TOLMINATOR REPORT: DAY 1

(In mid-June we published a preview by our Slovenian comrade Didrik Mešiček of the star-studded Tolminator festival in his home country that was then set to kick off in late July. When it did kick off, Didrik was there, and below you will find his report on the first day. It’s accompanied by excellent photos, including a large Flickr gallery at the end, made by Katja Torkar/Bloodbat Photography.)

Summer brings with it many things – the heat, the impending dread of the next storm and how much damage it’ll do, but most of all it brings the joys of summer, and amongst those what’s better than metal festivals?

Slovenia’s metal scene reputation has taken a bit of a hit lately as you’ll know if you’ve ever heard or read the unfortunate word “Metaldays” but that beast has been fully slain and buried in what has brought nothing but relief to most people. Upon its grave, a new hope has grown, a young and green tree by the name of Tolminator, now in its second year after a generally impressive debut in 2023.

The festival brings a unique location as it’s based on the confluence of two Alpine rivers while presenting a fairly solid extreme metal lineup and what has become a proverbially pleasant atmosphere ever since some 20 years ago when metal festivals first arose in the area. Much like last year, I was once again allowed to pretend to be a real journalist at the festival and this is why you now get to – naturally to your extreme satisfaction – read a bit about what happened at Tolminator 2024. 

The weather prognosis is, of course, not ever a thing one can trust, especially when one lives around the Alps, and thus the “cloudless sunny day” has been rather rainier than one might have presumed. The two-hour drive therefore included many radar checks to see whether the clouds are merciful and would have passed by the time we’ve arrived at the festival.

They were not. But still, it was not more than a drizzle and with some 30 minutes before the opening band there was time to have a quick look around. The main stage has been moved 180 degrees since last year and I read beforehand that this is “better” (we’ll cover that at a later point), while the underground stage has – in one of the better decisions – been moved to the beach, in the very vicinity of the rivers.

At the unholy and very un-metal hour of 11:50AM the musical program began with the local atmoblack outfit, Kamra. Initially, I had no plan to be at the fest this early on day one, but this is not a band to pass up as it is – by some distance – the coolest metal thing to have come out of Slovenia in recent years.

The band usually surrounds itself in darkness and mist and seeing them at noon seemed just a bit silly, while the vocalist, Nik Košar, had some problems trying to be mysterious under his hood. It was not long until all of that was forgotten, however, as his extreme shrieks transcend planes of existence as they delve into DSBM territory, but the band’s sound remains firmly in this mystical and ritualistic black metal. Kamra is hypnotic and surreal, it can be an onslaught and just as easily an eerie lullaby. Thus, I stood there, in light rain, at noon, with a smile on my face every time those growls and shrieks ventured into some special place within the realms of black metal.

The sun was shyly appearing now and I quickly took a chance to dip my feet into the river which was, unlike the hideous after-storm brown last year, enchantingly green as well as pleasantly cold. As the upcoming bands weren’t too interesting or I’d seen them before (Samperium, Sovrag, Public Grave) this was a chance to have a bit more of a look around and greet some friends in camp who’d already arrived a few days earlier.

It wasn’t too long until it was time to go back to the beach stage, however, where we had to pretend to be real journalists once more and the Belgian death metal band Carrion were taking the stage. This may be my personal bias but I’m really struggling to find a large portion of death metal to be interesting in any way. The Belgians weren’t horrible, however, with some bass lines especially being intriguing and their performance appealing enough to break the monotony. Their latest album is called Morbid Nailgun Necropsy, and I believe that tells you enough about their music – it’s definitely aggressive, straightforward and uncompromising death metal that the crowd of about 150 people, a bit smaller than earlier for Kamra, rather enjoyed.

After another 20-minute break, it was time for something much tamer and something I’ve been looking forward to very much. The Austrian Dusk plays a rather doomy heavy metal, fronted by an actual woman (shocking, eh?), Denika Denkmair, who has a very particular presence on stage that elevates the band’s performance.

