Blood of a Pomegranate-"Enter a temple of the Dark-Sacred"
BLOOD OF A POMEGRANATE
AS PART OF:
BLACK PLANET
25TH JULY TWO VENUES THREE STAGES 21 BANDS
O come, creatures of the night!
Bear witness to BLACK PLANET: A Celebration of Australian Dark Music.
Descending for the first time as a full-spectrum gathering of darkness, Black Planet hosts 3 stages across two iconic venues: The Bendigo Hotel & Nighthawks. Built for devotees of sonic extremity and shadow culture, this inaugural edition transforms the night into a living cathedral of sound, atmosphere, and chaos.
The night will be separated into 3 spaces:
The Ossuary (Bendi Main Room) - A shrine to brutality and all things heavy
The Void (Bendi Upstairs) - A chamber devoted to noise, ambient, drone and experimental
The Black Hearts Lodge (Nighthawks) - A sanctuary of goth, darkwave, post-punk and nocturnal romance
Headlining Black Planet 2026 is THE AMENTA - One of metal's most uncategorizable acts, THE AMENTA have been synthesising the ugliest aspects of death, black, and noise into a unique maelstrom for over 25 years. Well-known across the world for their intense live shows, THE AMENTA combine speed, anger, and a weird sound with smoke and strobes to create a brutal, overwhelming experience.
Joining them across the 3 stages are: Mammon’s Throne, Hybrid Nightmares, Victoria K, Küntsquäd, Bentham’s Head, Knife, Npcede, Živa, Inaugural, Chiffon Magnifique, Blood In The Champagne, Dystropolis, Palliative, Blood of a Pomegranate, Military Position, Anocht, AnnaBortionist, Serene Ailment, Angellis Taliuu, and Koolooz.
By the time you're deep into a Black Planet night, you've likely crossed between all three rooms more than once — Ossuary brutality, Void abstraction, Lodge romance, back again. That movement is the point. Twenty-one acts under one banner isn't meant to flatten the differences between a blast-beat and a drone loop; it's meant to prove they belong in the same conversation. Few line-ups this size manage that kind of coherence without sanding off what makes each room distinct.
ARTIST: BLOOD OF A POMEGRANATE
Blood of a Pomegranate is the solo project of Astghik Anahit Lusaberyan, an Armenian diasporan artist working at the intersection of folk, industrial, noise and dark ambient. Their work draws directly on Armenian folk melody and history — 2022's 7000 Haunting Artsakh reworked traditional songs into a meditation on the 2020 Artsakh war, and they went on to curate Noise for Artsakh, a 14-artist benefit compilation raising funds for displaced Artsakhtsi refugees. The politics are never incidental to the sound — anti-nationalist, explicitly anarchist, built from dronescapes she's described as summoning something ancient and apocalyptic at once. Closing the Void in the festival's final slot puts them at the point where the night tips from ritual into something closer to reckoning.
INTERVIEW:
1. The Void is framed as a chamber, not a stage — something more enclosed, more about atmosphere than spectacle. How do you think about the difference between playing to a room and playing inside one?
I guess I mostly think about the acoustics of the space feeding back through my vocoded vocal effects chain. That's a huge part of my live sound, so it sounds quite different in each space. I also think about making a connection to the unseen world, and causing disturbance and introspection into the nightside of consciousness among the audience. I see visions, and I expand them to fill the room and immerse the crowd. I hear melodies in my mind, and I sing or play them on the duduk (ancient Armenian double reed instrument).
2. Noise/drone/ambient work often lives or dies on what it does to time — does it stretch, collapse, disappear? What's Blood of a Pomegranate doing to the room, ideally, forty minutes in?
Ideally, the audience and I have become too immersed in the flow of the music to notice time. I hope by 40 minutes in, they have achieved a kind of catharsis that inspires them to radical self-love and revolutionary praxis. I hope they feel like they are in a space where it is ok to collectively grieve together.
