CHAKA

Diablo Fest, Brooklyn
February 22, 2025

by Sarah Herrera

I got to catch the band Chaka at Diablo Fest in Brooklyn, and here is my review

Within 30 seconds of the beginning of their set, I felt as though I was being held down and raped.

While they are obviously talented musicians, and a great choice to open the event, I soon had the feeling almost like I was being brutalized in a men’s room on a highway full of lost souls, or as if I was being forcibly sodomized in the communal showers in a prison where everyone else is in a gang, and therefore can act with impunity, and you are not.

When they began the first song of their set, I felt like their music was reminiscent of the experience of being gang raped in an alley by a group of large men with no consciences or morals, sick individuals who should be in the mental health system but are not because they have slipped through the cracks and roam the streets at night looking for flesh. I also felt almost as if I was being tied up in the basement of a filthy tenement in the late 1800’s and a very sick individual with sharp surgical tools was experimenting on me, an individual with the expertise to inflict the most pain possible without me passing out due to blood loss or going into shock and thus being numb to his sick, sick compulsions.

Their second song of the night had a title in German, which made me think of the Third Reich’s Master Plan, and frankly I wished I had been part of that plan after hearing the song. It was akin to dying alone in a hospital bed in an abandoned psychiatric facility where I am screaming, but there is nobody around to hear it and my cries simply echo off the walls and reverberate back to me, filling me with the existential dread of knowing that I am going to die alone, forgotten, and nobody will care. I also got the feeling that I was being held down on a street in a very bad neighborhood as a group of deranged individuals drilled a small hole in my forehead with a power drill, intending to pour boiling water into the hole in an attempt to, in effect, lobotomize me and destroy my corpus callosum, leaving me unable to think, feel or control my bodily functions.

When they began their third song, I started to feel as if Biblical plagues were being rained down upon me, only instead of blood and frogs, it was twisted, deformed sentient human/animal hybrids, capable of rudimentary speech but soulless in every other way. It was reminiscent of being strapped down in a Soviet internment camp while having body parts amputated while I shriek until my vocals chords burst while my body is being slowly sliced apart inch by inch with rusty scalpels and there is no way to escape the pain, despite my best efforts to retreat into my own psyche simply in an attempt at self-preservation, and as a way to escape the exquisite, horrible agony that I am being subjected to, suffering that no human being has ever felt and has never been inflicted upon another living being because the people doing it do not have a shred of humanity and were born from mothers that have committed foul, unspeakable acts that exist only in the outer fringes of the occult and were paid for by the ritual sacrifice of screaming abducted children who are terrified and their fear only feeds the insatiable blood lust of these misbegotten creatures.

In short, I loved this show! Highly recommend this band. They are my jam!