The Silent Disco Stage at a Metal Festival

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Midnight, a tent behind the main stages, and a few hundred people in battle vests and corpse paint are dancing in total silence. No bassline leaks out, no PA rattles the guy ropes. What you get instead is the sound of several hundred human voices, all a semitone apart, howling along to a chorus only they can hear through a pair of glow-in-the-dark headphones, at a volume that would embarrass a karaoke bar. Someone near me is doing the entire chorus of an Abba song with his eyes shut and both fists in the air, three channels of colour-coded headphones flicking between a Europop set, a nu-metal set, and — I checked twice — a channel of nothing but 1980s power ballads. This is the silent disco tent, and it has become one of the strangest fixtures on the modern European festival circuit, including, improbably, at festivals built entirely around the idea that music should be loud enough to hurt.

Festival Camping: The Sociology of the Tent City

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 10:03:00 +0000

Walk into any large festival campsite on the first night and you have, functionally, walked into a new town. It has no elected government, no permanent buildings, and it will not exist in three days’ time, but for one long weekend it has a population larger than most places on the map, a working internal economy, its own landmarks people navigate by, and a set of social norms that visitors learn within an hour of pitching a tent. Roskilde’s campsite alone regularly holds well over a hundred thousand people across its various fields — bigger, for four days a year, than most Danish provincial towns.

Festival-Culture - vo.rs

The Silent Disco Stage at a Metal Festival

Festival Camping: The Sociology of the Tent City