Creative Update: Festival Fever at Soundsphere

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August usually sees the curtain come down on the summer festival season, and the Soundsphere magazine team at The Creative Condition have certainly been revelling some in these moments in recent weeks.

What’s more, these festival jaunts haven’t been restricted to British shores. Editor of Soundsphere, Dom, has recently returned from a week attending one of Europe’s leading celebration of live music and performance art, Sziget – in the northern suburbs of Hungarian capital Budapest.

Taking in a menu of acts as diverse as The Horrors, KoRn, Snoop Dogg, Placebo, Dimmu Borgir and The Stone Roses – the twentieth-anniversary week-long event has become an annual event in Soundsphere’s calendar. After gathering pages of notes, megabytes of audio files and a myriad of photographs taken by his partner-in-crime Stacey, Dom’s comprehensive review of Sziget 20 is now online on the magazine’s website.

The weekend past saw the magazine represented at Beacons Festival in the Yorkshire Dales by York-based scribe (and member of Darker Shades of Gorgeous) Pete Wise; an event infused with indie and reggae rhythm. Pete’s review of Beacons for Soundsphere is also due for imminent publication.

Which brings us to the weekend ahead, when Soundsphere will be attending not one, but two, festivals.

Head honco Dom will be accompanied by writer Evangeline Spachis and photographer Nick Stannard to attend Leeds Festival from Friday onwards. Dom has disclosed a handful of interviews are already arranged which will feature in the future – we won’t name names just yet – and when sets from the calibre of The Black Keys, Enter Shikari, Justice and Azaelia Banks aren’t even the headliners (that’ll be Foo Fighters, The Cure and Kasabian on respective nights over the weekend).

At the same time, two of us are covering another Yorkshire-located long weekend of live music on the outskirts of a North Yorkshire village. However, don’t let the Forest of Galtres Festival‘s seemingly idyllic location of Crayke deceive you into thinking the three-day event is as dormant. Galtres combines a prime selection of singer/songwriters on the Northern alternative music scene with legendary bill-topping acts; who this year are Adam Ant, Ash and The Buzzcocks.

Mike is heading to Galtres this weekend to catch up with as many performers (musical and otherwise) and participants as possible for a future Soundsphere TV report, so if you’re milling around the fields of Crayke this weekend, please come up to us and say Hi!

Soundsphere’s presence covering the festival scene this summer hasn’t just been confined to this month. In June, regular contributor Steve Nash shared his perspective on this year’s Download Festival in the East Midlands, heaping particular praise on NOFX, Black Spiders and headline act The Prodigy.

Even if preliminary weather forecasts for the coming weekend look dodgy, it’s unlikely to put a dampener on our spirits at Leeds and Galtres in the
days to come. The thrills – and we hope not so nasty spills – of our festival experiences of recent times will come to a computer screen near you –
soon.

Published by Creative Condition

Specialist press and copywriting agency.

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