Right before I start with the pictures from Wacken a small interlude of last Friday. Then at the Dutch Ulft the Huntenpop Festival took place which Within Temptation had chosen for their "First Challenge". The concert should be a special one, at least it was announced on their website beforehand and the band did not promise too much. With a fantastic show on stage not only the whole current album "The Unforgiving" was played but also further great classics. That was how round about two hours in front of a quite small crowd were filled. Great athmosphere, great show, is there anything you could want more?
The Wacken Open Air 2011 is history. Across four days the heroes of metal like Blind Guardian or Judas Priest but also smaller bands as well as newcomers from all styles of metal music were playing. In keeping with the motto: "See you at Wacken, rain or shine" you could tell this also about the weather because really everything was offered: it was changing all the time with rain in the morning, clouds around the time until noon and afterwards mostly sunny. The concerts thankfully took place only during the dry phases, only during the last two bands of the festival Children Of Bodom and Subway To Sally two short but heavy rain showers went down turning the festival area into a huge puddle of mud.
Finally I reviewed the last pictures of my collection and reworked them and so there is now the article and the pictures of the historic victory of the German icehockey national team against the Finnish national team online. In front of a sold out Nordhorn ice rink the DEB guys showed a very convincing performance and were having the Finns under control all the time so that the game ended after 60 minutes 4:2.
On 12.03.2011 many metal fans entered the holy halls of the Turbinenhalle Oberhausen to hail bands like Obscurity, Varg, Korpiklaani or Eluveitie. Also I was attending this extended version of the Paganfest tour which was increased that day by Obscurity, Heidevolk and Eluveitie who supported the already very good lineup of bands (Kivimetsän Druidi, Arafel, Varg, Moonsorrow, Unleashed and Korpiklaani).
Slowly I am getting to the first quarter of the year and so finally the pictures and review for the concert of Epica at the sold out Hedon at Zwolle is online. Support act were the Dutch newcomer of Sin7sinS who also already supported Revamp at the Atak at Enschede and were opener for them.
On 23.04.2011 the two bands Midnattsol and Leaves' Eyes presented their new albums released the day before at the Atak at Enschede. They were supported by the Austrian symphonic metal band Serenity.
On 10.05.2011 Kamelot was guest at the Cologne Live Music Hall and had not fewer than three support acts with them: Sons Of Seasons (the project of Kamelot keyboarder Oliver Palotai), Amaranthe and Evergrey. Chaos with the time when the concert should start, very mixed music styles and great uncertainty how Kamelot would perform without Khan. They presented a lot and it was quite fun but some questions were left open in the end. It was very dark inside the hall but nevertheless I was able to take at least some usable pictures of the bands.
It has been quite a while that there was an update on the website but this will change now. I had built a new computer and for many components I had to wait quite a while due to delivery delays. High professional workload was also there so this is really the first news from my side in this year. That was not very uneventful and so during the upcoming weeks a lot of new picutres will find their way onto the website.
After a long time I really did it and went through the left overs of concert pictures to get them online. These are from the Metal Female Voices Fest VII in the year 2009. More or less my love for taking pictures at concerts was born there. The pictures are not of that good quality (at least I hope that I learned something to produce better ones meanwhile) but I hope that you will like them anyhow and that you get a slight impression of this great festival.
As you already may have seen I finally was able to renew the foundation and the structure of the website to a new and hopefully better state. From now on not only more concerts are online (Rammstein, Metal Female Voices Fest VIII, etc.), but also some futher categories like landscapes. Furthermore there are corrections and updates of the reviews (this will be continued and is not yet finished for all galleries).