The band played most of their songs from the latest album, Wheels of Twilight (which is fantastic,) and despite needing just a bit to get going it wasn’t long until I was fully entranced and singing along while the skies decided to punish us for our past misdeeds with another shower.

Denika Denkmair is fairly minimalistic in her movement yet at the same time commanding of the stage, using props such as a dagger and adding a tambourine in some songs. The beach stage’s sound was continuously very impressive and with Dusk this was especially important as there’s that fine line in a dirty, doomy sound between highly alluring and disastrously muddled.  Thus the 40 allocated minutes passed quickly and I’d think back to this show during the upcoming days a few more times as I was wishing for a break from the onslaught of death and thrash metal.

Thrash metal! It’s certainly one of the subgenres of metal and often not one of the best ones. Tolminator has to be commended for the choice of their beach stage headliners, though, as Dust Bolt closed this first day on the beach and they sure did so in style.

This is a band that simply knows how to put on a show, their thrash crosses into a fairly mainstream sound at time, a sound that could be accused of flirting with punk rock and honestly, I’m perfectly happy with that. The Germans are energetic, their playing is tight, their crowd control brilliant, and the crowd, which was now at a few hundred, helped them along with a near-constant circle/moshpit under the stage.

Having released a new album in February, the band played a few tracks from that which seemed generally well accepted while the vocalist/guitarist Lenny B. ended the show by jumping into the crowd with his guitar and mic stand and performing under the stage while a group of the most enthusiastic fans ran around him in a circle pit. Against all odds, no one got killed in this madness, but we all definitely had a very good time and therefore Dust Bolt is a band I can only recommend you go see whether their music sounds appealing to you or not.

The first day had one more band playing than the other days, and that meant there was only a five-minute break before the main stage started – and because Dust Bolt decided in a very thrashy manner to fuck the timeline and play an extra song we were already hearing Jungle Rot playing before we managed to make our way to the main stage.

If you’re anything like me – firstly, my commiserations – you’re probably wondering what kind of a name for a band is “jungle rot.” Turns out it’s some skin ulcer thingy that makes your flesh rot, so suddenly that makes a lot more sense. What didn’t make as much sense was the band’s poor crowd interaction, with the vocalist just continuously yelling “old school” between nearly every song.

It’s funnier because the band was formed in 1992 (so you know, not that old) and has a bit of a groovy touch to their death metal that I wouldn’t necessarily correlate as much with an old school death metal sound. But hey, whatever makes you happy. What made me happy was that the sound on the main stage was actually excellent, unlike the many problems of last year, and maybe that’s why the stage facing the other way was indeed “better.”

None of the bands playing on the main stage on this day looked outright offensive to my senses but still, one needs to take a dinner break and so Sinister was sacrificed. One of the great things about Tolminator is that the store is literally 3 minutes away by car and that is very helpful if you’re not exactly a fan of spending 30€ on just food at the festival every day.

Afterwards, another death metal band was preparing to play and that was Misery Index. The guys seemed to have a few problems with their playing as the drums and the guitars had some issues working cohesively, possibly due to the drummer not hearing his bandmates very well. Their particular style of death metal leans a bit into deathgrind and has a bit too much aggression for my taste, which is a rather common complaint from me when it comes to American bands. Still, their on-stage energy got a bit of a circle pit going and some headbanging from the crowd, especially to the more well-known songs like “New Salem”, and overall their performance was decent – but sadly also not particularly memorable.

Meanwhile, things were happening at a new addition to this year’s edition – the DIY stage. What the fuck is a DIY stage? Well, it’s not much of a stage at all as it is a ramp for skaters to mess about while a band sets up their equipment in front of them and makes all sorts of unholy noises. Over the four days the stage would feature from two to four bands per day, almost entirely local outfits that would generally play something between hardcore-thrash-grindcore and similar sonic filth. The bands would only get 20 minutes for their sets which would fit in between the acts on the main stage so as to never cause any actual overlap of performances.

