On Saturday night at Santos Party House, the Egyptian visual artist Nader Sadek staged his latest lavish performance piece, B’doun O’mr (Ageless), which featured accompaniment from three world-class metal musicians: vocalist-bassist Steve Tucker (formerly of Morbid Angel), guitarist Mike Lerner (Behold…the Arctopus) and drummer Flo Mounier (Cryptopsy). See above for a slide show of photos by Laal Shams and click past the jump for a review by Hank Shteamer.

Thanks to Matthew Barney, Sunn O))) member Stephen O’Malley and several other like-minded visionaries, the art world and the underground-metal scene have been cross-pollinating for around a decade now. Egyptian artist Nader Sadek, who staged a conceptual metal happening at Santos Party House this past weekend, seems primed to make his mark on this odd hybrid culture, having already designed grotesque imagery for iconic bands such as Mayhem. Saturday’s event, titled B’Doun O’mr (Ageless), wasn’t entirely successful, but it held great promise for future—hopefully more elaborate—Sadek performances.

Sadek’s set design functioned like an installation piece. It consisted of an imposing web of branches arranged in front of the stage, as well as a large tree stump, and various creepy sculpted objects situated throughout, suggesting mutilated body parts both animal and human. During the performance, Sadek and his collaborators Tucker and Lerner wore headpieces featuring frizzy black manes.

Sadek took the stage first, donning a guitar and playing a brief noise intro, which utilized tense string scrapes. Then Tucker, Lerner and Mounier, ostensibly acting as Sadek’s sidemen, entered and proceeded to seize the spotlight. Any death-metal fan could tell you that these three are among the elite players in the genre, and they certainly upheld their imposing reputations. Sadek accompanied the trio through a too-brief 20-minute set of outstandingly brutal and technical riffage (apparently composed collaboratively by the artist and the musicians), featuring Tucker’s bestial growls, Lerner’s head-spinning finger tapping and Mounier’s punishing blast beats. Several forays into dissonant, down-tempo grooves leavened the assault. Sadek stitched the five or so pieces together with more guitar atmospherics, but overall his presence felt secondary in light of the others’ remarkable virtuosity.

If the piece had a message—Sadek’s press release referred to a commentary on the oppression of women in the Middle East—it too was obscured by the force of the music. Still, the artist should be commended for attempting to bring visual flair to a genre that’s not always as engaging to watch as it is to listen to. One hopes that in the future, Sadek will be able to indulge his singular muse in more lengthier, more fleshed-out performances. His gift for setting a sumptuously creepy visual atmosphere and his commendable taste in musical collaborators show that he could one day create a truly enveloping—not to mention terrifying—event, given the proper resources.