In the first of two festival nights at Astra, the expansive, vista-dimming power of a team of metal gurus will be buttressed by the equally-matched albeit newborn force of a experienced player's latest experiment in merciless genre-melding.

Reigning psychedelic metal lords Electric Wizard will make an eagerly- anticipated appearance in celebration of their new release, Time to Die, an album that “deserves every accolade thrown its way” (Pitchfork) and which the band has supported with only a handful of live shows to date. Formed in 1993 in Dorset, Electric Wizard have long been embraced as doom linchpins with their use of tense hypnotic stoner riffs, heavy, dripping, low-end psychedelic freakouts, and ominous vibrations. Their hallucinatory world of sleaze, exploitation, vintage horror, and occult syncrasies conjures up the dark and dirty sides of popular culture. Described by the band’s guitarist and singer Jus Oborn as “a perfect example of arrested development,” (The Quietus), Electric Wizard drag us along on hazy trudges through sinewy second-hand smoke and misanthropic glee.

French producer Paul Régimbeau, most commonly known as Mondkopf, brings his own shade of acerbity under his new grindcore-influenced alias Extreme Precautions. Having had his fill of churning out brutal techno, Régimbeau began turning to grindcore masters such as Napalm Death, Brutal Truth, and Pig Destroyer for even rougher relief, and bases his new moniker on a similar, if digital, sound. His new release, | , is out on his own imprint, In Paradisum.

Extreme Precautions is presented within SHAPE, a new 3-year initiative co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, which unites 16 likeminded organisations in supporting emerging experimental sound-based artists in Europe .