Second week of Festival Summer. This time it was Myötätuulirock in Vantaa, actually the municipal I live in. So no need to travel too much, this was also supposed to be only photography festival… Buut, during the week I got a phone call that the guys and girl of Ensiferum would need some help, so naturally I ended up helping them. So my friday started getting the backline and people of Ensiferum horde from their rehearsal place to the festival site. We arrived quite early, since you couldn’t build the backline yet, so time to get something to eat. The food was amazing! But the only drawback was that the only drink you could get free with the meal was coffee?!? I mean no water, no juice, no milk. You’d have to pay to get those kind of drinks from the food area, ofcourse near the stage and at the backstage booth there were free drinks… oh man, so I ate quickly and went to get some water.

After Viikate ended and got their stuff from the stage, Ensiferum could build their drums on the riser, so while they were building stuff I went to take pictures of Tarot which was the next band, good pics, good show, but this time nothing too special. After them it was time for Ensiferum, it’s always great to see them, this time they had also to backing vocal guests. The set ended up with Battle Hymn, the legendary Manowar piece. And I must tell you, it was greeeaat! This old power metal / Manowar fanboy was just amazed. Awesome. After that, we quickly loaded the gear back into the van. Then it was time for Exodus, I was suprised how good they were, I saw them couple of years ago, but wasn’t too impressed. Too bad I couldn’t see the whole gig since we had to take the gear back to the rehearsal place, since the band had a early leaving to France the next morning.

The rest of the weekend was more “free” for me, so on Saturday I arrived just in time to see Kiuas play. Solid set, always amusing speaks, but I prefer club gigs. After them it started to rain, so I tried to protect my camera, actually I didn’t care too much about Diablo or Mokoma so no harm done, but missing Korpiklaani wasn’t that great, bugger. The rain calmed down a bit, so I went and tried to shoot Swallow the Sun, few good shots but the rain was getting on the lens and I was scared if it would get inside the body too, so I decided to leave the area since there wasn’t anything to do. On my way I got the information from the Turisas fellows that during their show there would be some pyros…. I actually went home, for almost four hours since it was raining like hell and I wasn’t too keen on the next few bands. Luckily I came back to see the Turisas show, since it was really, really good! Actually when I arrived to the area I went to find the pyro guy since you can’t always go infront of the stage to take photos during pyros. But it turned out that I knew the pyro dude and he gave me a grand tour of the pyros on stage so I would know where they were and what would happen. I even almost ended up doing the the pyros, he asked me if I knew the songs I was well yeah, kinda. Goody this button does this and this that, go for it! It was an interesting opportunity, but it would mean no pyro photos, so I made a deal, if the security doesn’t let me shoot the pyros I’ll do them, but they allowed me infront of the stage, so no pyromaniacy this time.

Sunday didn’t offer that much, I just came there to shoot Amorphis, the announcer Jone Nikula seemed pissed of or he was piss drunk, enyway he shouted some bullshit on the stage for sometime and after that Amorphis, took the photos, met couple friends and left home. Too bad this year the rain kinda screwed things up since there wasn’t too many places to take cover and maybe a second stage wouldn’t hurt, so the waiting times between bands wouldn’t be so long.

See photos HERE

It’s the time of year when the festival summer is upon us. At first I thought that there wouldn’t be too many festivals this summer that I visit for reason or other. Like last summer my festival count was 11 and the year before that it was 13.

Well I started my Festival Summer from Estonia, there was this event called Reiu Rock in Pärnu. I went there with Amoral. Before we left there was some misshappenings, like the info that yes we would have hotel rooms in Pärnu BUT the ferry would leave so early that we would have to check out from the hotel at 4 in the morning… Tried to change the ferrys but the later ones were full, oh well. The second unfortunate event was that our first car broke the week before, but luckily we got another van for the trip.

The ferry to Estonia left at 11 in the morning on Saturday (12.6.) and I can tell you there’s really not much to do at the ferry, the trip lasts only about 2,5 hours but when it’s full you can hardly find a place to sit and you have big lines whatever you want to do, go to the tax free shop, try get something to eat or drink, allways a big line. Well eventually the trip was over and there were few locals waiting for us, they would guide us to the festival. Our van could travel only around 80kmh since it was registered as a truck, so when I had my GPS stuff with me (mini laptop with Microsofts Autoroute and externald GPS locator), I made a deal with the locals that they just show us the easy way out of Tallinn and after that they could floor it and no need to wait for us.

Distance between Tallinn and Pärnu is only about 130 kilometers, nice countryside scenery and the roads were actually in better condition then the ones here in Finland currently. Couple of urea brakes and suddenly we were at the festival site. Actually the battery from my laptop ran out just before Pärnu, but luckily I had the image and road numbers in my head. After getting the driving permits and wrist bands we were at the gate for artists, but there was no personel… I just went and opened the gate myself and closed after we got our van inside. The backstage parking area was quite full and I had to do some famous precision driving in order to fit the van there. I bet most of the cars there could have been somewhere else… Also the area behind the stage was surrounded by some weird moat/ditch type of thing and it only had one bridge and it was at the opposite side where we could fit our van, so you had to make a silly detour when carrying the stuff to the stage. Also you could have hoped for a small tent for the stuff, if it was going to rain all the stuff would get wet, but luckily it didn’t rain.

We got food tickets to some food tent, first I was bit worried since atleast in Finland you have this “spydäri” pyttipannu, don’t know the translation, mixed pieces of frozted meat and potatoes and something else and it usually isn’t too good, in those plain-food-tents but here they had tasty sausages, pieces of chicken and real potatoes and some sort of soup, goody! We got also lots of drinks, lots of energy drink which would come in use the next early morning, and suprisingly lot of different alcohol stuff, you can’t always bet that you could get so much of that, but since I was the driver, I just took some water, cola and energy drinks to the car.

Band had a good gig and the personel were professional and the sound was good. But since we had an early checkout, 45 minutes after the show stopped we had the gear in our van and were already heading towards the hotel. I managed to sleep for couple of hours, quick wash and to the hotel lobby with Ari to wait for the others. As we waited there was this drunken finn wandering from the city center to the hotel, well usually when you encounter a drunken finn at some hotel early in the morning, he usually tends to be a pain in the ass, but this guy was really nice, he had some cool travel stories which he told us as we waited for the other fellows to arrive. Sometimes you can be positively suprised!

After the others came we started our trip towards Tallinn, nothing really happened, I stopped to get some diesel for the van once, but other than that we didn’t have any stops and nothing special happened. After we got into the ferry everyone just tried to find a place to get some sleep, I snoozed for some time and tried to read a science magazine when I wasn’t… Even more boring ferry ride back. So we arrived in Finland about 10:30 at sunday morning so we were out of country for under 24 hours.

Pictures from the gig: HERE