3. Black Planet's being pitched as a "living cathedral of sound" — where does your most recent release, or whatever's next in the pipe, sit inside that? Anything dropping around the show we should know about first?
Well, I guess I am living. But my music has as much to do with death as it does with life. And my music is not Christian, so the cathedral doesn't quite resonate. I think my music is more like a deep chthonic cavern of infrasound, where the subsonic resonance of death is revered as the womb of life.
I have a new album close to completion that will be released via W.V. Sorceror Productions. I have gone far beyond anything else I have ever worked on. This is not a cathedral of sound, but a temple of the Dark-Sacred.
4. This is billed as a celebration of Australian dark music specifically. What does that qualifier — Australian — actually mean to what Blood of a Pomegranate does, if anything? And why does this underground still matter to you, this far in?
So-called Australia is a settler colonial prison state that must be overthrown by universally liberatory revolutionary force. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. The most ancient continuous cultures in history all come from here. 65,000+ years of sustainable and relatively peaceful life compared to about 240 years since the First Fleet arrived... And in a couple of generations they have done so much fucking damage that some of it is now irreversible. Fuck the colony, fuck Capital and the State. 'Australia' is every bit as fake and illegitimate as Israel. Solidarity with indigenous resistance here and everywhere forever.
I am an Armenian immigrant, and I sing in my native tongue. The only reason I am here is that the USSR collapsed when I was 1 year old, and we happened to get the green card when the Iron Curtain lifted (after many failed attempts). I play dark music, and I am living on the stolen lands of the Wurrundjeri people of the Kulin nation. My music is not 'Australian'.
As for why does this underground matter to me, I'm not sure. I have no allegiances with any scene or genre, but I do have some dear friends who make incredible art here. I just wanna make cool shit wherever I am, and I'll play lineups with my friends whenever/wherever I can.
5. Bendigo and Nighthawks are two venues, three rooms, one night. What are you actually trying to do to a room when you play it — what's the physical or psychic effect you're chasing?
I want to shake people up and confront them with the abject horror of our times. Bring them closer to Dark-Sacred gnosis. I want them to recoil in disgust but be paralysed by the paradoxical beauty of my horror. I want them to feel the grief of a world that is changing, aeons ending, and the incessant spilling of innocent blood in pursuit of a dying empire. I want them to understand that as a species, we are standing on the balcony of a burning building, 100 stories high, trees far below. If we stay, we burn to death. If we jump, the trees might break our bones, but we have a marginal shot at survival. I want them to see this as the revolutionary struggle. Our choice is anarchy or extinction. I want them to feel confronted by Otherness, and the Outside. To not be frozen in fear when confronted with the darkness of unknowing, but to go into the void hand in hand with their fears.
6. Having seen you perform many times, I can attest to the overwhelm one has with your performance-it's atmospheric vs abrasive, it is very punk and protest-like in its loose and nature but amazingly structured and thought out. ..and unique and intelligent. What are the aims of your work and what drives the creativity unleashed in live and recorded documents?
The aims of my work are to express every part of me that was ever forced into hiding via the violence of displacement, assimilation, and other marginalising experiences. I choose expression because the alternative is no life. What drives me is the black flame of revolt. I show the existential struggle of the Armenian people as we face genocide; I show my own struggle as an anomalous survivor in this place, I confront mortality and wade through oceans of entrails to chant ancient incantations in dead languages.
I hope you feel it through your bones and organs. I hope the black bile is stirred from the pits of your soul.
LINKS:
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SO GRAB A TICKET ASAP AND START WORKING OUT HOW YOU CAN SEE EVERY BAND...SOMEHOW
KILLER PRICES TO BE HONEST;
Both venues: $75+BF
The Bendigo Hotel Only: $45+BF
Nighthawks Only: $35+BF
ALL PICS ARE FROM THE ARTIST OR BAND'S SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES
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