that experiment. “Yeah, you get this field of dreams, if you build it, they will come kind of thing happening, which is a super American ethos,” he says. “I was just really excited by the possibilities of working on a blank canvas when I moved here in 2015. What can be possible when you kind of color outside the lines of big cities and algorithmic promotional onslaught and just try to really, really distill the essence of the thing to provide an experience that just can’t be replicated in a place like New York or LA. And no shade on those places. I’ve lived in those places and I love them. But I think there’s something really, really important that can be realized by recognizing that there are possibilities everywhere.”
Yellow Gas Flames at Untitled Nashville Fest 2
The current edition continues that approach with a sprawling program of industrial, noise, experimental electronics and club-oriented sounds. Among the artists appearing across the festival are 51717, Ámes Sanglantes, Arzat Skia, Chaos 31, Coldship Passage, Death Pact International, Energy Gradient, Frontier, GNO, Golden Purifier, Heterosexual Rage Murder, Hollow Serpent Tooth, Imminent Death, Japanese American Terror, Kanal Nula, Mark Solotroff, MiNDFOLD, Viodre, Vatican Shadow & Lussuria.
Several performances carry particular significance within the underground context. Representing my home and native land, noise veteran Ámes Sanglantes, is responsible for producing some the most important extreme music to come from Canada the last 3 decades. Debuting live is one of the various monikers that act as a vessel for James Lights’ (Agonal Lust, Wounded Son) profound ritualistic post-industrial dark power ambient mind bending and prolific recording output, Coldship Passage. Now joined by Josh Strachan (Desolation Colony). Death Pact International is a moniker devised in 1985 by members of what are now The Grey Wolves. A collective spirted in anonymity that has had previous contributions from Con-Dom, Wertham and more, will take place with a new International deity led by Dave Padsbury, who will also perform as Salford Electronics at the first night afterparty. “I personally have never been involved in a DPI (un)performance in the USA. Others well have done. The whole point of DPI is that it belongs to everybody. The project is as much as yours as it is mine or anybody else for that matter” says Dave. While it is not listed on the flyer – I noticed that this event will also be the debut performance for Japanese American Terror, whom have appeared in the recent Hospital Productions catalog. 51717 makes a very rare appearance as well, as she has not performed for some time, as far as I know.
Video of Coldship Passage Promo for Untitled Nashville Festival.
Another rare performance from the elusive member of BLOODYMINDED – James Moy – expect psycho gut-wrenching bowel electronics with his project Heterosexual Rage Murder. BLOODYMINDED founder & front man Mark Solotroff will perform a striped down ritualistic post-industrial set, just a week ahead of his latest solo release A Diagnosis of Distance. Imminent Death will come full force with her harsh noise-tinged industrial decay. Now added to the second night headliner is, for now the third time, the king of dark-ambient theatre psychedelia, Lussuria. “Part of what made those fests so great was the adventure of getting there. They were hidden in hard to find places, and once you arrived, the underground atmosphere made you feel like you were in on a secret.” says Jim Mroz regarding his role in the previous years festivals. During the latest EU tour, Lussuria had introduced an old track that had never before been played live, and for this performance he will continue in these thread creating an exclusive set. Hollow Serpent Tooth will be playing a set of all new material specifically tailored for this occasion. “Confrontational. Hail crime. Barbarism begins.” Arzat Skia is the ritualistic post-industrial ambient project of Andrew Hock who will be performing all new material from his upcoming LP on Luke Younger’s (Helm) label Alter.
Frontier (the solo project of Thomas Artiguenave) performed their first-ever live set at Hospital Fest 2025 in New York City and will fly in from France to deliver the same brutality. Disctrix residents MiNDFOLD have just released a new tape on No Rent and will bring their signature rugged PE to their familiar sonic territory. While there’s a few performers I missed, surely with an event of this magnitude, all acts will deliver appropriately.
The after-hours programming extends the same continuum between club music, industrial electronics and experimental sound. Friday’s late-night session features DJ Becka Diamond (Hospital Productions) alongside Salford Electronics, while Vatican Shadow and L.I.E.S. founder Ron Morelli appear in the broader weekend programming. “The Salford Electronics dis/play/ will largely consist of repetitive beats” said Dave when asked what to expect from his set. Saturday’s session includes IZNUTRA – the new moniker of DJ Valentimes, alongside a live Redline performance.
Photo at Disctrix
What ultimately distinguishes Untitled Nashville Fest is not simply the extremity of its music or the obscurity of its location. It is the attempt to reconstruct a particular social experience around music: people traveling from different places to meet old friends, discover unfamiliar artists and share a physical space without the usual machinery of the festival industry. The first two editions established that principle through remote, invite-only gatherings, while the third continues to develop it through Disctrix and its deliberately unassuming surroundings.
In an era when underground music is increasingly searchable, categorized and algorithmically delivered, Untitled Nashville Fest is built around the opposite proposition. The obscurity is intentional, the mixed bills are intentional, and the physical space matters. It is an attempt to make discovery difficult again, and in doing so, to recover some of the communal energy that made underground music feel like soming you participated in rather than something simply delivered to you.
Photos provided by Kevin Kilpatrick
