No one captures the sturm und drang of a hardcore set with the level of skill, vitality, and fire as hate5six founder Sunny Singh. It isn’t even close, really.
And so when Singh announced yesterday that after a decade of operating the uber-essential site “purely as a hobby outside of my 9-5 job working in tech” he would be launching a reward-stacked Patreon and attempting to “take hate5six to the next level by going full time with it,” the well-deserved praise and fanfare that greeted his post was no real surprise.
To celebrate that tech’s loss and the scene’s gain Decibel invited Singh to pick five hate5six videos that held special resonance for him…
Band: Catharsis
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Date: August 7, 2015
Thoughts: This show came off the heels of TIHC 2015 which included American Nightmare’s return to Philly, Chokehold’s reunion, Bane’s final TIHC performance, and close to 50 other bands. A hard string of sets to top, but something about seeing Catharsis in such a small room was one of the most memorable moments that summer. Everyone in that loft was focused and engaged in the moment. There wasn’t the level of posturing that you see at big fests. The band and crowd fed off of each other’s intensity and that made for some of the best moments I’ve ever filmed.
Band: Converge
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Date: July 25, 2014
Thoughts: Converge will forever be one of the greatest live bands to ever grace a stage. This was their first appearance at TIHC and my 7th time shooting them, so I had some sense of the types of shots I wanted to get. I had a few people help run the other angles which, in the end, proved to be a wise decision. Stephen Brodsky from Cave In returned to perform with the band, and they also performed “Disintegration” by The Cure, which was emotionally intense. I was humbled that Kurt Ballou and Brad Boatright teamed up to mix and master the set for the video. There’s a certain cadence and rhythm I strive for when cutting multiple camera angles together and I think this video in particular is one of the strongest examples of my work. To see that the band included it on their box-set, “Thousands of Miles Between Us”, is easily one of my proudest accomplishments.
Band: Disembodied
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Date: July 29, 2017
Thoughts: This was truly one of the most vicious live performances I’ve ever seen. TIHC 2017 had a strong lineup but immediately after their set I tweeted something to the effect of, “Disembodied just dragged every band in history through school starting with kindergarten and ending with a PhD dissertation.” The pit was packed–not so much with the usual crowd killers, but people clearly in their own little worlds exorcising their own personal demons. This video has some of my favorite editing decisions, too. I tried to strike a balance between capturing the what the crowd was feeling with what the band was making me feel at that moment.
Band: Mindset
Location: Washington, DC
Date: May 14, 2016
Thoughts: I’ve filmed Mindset more than any other band in my archive (about 40 sets since 2008) and I had the chance to go to Europe with them twice. Shooting their final show was one of the more emotional sets I’ve ever documented. With each passing note, the crowd knew those sounds would never be played by those members ever again. I was choked up the moment the first note rang out until the end. Thankfully, again, I had several cameras running in order to mask the fact that I was trying to film while sobbing like a fucking baby.
Band: Inside Out
Location: Reading, PA
Date: June 28, 1990
Thoughts: I was 4 years old when this set happened. But it represents hate5six coming full circle. Anyone who follows hate5six on social media for even just 3 minutes will know that I am fucking obsessed with Inside Out/Rage Against the Machine. I fell in love with archiving live music after I spent my teens in the early 2000s collecting and trading bootlegged videos of old RATM shows. Through Rage I discovered Inside Out and that was my gateway into this hardcore community that is such a big part of my life now. This Inside Out set made its way through the trading community years ago, but because they were all dubbed copies the quality was absolute trash. A version of this set appeared on YouTube 7 years ago but it was clearly a degraded rip. In 2017, Jeremy Dean, the original filmer, unearthed his master tape and sent it to me to digitize, restore, and share. He also managed to shoot Quicksand and Shelter that night, too. Three iconic bands in their prime, in a room with no cell phones, no fucking horseshoe-shaped pit, nothing. Just people focused on the moment. This set is special because Inside Out plays some tracks that never got officially released, so it’s amazing to hear and imagine what that band could have gone on to accomplish. Before “Undertone”, Zack starts screaming, “Wake up!” over and over again. A year later he would start one of the biggest bands ever (in my biased opinion) and write a song using that line, so this video represents a window into the makings of the incendiary device that would later become Rage Against the Machine. I released this set on hate5six.com’s 9 year anniversary. To me it symbolizes how I got into live videos and how I’ve evolved from not just a videographer but to an archivist as well.
