Summer Darkness 2005

I attended only a small part of this year’s Summer Darkness festival, mainly on Friday. There was a nice opening concert by Estampie in the mighty Dom Church. As always they were excellent musicians, and the atmosphere and acoustics of the church were very suited for their traditional medieval music. In Ekko there was a special Cold Meat Industry evening.

Dutch wave-rock band Fertile Reality opened the evening with a solid set, followed by the energetic nihilistic dark folk of Spiritual Front. They were the defitinive highlight of the evening, with an energetic performance and a cool stage presentation. I had hopes that Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio would turn up as a special guest, but alas. Spiritual Front did open with the wonderful ‘Autopsy of a love’ from the recent split cd.
They were followed by the atmospheric folk/pop/triphop sounds of Olen’k. Especially their singer is excellent. She was assisted on two songs by a guest singer from Senegal, which gave the music a special colourful touch. Luckily they could play the nice song ‘Season of Tears’ this time (in Den Bosch that was not possible due to technical problems).
The bombastic neoclassical music of The Protagonist followed. The sound was heavy, but there were not many surprises if you saw them before. This time they had brought along a violin-player, but you did not hear him play very clearly. But visually it made the performance look less static. A curious film was projected on a side wall of the venue, and many visitors were watching it during the concert.
It was not extremely crowded, perhaps partly due to the fact that Olen’K and The Protagonist already had played in The Netherlands recently. Between the concerts I had the task to play some songs. The rest of the weekend I did not see any concerts, only participated in the GRUIS-party at the ACU, which turned out to be a succeeded evening.