The sunny afternoon turned into a great party with a good mix of bands. Satomi Miyata, Lundagard’s reviewer, report her special experience at her first Swedish summer music festival – the Sensommar Festivalen that was hosted by Gothenburg Nation last Saturday.
Summer has a different meaning for Swedes. You will never find people as alive as the Swedes in summer. It is because summer is like an extraordinary gift for those who survived the long and gloomy winter.
The weather during the festival was great with the sun being loyal to us the whole time. The Festival gave us the perfect, yet probably the last opportunity to appreciate each moment of the beautiful Scandinavian summer.
My experience at Sensommar Festivalen was completely different from what I remember from an outdoor summer music festival I went to a few years ago in Japan. (By the way, I am from Japan.) Summer in Japan is always accompanied by sweat. Its extremely high humidity (around 70 percent) and temperature (over 30 degrees) makes Japan one of the most notorious places to spend summer. Sensommar Festivalen gave me a new insight on what summer music festivals could be like.
The extreme Japanese summer makes it irresistible for the Japanese to take a few swigs of beer during the festival and ultimately get totally drunk, apparently it goes exactly the same for Swedes except for the weather part. Most people had a pre-party before the Festival. So when I got there, I could see a lot of drunk and “happy” people just enjoying good music and dancing under a big smile of sunshine. And of course, the end of the Festival was followed by after-parties offered by different nations. Yes, it was a one-day big event which could only materialize in a student towns such as Lund.
Johnossi, which was probably the highlight of the festival, is a rock duo from Stockholm. Johnossi is a fantastic band if you listen to them live, more so in misty moonlight. Their music is the kind that allows you to remember the feelings of being excited, having your arms around each others shoulders, jumping up and down. Memories that will stay with you forever, when you completely let go of yourself and just enjoy good music with good company. And, of course, alcohol always helps.
Urban Cone is a Swedish electropop group from Stockholm. As a massive fan of Urban Cone from before, my excitement peaked when they played Urban Photogragh. I don’t personally listen to much party music such as hard-core electro, as in Japan clubbing is not so embedded in our culture as it is in Europe. But still there is nothing wrong with secretly dancing and getting into the rhythm in your own space, right? If you are still with me, I guarantee you that Urban Cone is worth making a show on your top secret music playlist.
And, yes, I can’t finish this article without mentioning my absolute new favorite music artist, Klingande! They are DJs from France and their music is an excellent mixture of many different instruments and sounds such as saxophones, percussion and the flute. I would recommend you to start with their work called Jubel.
Overall, I have to say the festival was a great success. It is always difficult to precisely pin down what kind of music is in demand. The young, college students are the most complicated creature who seek fresh, innovative music that must not be too removed from mainstream taste. And I can’t deny that all the 5 artists succeeded in meeting this challenging demand.
