Almost hippie-esque: the Hellseatic Festival
Photo: Hellseativ
The fate of the Bremen Hellseatic Festival is exemplary for many small and medium-sized festivals at the moment. Since the disruption that the pandemic years meant for the events industry, the gap between major events and the idealistic fringe has suddenly widened, exacerbated by further crisis phenomena everywhere. On the organizers’ side, everything is becoming more expensive, so ticket prices are going through the roof, the fees for the main bands have increased more and more to sometimes absurd levels, and ever larger parts of the festival goers’ income go to rent and in the supermarket on it. During the crisis, metal fans who are naturally keen to buy are also considering whether it would be better to spend their money on just one major event per year.
The Hellseatic relies on the audience’s joy of discovery and mainly features bands in its program that are not yet particularly well-known or have mini-legend status in the corners of the niches of the subgenres. That almost went wrong, at least as far as financing was concerned, especially since the city of Bremen did not receive funding for the third edition of the Hellseatic. In mid-July, the team of organizers, who were all volunteers, sent an SOS call to the world: “These are tough times for festivals, especially for young, experimental and passionate examples like Hellseatic!” 300 tickets would have to be sold in July to achieve this everything could happen. The 300 additional tickets didn’t quite work out, but the Hellseatic could still take place, with the financial backing of friends.
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The very good idea of the festival: not just buy two or three strong headliners and fill the rest with cheaply bookable mid-range bands, which would have been a safe bet. But instead a program that puts bands that tend to operate on the inventive edges of the countless metal subgenres in a relationship with one another. The organizers actually no longer want to use the term metal, as they explained in an interview with the Bremen city magazine “Z”, and prefer to speak of “heavy music”. This means that the program can in principle include anything that sounds guitar-heavy and either massive and heavy or massive and hectic.
When you look at the bands that take to the three stages at the Schlachthof cultural center over the two days (a fourth stage that was supposed to be open air was canceled for financial reasons), you can clearly see in what way the non-conservative ones Varieties of metal are opening up more and more. Agriculture, for example, managed to play black metal in such a way that the music sounded like a hippie festival. The band themselves call it “ecstatic black metal”. Everything dark and nihilistic is crossed out. The anger that resonates in the voice of singer Leah B. Levinson Real no longer has anything destructive, but rather suggests liberation and a primal scream.
On the opposite side of the speed spectrum is doom metal band Ahab, who have produced six concept albums about seafaring, whales and the sea over the last 20 years. Everything was tuned low and almost as slow as possible, so slow that the music at least in parts resembled the slow-motion aesthetic of bands like Bell Witch or Earth.
Both bands follow a trend in the genre that is very good for the whole event. The aesthetic is shifting, at least among the metal bands that have come into contact with post-rock – away from a sound that is supposed to be hard and crass, towards a sound that wants to be massive first and foremost. That’s not a small difference.
With regard to the festival program, this means that many of the bands here no longer sound armored in a genre-typical way, but instead produce a sound that the listener can flow with. And those – keyword post-rock or post-metal – are less concerned with classically structured songs than with a sound or a state. The ecstatic black metal of Agriculture sounds oceanic, the long-lasting guitar drones and the thunderous drums of Ahab like an oppressive thunderstorm. And the Cologne black metal band Ultha produced a nice shoegaze haze with the three long pieces they played.
The departure from traditional ideals of hardness makes the music more interesting and allows for diverse voices. The Belgian band Predatory Void showed that in the most extreme forms of metal, death metal and black metal, it doesn’t matter whether a singer screams and roars. Ultimately, everyone gets all the frequencies, assigning the voice to a clearly defined gender is obsolete.
This musical openness is reflected in a festival audience that radiates respect and an almost hippie-like peacefulness and is just as happy about the riot grrrrl punk from the bands The Pill and 24/7 Diva Heaven as it is about instrumental stoner rock -Band like Rotor or the elegiac, unfortunately very developed symphonic post-rock of ef or Monkey3.
Taken all together, this proves that there is more to discover in two days of programming put together with a love of experimentation and fun with noise than, say, at the Wacken Festival, where almost only what you have been listening to as a metal fan is played for a long time the umbrella has.
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