Arts & Culture

2017 - Autumn Moon Festival

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Third Autumn Moon Festival in Hameln

Another year has passed, it's autumn again, the Autumn Moon Festival takes place in Hameln again and I have been looking forward to it since months.
A few weeks have passed now, the unbelievable flood of pictures has been sorted, the best ones have been edited and the worst ones have been deleted. Now it's time for my festival summary.
It was the third time that Autumn Moon took place (the second time for me) and just like last year I was really impressed by the atmosphere and the organization. The fact that all locations were so close to each other and mostly connected by the Halloween market meant that you could combine the pleasant (mulled fruit wine, flat bread with sheep's cheese) with the useful (getting from A to B) when changing locations. There was certainly enough choice of food and drink stalls. And just like last year, the Rattenfängerhalle was very atmospheric with a "forest" and a complete ghost ship. The staff at the entry, the bar, the stalls and the security were also incredibly friendly, just like last year.

The range of different bands was huge, so there was something for everyone's taste (unless they were at the wrong festival). 
As a result, opinions about which bands were "headliners" and which were not will probably differ greatly. In fact, my highlights were mostly bands I hadn't seen before, or at least not like this. While "Inkubus Sukkubus" were good but (for me) not earth-shattering when they opened the day at 3 pm, I found their second performance, this time with a purely acoustic set in the "living room"-like atmosphere of the ship, absolutely brilliant. The music and the ambience went together perfectly.
Apart from that, my impression was: "the later the evening, the more energetic the bands". This was the quite visible in the "Kochkraft durch KMA" concert on Friday (I still haven't figured out what KMA stands for and what "Kochkraft" might be), during which singer Lana Van da Vla happily jumped around on and in front of the stage (using the microphone cable as a skipping rope). Even though I heard mixed opinions about this concert afterwards, I really enjoyed it in its crazy way. The same pattern repeated on Saturday: at the INVSN concert, singer Dennis Lyxzén rarely touched the ground, most of the time he seemed to fly across the stage, and the energy was just as present in the music.

As a photographer you might complain about the dense fog at Faun ("Okay, we photographed fog in four different colors, but could we please have a glimpse at the band?") or the cramped conditions at Papa Hemingway, but I think that's complaining on a high level and ultimately it's not the goal to tailor the concerts to the photographers. 
And so I can only say that I had a lot of fun photographing the festival again and I'm already looking forward to next year.