Sunday, September 17, 2017

Golden Leaves Festival 2017

This year's GLF was planned in parallel with a couple of other events: the SXSW in Frankfurt that ran from Thursday to Sunday, a Lasertag Saturday and a mini table tennis tournament on Sunday. As any other super multitalented multitasking parents would do, we kept to all engagements by setting priorities. That kept everyone happy as we were able to enjoy the best bits of everything!

Golden Leaves Festival 2017 - Darmstadt



As usual, GLF was meticulously planned. Every single prop was lovingly handcrafted, from the hand painted golden brown autumn animals murals to the colorful bunting that hung gently overhead on the arms of the beautiful giant oak trees.

Little music lovers

This year we noticed that there were even more children in the crowd than the years before - could the crowd be getting older? Man!  I was pretty envious when I saw that kids get pretty little customized necklace with an imprinted of a leaf on a wooden pendant. The tiny tots were freely roaming around happily with huge fluorescent ear plugs. Some were busy picking and sorting acorns, some carefully filling up watering cans creating more puddles, some were trying to swing like baby apes from the white stringers roped around branches.


Astronautalis at the GLF!!


No music indoctrination this time. We just dived into GLF without the usual expectations. Gentle ripples of impressions were made by the first few groups, but the big splash was without doubt made by Astronautalis. A single talented one man band with his techno rap not only brought the crowd on our feet but probably just made our day and marked THE music band for GLF 2017! Yea.....so did the really talented Icelandic VÖK - a dream-pop/indie-electronica band!


VÖK - with our not-so-tiny-tots in the first front row

Friday, June 30, 2017

Maifeld Derby 2017

Maifeld Derby 2017 was by far the best year yet! Are the kids older, thus allowing us to stay up longer? Is the music selection getting better thus attracting even a larger eclectic group of amazing artists? Whatever the reason, Maifeld Derby was ranked this year as the Germany’s second BEST music festival for new comers. For the very first time, the core event was transmitted live on ArteConcert. (If you do not know Arte, it’s a public French-German tv network channel dedicated to arts and culture.)


Live Streaming by Arte Concert


We belted, danced and sang the entire Friday evening with Flut, J. Bernardt, Wild Beasts, Cigarettes after Sex, Sohn and Bilderbuch. We couldn’t managed more because Baby M was already swaying on his feet. And as much as he wanted to stay on for one of his favorite DJ - Trentemøller, we decided that staying up until 2am might be pushing it bit too much if we want to come back the next day.


Dinner break between bands
On Saturday we turned up about dinner time for Metronomy, listen to the amazing Kate Tempest rapped on stage (Last year she had the relaxing Parcours d’amour with the original intention of a reading from her new novel, but that quickly morphed into an impromptu rapping in the end. This year Kate got her own outdoor Fackelbühne with her entire band.) and wrapped up with Moderat.

We left out Sunday because kids needed a day to recover before going back to school on Monday..and also the summer heat was making us extremely drowsy and sleepy. Besides, this year we could stream from the Mediathek - courtesy of Arte on the programms we have missed. 

Loved it! See you Maifeld Derby 2018...

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