Roadburn Festival 2012: The Creature Stirs – part 2

As you all have noticed, the line up for Roadburn 2012 is starting to shape up very nicely. We are extremely pleased with all of the additions so far. Finally, after spending several years trying to get Sleep as overall headliner, it is going to happen. The Roadburn website almost caved under the heavy traffic when we made the announcement.
The same thing happened when we shared the news about The Obsessed reunion and d.USK/diSEMBOWELMENT traveling to Roadburn to play Transcendence into the Peripheral in its entirety. Confirmations of OM, Agalloch, Hexvessel, 40 Watt Sun, Sólstafir, Necros Christos, Saviours, Gnod, Spiders, Necro Deathmort, and Devil have also caused a quite a stir among the Roadburn community.

All of this has definitely helped me move out of the anxiety zone and into the excitement zone. Last time I checked in I was feeling pretty intimidated as we started to work on Roadburn 2012. We sincerely want Roadburn 2012 to be as good as the previous editions of our festival, but I was seriously wondering whether it was madness to try.
In the meantime I am pretty sure that Roadburn 2012 will be amazing in its own right! In addition to my personal belief in the line up so far, I have your overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to go on. Thanks for your support. It inspires us to go to great lengths to help bands get to Roadburn within the power of our budget.

Unfortunately, we have been forced to cross a few great cult bands off the Roadburn 2012 list, due to either conflicting schedules or contract-related stalemates. This is a reality that I face everyday while working on the festival. Fortunately, those bitter pills are easier to swallow knowing that technical thrash metal legends Coroner will be headlining the Afterburner. And that Bongripper will be playing SatanWorshipping Doom in its entirety. And that Norway’s avant-garde rock maestros Virus and Finland’s Fleshpress and Dark Buddha Rising are coming over for one-off shows. There is way more to look forward to than to despair.

Voivod are currently working on their curated event, which they have named Au-delà du Réel, the name of the band’s favorite sci-fi show The Outer Limits when it aired on French Canadian TV back in the Seventies. Having Anekdoten on the bill is a dream come true for both bands. It is fantastic to see this kind of mutual respect, and is something that makes the Roadburn experience second to none. Expect more Au-delà du Réel announcements soon when the first round of bands have been confirmed.

We asked Voivod‘s Away to do the official artwork for Roadburn 2012, and we hope to proudly unveil his design very soon. We are thrilled that his distinctive art will grace the Roadburn poster and our website.

It is not your imagination: as we strive to continue blazing our unique artistic trail there is a marked emphasis on all things heavy for Roadburn 2012. We are pretty sure it is not our imagination that many bands in the doom / sludge / avant-metal scenes are currently reaching new heights.  At the same time, we will be sure to preserve Roadburn tradition by making sure we add some juicy psychedelica and heavy 70s to the bill, too. For starters, we consider ourselves extremely lucky that Leaf Hound will be commemorating their 40th anniversary by playing the entire Growers of Mushroom album at Roadburn 2012.

We will announce the Thursday headliner and the artist in residence soon. But first, we will take a short break until 16 October as we focus on confirming the next round of bands. Of course, we will let you know if there is any urgent news.

Walter on behalf of Jurgen and Roadburn.
(Thanks to Leslie Hadlock)

Tags: Roadburn, Roadburn 2012, Roadburn Festival, Roadburn Festival 2012

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2011 at 8:19 am and is filed under 2011, Festival News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.