After all the excellent metal and rock shows and festivals that are crammed into my schedule, it felt somewhat refreshing to come across an event that focuses on a different part of the alternative and dark scenery. Hellsinki Industrial Festival came in my sights, a festival organised by Elektrik Products, Club Infektio and Findustry, quickly boasting with some of the biggest names in the industrial/EBM/Gothic scene of today. The event that took over Helsinki spread over 3 nights and 3 locations and brought us a very pleasant weekend!

On the actual first festival day we had make the travel all the way to the legendary Nosturi venue. How much more fitting can it get? An old industrial building turned music venue as the setting for an industrial festival… No wonder they featured the actual crane in the official posters for the event. When getting to the actual venue upstairs, I was greeted by an impressive array of neon colored decorations that usually aren’t there. A pretty nice set-up for 2 nights of industrial and electronic music!

First band of the night was the Spanish Larva (***). This industrial duo has been around for about 20 years, bringing harsh beats and a lot of experimentation into the world of electronic music. InqUest, the man behind the main concepts for the outfit, was a quite impressive sight to behold with his frantic behavior and rather aggressive presence. Going back and forth on the stage, splattering blood on himself, imitating suicide and the lot, he brought quite the performance. Backed by Anoxia on the live synths, this was the perfect kick-off for a great weekend.

Up next was a band that I discovered while doing my research for the event and one that I was really curious to see. Sirus (****1/2) came all the way from Melbourne, Australia to rock the stage with their Cyberpunk. The mix of industrial music with rather catchy (punk) rock really lit up the room with of course highlight Singularity from their latest album Apocrypha. Both Josh and Danielle were dancing around full of enthusiasm and easily brought a smile to my face with the overal performance. And the combination of Josh‘s screams and almost tortured clean vocals with Danielle‘s soaring vocal lines are a match made in heaven. A nice little touch to the whole performance were the moments that Josh took his voicebox to record some of the crowd’s yells and screams and play it distorted back into the music to actually make us a part of the show, talk about interaction with the crowd!

An electro outfit that I actually listened to a lot about 10 years ago, is the originally Dutch outfit Grendel (***1/2). Being known back then for their dirty, gritty and harsh beats, I was really looking forward to see them play some of their classic hard techno tracks live. Which turned out to be a bit disappointing to me personally. Don’t get me wrong, the show and performance were actually topnotch and great to see and hear. But overal it sounded more clean and poppy than what I expected from them. It seems that with their latest work and performances they go more in the direction of the synthwave/pop sound of the highly popular outfits Carpenter Brut and Perturbator. Which is again, totally not wrong, but  I would’ve rather have gotten a serving of those gritty old tunes of the “old days”.

Hard beats was something that definitely wasn’t missing from the show by headliner of tonight, Nachtmahr (****). The Austrian industrial/EBM/techno outfit spearheaded by Supreme Commander Thomas Rainer is known for its energetic shows, love for military inspired uniforms and often sexually charged performances. Thomas strode on the stage flanked by his lovely Mädchen in Uniform and backed by luitenant Beyerle for the necessary beats and absolutely killed it on stage. He clearly enjoyed himself massively, seeking connection with his fans that were right there at the edge of the stage and so did his right hand on regular occasions.

At first his ladies joined in by adding some extra power to the beats through the drums they were playing rhythmically, but throughout the show they stood in for a lot of the show elements. They waved around with the official Nachtmahr flag, got partially undressed and then dressed again in a different outfit, ball-gagged one another and acted out a torture scene or 2. People with a fetish for uniforms and the “master and slave” routine definitely got what they came for… Rainer told us at a certain point that some people are saying that Nachtmahr is getting soft and that he was about to prove to us that was not the case. Which he and his mate did several times by both going behind the DJ table and crank out some of the heaviest beats the room had seen that night. Rainer came, saw and absolutely conquered.

For more pictures go here!