HELFEST2010

One of the many internships I'm juggling (and gradually dropping) is a writing gig for an online music magazine based in Shanghai. I'm acting as one of their Beijing correspondents along with two other writers. I met one of the others at the INTRO Electronic Music Festival, and the other I was to meet at this other show. She briefly mentioned it in an e-mail, without divulging any particularly descriptive information, so I headed towards the venue assuming the show was just another Chinese rock band, that is to say, a tired, worn-out sound and performance.

A side note: Beijing is a fairly homogeneous city in its architecture, which makes navigating unfamiliar areas extremely frustrating. As I was trying to find the venue, my co-writer was giving me directions on the phone, describing landmarks to help guide my way. The homogeneity of Beijing's buildings makes it so that every building can only be vaguely described by a few characteristics (color, size...) and you can almost always find a building that somewhat fits a description, even if you're on the other side of the city. So I found all her landmarks, but they weren't at all arranged in the way they should have been, and after resigning to meet at the subway station, I realized I had gotten off on the wrong stop and had spent the past hour wandering around in the wrong neighborhood.

Coming from Philadelphia, I'm entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon of venues and clubs being located on any floor but the first. This venue was on the third floor of monolithic structure reminiscent of the Kaaba, and as we climbed the stairs towards the muffled music it became clear that my assumptions were all wrong. The merch table had sprawled across it posters boldly announcing HELFEST2010, and on stage were a bunch of manic musicians dressed as Vikings, playing what sounded like extremely triumphant renditions of old Irish jaunts.

I had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was a seizure of strobe lights and double-pedaled kick drums. There was a scraggly ent-of-a-man wailing on his axe, braided beard and all, some Swedish girl twiddling on an accordion, a crazed man on the fiddle, and some other instrumentation that I didn't really pay attention to. I'm not well-versed enough in metal subgenres to understand their nuances and reliably distinguish between them, so I can't with any confidence state the type of metal fest I was at. But what I can say is it played out exactly as I ever have expected a metal gathering to, with Satan horns flung out above the raging crowd, a hoard of tightly-gripped fists and untameable sweaty hair reaching high into a whirlwind of fog and lights.

At one point, the singer announced that he was splitting the audience into two sides. Holy shit, I thought, this is my one chance to be in a wall-of-death. So from the fringes of the crowd I push myself to the front of one side, ready to charge. But then it turns out to be some lame side-vs-side singing contest. Not. Metal.