My favorite festival for the last years has been Norbergfestivalen. This is a small small festival with electronic music you’ve never heard of. In fact you’ve probably never heard of the genres. I know I have not for many many of both the artists and the genres. I always have fun when visiting.
One of the scenes at the festival is Mimer, it’s an old huge building made of concrete. Everything you play there will reverberate for atleast 4 seconds. Very suitable for drone-like music. It was there I began to appreciate drone and noise, for real.
So I was very happy when my favorite festival had a remix-compo with sounds from Mimer. Yes I know, not really a remix if it’s not a song to begin with. But I made a little song that I was pretty happy with. Uploaded and waited for the deadline to come. The deadline arrived, and was moved. Fair enough, they had loads to do that weekend.
The voting was system was novel, but nice. The more Facebook likes/tweets etc you’re song got the better you would rank. If you where among the top nine you would be on a record and have a chance to get picked by the jury to play at either Mimer or another stage (with less reverb)
I was hogging F5 on the webpage and noticed that there was an article about the remix-compo competitors to check their submissions. Only twenty entries! This was good news, I would get at least three votes from myself. That would kick ass, I had almost fifty percent chance of getting in that record, and five percent to get the gig.
Now the big wait for the voting began. I was planning on making a splash here and on Facebook, and talk to my friends all over.
Still pressing on F5 in my browsers, at least once a day.
Then one day I get an email congratulations to the ten winners. This surprised me, since I hadent seen anything. But a few emails back and forth reveled that there had been a Facebook announcement, that also showed at the homepage, but out to the right in an iFrame. I did not look there. I’m not active on twitter, so I missed that. And their RSS feed had broken down, so I did not get a message there. And there was no email saying that the voting had begun, or if there was, I did not get it.
I’m sure the best ten songs are up there, if you look at sound cloud mine has a lot less plays then any of the others. I dont particularly care about winning or loosing, but this time the odds seemed to be in my favor. Listeners would get what I was doing, since they are familiar with the genre. I have entered drone-songs in general compos and finished last. What get’s me is that this time I had a fighting chance. But I did not get the chance, out of all the communications channels, none reached me.
This year I wont go to Norberg. I dont recognize any of the bands playing, and after the emotional roller coaster that ended in a pool of mud I dont really feel like driving for a day, camp on stone, fight mosquitoes big as helicopters and pretend that I’m not feeling sad because I lost out on the chance. But you go, have fun.