::::Norbergfestival::::

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Norberg, Sweden, July 2007
No sex, drugs and rocknroll but beer, smoke and noise

The main difference between a club and a disco is the peoples`approach to music and lifestyle. Where Clubpeople tend to use their brains not only as a basis for the latest hairstyle, discopeople don`t really care for music or a theoretical background. Going to a disco is to show your new shiny shoes and meeting somebody. Music...well there is some in the background, thats it.

The Norberg Festival was a clubthing: too dirty and real for discopeople, too intelligent for the shiny shoes crowd, too raw for the cokeheadz. Norberg is organized by some danish folks. Its located on a beautiful old mine, in Norberg, approximately 3 hours away from Stockholm in the lovley swedish countyside. The town is just 5 minutes walk away from it, but it seems that people in this small place are really friendly and you find festival posters in shop windows all over the small town, from the tourist office to the bakery.

Complaining about this summer is hopeless, but when we arrived on thursday night I was sceptical if anything would happen there, it was quite cold and windy and the rainclouds played a funny game with us hanging out in the skies like only waiting for enough people to explode and drown them. But it didnt happen and we attended Dr. Gavanas and Rusties Dubstep set on the preparty at Camp 303. This Camp was organized by a funky analog freak, who provided nice and fine dubstep, drum and bass, hardcore and jungle to the camping site. A real nice one to open a party like this. It was fun to meet everybody and to dance but it became quite cold and we were hungry, cause we had acted like spoiled cityfolks and didn`t bring food with us. The local supermarked was closed hours already by the time we discovered this, so we endend up eating shit junk food from the only open place in the village.

Friday morning we woke up in our bungalow when some of our friends came for breakfast escaping the wet and cold. It felt really cozy, sitting in the little bungalow with a dozen people watching the rain and the grey colour. It was almost like winter, 10 degrees and no end to the rain. Fortunately most of the Festival is indoors, so in the late afternoon the dried crew left the camping and went to see music.



My favourite room was the noise floor. It happened in the amzingly huge building of the old mine factory. The great room was filled with light and installations. The architechture of the building offered amazing views. From the groundflloor one could see through several levels in some kind of basement, upwards there were several sets of metal stairs, typical for industrial places to walk or almost climb up to the 4th floor. Every level offered old metal leftovers to sit on or hang out just like the giant metal bowl, where 4 people were half sitting, half sleeping, like in a jacuzzi. The highest you could walk up was about 30 meters and it offered a stunning sound and view on all of the galeries. The stage was in the corner of the first floor, I still wonder how the liveacts and performers could cope with that reverb in this giant room. My personal favourite was a noise act with four guys sitting around a table with old amplifiers that were open, somehow using magnets or their hands to get different levels and colours of noise out of these machines. At the same time, one other guy was mixing the noise wildly by punking up and down faders and mute buttons of a very good sounding giant mixer, using the different noise signals to create more noise and reverbs by using the mixer as an instrument. It was great, you could physically feel the noise and how it swell in the room. It was like being witness in a war of frequencies traveling and meeting the leftovers from the reverb. Combined with livevisuals which made the room differ in all varieties of colour it was a great overdose of events. No way to enjoy this with any hallucinating substances in your blood. But I think there weren`t many drugs on this Festival.

Compared to Berlin and a lot of other places on the party planet, this was the cleanest festival I`ve ever seen. There was a lot of beer and some joints, but that was it. Good to see that there is people still going out to party for the music and meeting friends. At the dinner we met the Ström crew, Mats and his funky DJ wife Mikronesien and Hakan Libdo. Mats and his wife played some real nice tunes of contemporary techhouse and minimal, but most amazing was Hakan Libdo`s liveset. When you meet him in person he seems a bit shy, though really nice and interlectual. When you see him on stage its a different person. He jumps, while playing, makes the crowd go wild with him and plays some solid Technotunes that really make you go for a party. Great set and a great party that the ström crew presented in the Kraftcentral which was the „dancefloor“ and the second room. So friday night was in full effect, still there weren`t so many partypeople yet, probably because it was not raining anymore but it was still cold and wet.

Its amazing though how much effort is put in such a small festival. Considering that the average illegal outdoor party in Berlin has the same number of visitors. But this festival is the result of some musiclovers who see their organisation as art, which is pretty obvious. Plus they get a lot of artist support, like the camp 303 that was a contribution and all the partycrews like ström and svaj who bring their showcases and thereby support the festival. Like I said I really enjoyed the noise room, that place was so much work and there were plenty of interesting Installations and liveacts, who also contributed to the special atmosphere of this festival. One of the organizers said, he thought the main difference was that its artist driven, which is defenitly true. With the crew that I was with, the svaj people, everybody connected before playing the night together, Sul prepared the vocals, I sat with the visual people, Anna and Ola were taking good care of organizing and everybody showed so much respect for each others art. Thats what made Norberg so special, there was no fighting for playtimes, no gna gna about soundcheck who is first and who gets the most time and all that buisness. Just like the technicians, they asked if we needed help on stage, they suggested good things for the signal and the soundquality, they were nice and caring and above all, they really knew what they were doing. Besides the soundquality in all the rooms on the festival was great. Good monitoring, a massive sound on the dancefloor with brilliant eqing and a great bass which one could feel. Just like on the noise floor which must have been a real hazzle to get speakers on all the levels and to get the good soundquality going with all that messing up of the frequencies.

After the strömshowcase was finished we sat in the bar tent and had some beers, when I was cought by a networker. Well, if you don`t know what a networker is, be glad then you are not an aspiring artist spending all of your social live on myspace, networking instead of being really creative. In short, a networker is someone who is more interested in participating in other people`s projects than doing his own thing. When worst comes to worst, the networker is one of these desperate gighunters, only going to party to meet „the right people“. That guy was a real pain at that moment. It only lasted one minute untill I had a flyer from his party, half a minute later he wanted my email adress and two minutes later he asked if I could invite him over for a party in Berlin. Guess what: it urgently popped into my head that I had to go to the toilet and I was so sorry to end the conversation. Still, this networking buisness is so nasty and it reminds me so much to my stay in New York in the early ninties, when everybody you met was just exchanging buisness cards. What is even more sad about today`s networkers is the cheap and low level on which they sell their „art“ or their asses!

Saturday was the festival`s peak day. The program started at 13:30 and provided good music for the whole day. Finally the sun came also back and I wasn`t freezing all the time any more, though I hope for the lovley swedish crowd that this is not a typical swedish summer..brrr..too cold for me! The svaj showcase was brilliant. Annaya and her singer Sul created a warm atmosphere, almost jazzy, opening the party. Amazing to see how they made this warm atmosphere in the room with their music, though playing real hard techno. Tobias, who followed with a liveset was also great, follwed by a funky crazy Discopunk performance (...I don`t want to talk about my own music) and DJ Ola, who was extending the great atmosphere that was made by the visual guys and he made us dance and have a very good time. The last act of the night was again a liveset by Thor, great stuff from a funky guy.

Sweden is very organized over all, thats what I remember from my last tour in this country. It was only a new experience to me, that people really only played their playtime. No discussions, no fuzz, no problem with delays. Just like the next day, when after a crazy party which I left for sleep at six when everybody was still in the middle of celebrating, at 12 almost everybody was packed for leaving. I couldn`t trust what I had seen, when we showed up at the festival site and I was still slow and slightly sleepy, I was expecting the usual afterparty. But nothing like this happened. Everybody was prepared to leave and spend sunday night at their houses.

Great Festival, great music, shit weather, semi-bad food, great organisation, too much beer, funky folks. Have fun with the pictures and thanks again to eveybody.