Review & Photography by Nathan Vestal for MPM
The Forge in Joliet has always felt like the kind of room where the walls remember impact. It is not a precious venue. It does not ask the crowd to admire the architecture or whisper reverently about acoustics. It wants bodies in motion, boots on the floor, sweat in the corners, and sound thick enough to make the rafters feel suspicious. On September 24, 2026, Combichrist and Ludovico Technique gave it exactly that: a night of industrial muscle, black-lit tension, and machine-tooled catharsis that felt less like a concert than a controlled electrical fire.
Ludovico Technique: A Longer Sermon for the Damned
Ludovico Technique did not ease the crowd into the evening. They dragged the room down a flight of stairs and shut the door behind it. Their set carried a gothic-industrial weight that felt colder and more psychological than purely aggressive, less a punch to the face than a voice behind you in a dark hallway. The sound had teeth, but it also had shadow. It moved with restraint before it struck, letting atmosphere pool around the stage before the heavier moments cut through.
With Dead Animal Assembly Plant temporarily off the tour until the West Coast, Ludovico Technique had more room to stretch, and they used it wisely. The extended set did not feel padded, inflated, or thrown together to cover a scheduling wound. It felt inhabited. The band leaned into the extra time by letting the tension build in layers: pulse, drone, vocal pressure, synth abrasion, then the full-body impact of rhythm and release. The performance had the shape of a slow possession, each song pulling the room farther from casual attention and deeper into the machinery.
The stage presence was severe without becoming stiff. There was no wasted brightness, no desperate attempt to charm the crowd into submission. Ludovico Technique worked in mood, control, and accumulation. Ben V’s vocals pushed through the haze(ha ha the hazer was broken) with a ritual intensity, while the electronics and percussion gave the songs a hard skeletal frame. The band understood the room, and more importantly, understood the assignment. They were not there to simply warm people up.
The set’s progression mattered even more because of the circumstances. Early material carried a brooding, cinematic weight, drawing the crowd into the atmosphere before the heavier industrial pulse began tightening around the room. By the middle of the set, the audience had stopped treating Ludovico Technique like an opening act covering extra minutes and started responding to them like a necessary part of the night’s architecture. Heads moved. Shoulders shifted. The front of the room leaned in. The Forge began to feel smaller, hotter, more sealed off from the world outside.
The best moments came when the band let the songs breathe just long enough to create dread, then brought the beat down like a steel door. That is where Ludovico Technique found its power: not in excess, but in pressure. They made the extended slot feel deliberate, almost ceremonial, and by the time they left the stage, they had done more than compensate for Dead Animal Assembly Plant’s temporary departure. They had carved a trench for Combichrist to detonate.
Combichrist: Raising Hell on a School Night
Combichrist hit The Forge with the force of a factory line breaking loose from its bolts. Where Ludovico Technique built tension through atmosphere and dread, Combichrist came in like a riot squad made of strobes, drums, distortion, and bad intentions. The shift was immediate. The room snapped from blackened suspense into full industrial impact, that familiar Combichrist collision of electronic aggression, punk nerve, and metal-edged violence.
This is where the night became physical in a different way. The crowd did not just watch Combichrist. It reacted to them. Bodies surged. The floor loosened. The temperature in the room seemed to climb song by song, until The Forge felt less like a venue and more like an overheated engine compartment. Combichrist have always understood that their best live work is not just about volume. It is about command. The songs are built to move bodies, but the performance is built to take ownership of the room.
At the center of it was Andy LaPlegua, a frontman who does not so much perform as conduct controlled damage. He worked the stage with the presence of someone who knows exactly when to provoke, when to sneer, when to let the beat do the talking, and when to throw the whole crowd back at itself. His voice cut through the mix like a transmission from somewhere hostile, carrying that signature blend of menace, swagger, and industrial rot. He did not need to sell the chaos. He let it gather around him, then pointed it where it needed to go.
The band behind him played with the kind of hard precision that makes disorder possible. Tim Van Horn on drums gave the set its violence, pounding with enough force to make every chorus feel like impact rather than release. The guitarists Eric13 and Jamie Cronander added grit and serrated edge, dragging the electronic core into something meaner and more physical. The programming and synth elements from Elliott Berlin kept the whole machine twitching, hissing, and snapping beneath the surface. Combichrist’s live power comes from that friction: flesh against circuitry, punk aggression against club mechanics, human sweat inside a digital cage.
As the set pushed forward, the room changed. That is the thing Combichrist still does better than most bands working this territory. They do not simply play songs at people. They alter the social weather. The crowd becomes more feral, more unified, more willing to hand itself over to the beat. The edges between goth night, metal show, industrial club, and punk basement start to blur until the only real category left is movement.
The Forge was the right room for it. There are venues where industrial music can feel over-polished, trapped behind clean sightlines and expensive lighting. This was not that. The Forge gave the show a working-class humidity, a close-quarters pressure, a feeling that the sound had nowhere to escape except through the crowd. Every stomp, every shout, every distorted beat felt absorbed by the walls and thrown back harder.
Combichrist’s history matters because it hangs over a performance like this without needing to be explained from the stage. This is a band that has spent years turning alienation into motion, ugliness into release, and electronic aggression into something tribal enough to feel ancient. The songs may be mechanical, but the response is human. That contradiction is the heart of the thing. The machines make the noise. The crowd gives it blood.
By the back half of the set, The Forge had become a furnace with a door policy. The audience was sweaty, locked in, and running on whatever strange fuel lives between adrenaline and exhaustion. Combichrist kept tightening the screws, refusing to let the energy drift into nostalgia or routine. Even when the set leaned into familiar territory, it did not feel like a victory lap. It felt like a band still interested in pressure, still willing to make the room earn the release.
What made the night work was the way both acts fed different parts of the same animal. Dead Animal Assembly Plant’s temporary departure could have left the evening feeling thinner, but Ludovico Technique stepped up and extended their set with purpose. They brought the dread, the shadow, the slow pulse under the skin. Combichrist brought the detonation. Together, they made the altered bill feel less like a compromise and more like a different kind of damage.
And that may be the most honest way to understand a night like this. It was not clean. It was not glossy. It was not some perfectly packaged tour stop with every edge sanded down for easy consumption. It was sweaty, dark, reactive, and alive.
By the time the lights came up, the room felt wrung out in the best possible way. People spilled back into Joliet carrying that post-show static in their faces, the look of a crowd that had been somewhere louder than normal life allows. The Forge did what rooms like it are supposed to do. It held the impact, took the sweat, absorbed the noise, and sent everyone back outside a little more dented than they arrived.
That is the point of a show like this. Not perfection. Not polish. Impact. Combichrist and Ludovico Technique gave Joliet a night of rust, pulse, shadow, and release, and The Forge wore it well.
