Germany on vo.rs

With Full Force: East Germany's Extreme-Metal Institution

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Rockharz: The Deep-Cut German Fields

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Germany has so many metal festivals that some of the very good ones live almost entirely in the shadow of the giants. Rockharz is one of them: twenty-five thousand people in a field at the foot of the Harz mountains every July, a festival most of the non-German metal world has never quite registered, run with the sort of unglamorous competence that keeps a thing alive for thirty years. I have never stood in that field myself. I have spent enough time in the German festival machine, though, to recognise a deep cut the moment I see one.

Rammstein and the Art of the Flamethrower: Pyro as Narrative

Sat, 11 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment near the end of a Rammstein show when a man in a harness rises off the stage floor, spreads a pair of steel wings that reportedly weigh around fifty kilograms, and throws fire out of the wingtips into the dark. The crowd — a hundred thousand people who mostly do not speak German — makes the same noise every time, in every city, in a language older than any of them. That noise is the whole argument for what this band does. You do not need the lyric. The fire has already told you the story.

Rock am Ring: A Racetrack, a Storm, and the German Masses

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Wacken: How a Village of 1,800 Hosts 85,000 Metalheads

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Summer Breeze: Germany's Well-Oiled Metal Machine

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Dinkelsbühl is one of those absurdly preserved medieval towns that Bavaria specialises in — a walled Franconian gem on the Romantic Road, all timbered gables and stone gates and coach parties photographing the market square. It is the kind of place that exists in a permanent postcard. And every August, in the fields just outside those medieval walls, forty thousand metalheads assemble for Summer Breeze Open Air, one of the most quietly efficient large festivals in European metal. The contrast is glorious, and the efficiency is the whole story.

Wacken 2019: The Rain Year

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Wacken 2016: First Time in the Holy Mud

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 09:00:00 +0000