Erstellt am: 19. 7. 2010 - 10:45 Uhr

Wetterleuchten Festival 2010

Located up in the mountains of Tyrol, "Winter"-Leuchten is a cold and remote festival. But also fascinating.

Days before I headed to Innsbruck's Hungerburg to check out the epic and wildly improbable Wetterleuchten festival (described by its website as "das weltweit einzige Festival auf 2000 Meter Höhe"), I'd been moaning to my friends that it was atrociously hot in Vienna, and why couldn't I go back to Iceland or the Southern Hemisphere where it would be a bit colder.

As it turned out, I didn't need to go that far at all.

Lisi Eder, 2010

30 Degrees of Separation

The best part was, 30 degrees* lower and still not freezing at all, or at least I didn't think so as I stepped off of the cable car, onto the gravel path.

To be fair, Innsbruck itself had warned me. All 38 degrees of Vienna's recent heatwave were but a memory from the moment I'd set foot here.

Just earlier on Friday, I'd gotten a little taste of what was in store for me when I'd experienced the wrong side of a very heavy thunderstorm, complete with many large hailstones. Still, I was surprised by the foggy conditions, not to mention the genuinely cold mountain air.

Lisi Eder, 2010

Check out the amazing view over Innsbruck! Wow!

We were initially planning to stay overnight in a tent (more on that later), but experienced something of a bad omen when our makeshift camping area was surrounded by a small army of aggressive and noisy sheep.

They came pretty much out of nowhere. One moment we were planting stakes and chatting quietly among ourselves, the next moment we were all drowned out by a cacaphony of bleating from the rock wall above us.

Lisi Eder, 2010

Here we are, standing off against the Sheep army, something à la Braveheart

At first we surveyed each other with a polite curiousity, but this tentative peace was not to last. I don't know what triggered it, (perhaps one of the "ba-a-a-a-as" was Sheep for "Chaaaarge!") but suddenly they rushed us and our feeble colony of tents. It was so absurdly melodramatic, you could practically hear the James Horner soundtrack.

Lisi Eder, 2010

Chaaaaaaaaaaaarge!!!!

Lisi Eder, 2010

As it turned out, they were merely in a hurry to be my first interview partners.

Perhaps inadvisably, we did not take this newfound interest in us and our food with the gravity it probably deserved. But what can I say? The first band was already on, and we were itching to see some live music. So after we finished building up our tents, we hurried to the much bigger main tent...

Johnny Bliss, 2010

...and were apparently the first people there.

Wetterleuchten Festival 2010

The festivities started low-key, with few spectators there to see the first band, the BPM Xperience Part 2.

This was a shame because they were really good, and an interesting choice to open up a so-called "electronic" music festival. Performing live with drums, guitar, and some sort of electronic set-up, they re-interpreted the Beatles and then went on to play a series of diverse instrumentals, sounding in the end like nothing less than a full-on jam band.

But Lady Fate was cruel. By the end of their set, the BPM Xperience were competing with the gods themselves for our attention. The roar of heavy winds and rain crashing down on the roof was deafening, and water was beginning to leak in from the sides.

Johnny Bliss, 2010

The venue's attempts to sell food outdoors were severely hindered by their protective umbrella trying repeatedly to pull a Mary Poppins.

Johnny Bliss, 2010

Fortunately, by the time the weather really became outrageously bad, enough folks had already arrived to make for a pretty sizeable mass of people. And it wasn't like anybody was in the mood to hang outside either.

All that considered, I still managed to miss the second band, a local heavy metal group called Turnout, because I was indoors at the Seegrube, drinking a delicious cup of hot chocolate. As a result I have neither pictures nor my own opinions, but I've heard that the band was really great.

I did manage to see a rather unconvincing set from Tyrolian rapper Ludo, or Ludwig Reiter. His instrumentals were often quite good, but the superficial braggadacio lyrics killed the mood for me. Not my cup of tea, but should have been my cup of hot chocolate.

Lisi Eder, 2010

Let's Do The Time Warp Again

Johnny Bliss, 2010

More to my liking was some old school new wave/electro in the style of David Bowie. The artist was a quirky and sympathetic Australian guy in a red one-piece suit, named Dyko.

Apparently he lives in Frankfurt, but is nevertheless still a foreigner, which would explain his extremely clear and dialect-free singing in German.

A good friend of mine (who also witnessed the concert) called him the Rammstein of Electro Pop, and I find that description oddly accurate.

It was a very flamboyant set right out of the '70s or '80s, and I liked how Dyko kept going down into the crowd and dancing with people. I danced too.

And so, by the time Dyko left the stage, I had re-emerged from a dark and stormy funk into a real party mood. Just in time for...

DAT Politics

Johnny Bliss, 2010

Johnny Bliss, 2010

I have been kicking myself over missing their show at the the Donaufestival 2009, when I got to interview them... and then had to leave half an hour before their set started.

Luckily, in Austria the golden rule seems to be, if you wait long enough, if you are patient, sooner or later every artist comes back.

And so, on this lonely mountain at just after one in the morning, I finally got to experience the 8-bit electro dance funk of DAT Politics in person.

I did not dig all of the vocals (some of the lyrics were a little too basic for my taste), but the music was original, the percussion was amazing, and in the end I did dance my ass off.

They ended after one encore at about 2:45, after what seemed like a nice long set. Although I was ready for more, as it turned out it was the best thing ever that they stopped when they did.

3 a.m.

When we returned to our tent, we found it suspiciously annihilated, broken, and flattened. Everything inside was soaked, everything outside was strewn chaotically about on the landscape. It looked as if a tornado had struck.

It could have legitimately been the wind, which WAS strong. But we also suspected those sheep, who had been eyeing our tent hungrily earlier, and who quite possibly smelled the edibles we'd left inside.

Either way, we were very lucky to discover our misfortune when we did. Just a few minutes later, the last cable car of the night was going back down to Innsbruck, and had we missed it, our only recourse would have been to sleep on cold benches at the station, in our soggy sleeping bags.

Lisi Eder, 2010

These people are more intelligent than us, but less rugged.

And so, regretting what we already knew: that we would miss the next day's line-up, including Crazy Bitch in a Cave and Cherry Sunkist, we climbed aboard the cable car with about two million other young people.

It was a bit of a sardine can. I found myself crushed together with at least a dozen strangers, and experiencing the various smells and inadvertent intimacies that come with it.

With all due respect intended to this unique and fantastic music festival, I suddenly found myself looking forward to a little bit of sunlight.

Lisi Eder, 2010