While I didn’t care for any of this personally, it seems like a lovely addition and whenever I’d pass there were a surprising amount of people there (probably a few hundred) watching the bands. I did manage to check Slugpit, a very new Slovenian death-black-grind band just for a bit and while their name is absolute false advertising as there are no slugs, their sound and performance was not bad at all and it could be interesting to see where this band is heading. Before them, the thrash band Black Camo was performing as well, but I was busy trying not to die from the heat and missed their performance entirely.

 

Possibly the most anticipated show of the festival was coming up next. It was just past 9PM and night had almost fully descended when men (and a woman!) clad fully in black, save for some golden glyphs, invaded the stage.

The Portuguese Gaerea has been making waves in recent years and is one of the more exciting newer black metal bands. Although it’s not their sound and their albums alone that have brought attention to them, it’s their vibrant and energetic live act that made me very eager to see them. The band is fronted by Guilherme Henriques and that is a man who knows how to command the crowd. His voice strong, his actions sharp and measured, he acts on stage like a puppeteer, controlling every person of the crowd while it also simultaneously gives off the impression that he himself is a puppet in the hands of some mysterious dark force that is Gaerea.

The Portuguese opened with their new single, “Hope Shatters”, while most of their setlist was comprised of songs from Mirage – and here is where my one complaint of their performance comes from: While I’m quite familiar with the album, it didn’t feel as if I could easily recognise the songs nor were they as headbangy as they are when I’m listening to them at home. Whether this is a me problem or a band problem, I’m not quite sure, however.  All in all, a small detraction in what was otherwise a sublime performance, a true dramatic act of modern black metal.

Another of my personal highlights followed – seeing Dark Tranquillity for the very first time. The Swedes are by far my favourite of the Göteborg melodeath scene and Mikael Stanne one of my favourite vocalists, and thus this part of the report may not be entirely unbiased.

The band entered the stage to the sound of many high-pitched screams (and obviously, my very manly, brutal scream) and descended into “Encircled” from Atoma. Stanne as well as the rest of the band are absolute professionals and it seemed they charmed the crowd effortlessly right away, yet it felt slightly as if it was taking a while for everything to properly warm up. DT sprinkled all three of their new singles from the upcoming Endtime Signals into their set, but it was not until they played “Atoma” that the craziness in the crowd really took off and the crowdsurfers started coming.

I have to say the setlist could have been more to my liking and perhaps the band felt almost a bit too routine on stage, somewhat lacking in emotion. But it was about an hour in when that famous intro was played and I could not help but smile like a maniac. “ThereIn” is a song that’s been very special to me for years and when the band descended into that romantic chorus and we all sang along – I’d have been pretty happy dying at that point.

“It was solid

Yet ever-changing

Oh, it was different

Yet the same

So I starve myself for energy”

With two more classics, “Lost to Apathy” and “Misery’s Crown”, the set came to a close and I managed to catch a guitar pick while “ThereIn” continued playing in my head as I was still slightly oblivious to the world around me moving on.

Oh god, did you know this bloody festival goes on until nearly 1AM? This isn’t suited for us old people. Therefore we found a place to sit for the 25 minutes before the next band and I was thinking about what sort of a casket I should have at my funeral since I’m clearly close to dying. I think oak.

However, the area under the stage was getting filled up with old thrashers – my personal enemies in the world of metal – as Testament was set to close the evening. Now, I’m aware this is a band that’s very important and many people care about it but I just…can’t? I found this to be one of the dullest performances of the entire festival (well, out of the big bands) and later realised they’re only playing material from the first two albums. Which is…great? For some people?

I tried being entertained in the front for a little bit before retreating to the back which didn’t really make the band any more interesting but I can compliment the sound and say that clearly the band is doing something right as the circle pit happening under the stage was absolutely immense. As the band was finishing their performance and I checked what was going at the front a bit again there were some guys digging around on the floor – it turns out all the running and moshing managed to dislodge the safety cover from the cables going from the stage to the sound-tech shack. So I’m pretty sure we weren’t far off from a disaster.

And that’s the most interesting thing that happened during Testament from my perspective. In summation, solid band, excited fans, but god, please don’t make me listen to them again.

Sleep, however, beckons. And tomorrow we go into battle once more.