The people behind Way Out West do their best to think green when they fill the park Slottsskogen in Gothenburg with music. This year with artists like Prince, Kanye West and Robyn. Photo: Sima Korenivski / GFC
The Swedish holiday season is soon about to take over this country. After having celebrated Midsummer on Friday, most of the country tunes into summer mood.
One sector that tunes up its level though, are the music festivals. Summer is the time to enjoy live music in the open, whether it’s classical music or rock, whether it’s at a big city festival or a small obscure independent thing in the middle of a forest.
Lately more and more of these festivals have started putting a bigger focus on the sustainability aspects, considering that gathering thousands of persons at one place, providing food, drinks and sanitation for everyone, can mean quite a big environmental impact.
Here are some of the ones that have put an extra effort in an environmentally conscious profile:
* Mossagårdsfestivalen (web site only in Swedish) June 17-19. This summer’s first green music festival took place already last weekend. Mossagården is an organic farm in the South of Sweden selling vegetable food-boxes, but once a year they arrange a music festival at the farm with free horsecarriage-taxi from the local bus station and organic food.
* Urkult August 4-6. One of the first green music festivals in Sweden. This year will be the 17:th time that the festival will be held above the ancient carvings at Nämforsen rapids in the North of Sweden. Urkult has urine separating toilet, all food served there is organic and all tdisposable products used are compostable. The festival has its own compost at a nearby field.
* Way out West August 11-13. This festival, held in the largest park of Gothenburg, is active in the development of an environmental certification system for eventmakers. The food is organic, the energy renewable and as a city festival Way Out West doesn’t even have a camping, partly with the argument that a city provides a lot of good existing green infrastructure, so why not use it instead of transporting people and material to a distant place to construct something temporary?
* Saltoluokta folkmusikfestival August 10-14 . One of Sweden’s few festivals in “roadless land” at the Saloloukta Mountain Station on the border of Laponia, with focus on Sweden’s Northern cultures. Get there by a small boat, sleep on a reindeer skin in a sami tent and learn how to joik , (the traditional Sami way to sing).
* Kosterfestivalen July 23-29. Chamber music in the Koster Gardens, that normally serve organic slowfood produced in the gardens. The idea is to combine art, music and nature at a beautiful spot by the sea on the Swedish West coast.
Saltoloukta Folk Music Festival couldn’t get much closer to nature, literally speaking. Photo: STF.
After finishing lunch with a friend at Kulturhuset, I walked right into an eccentric rooftop performance by the group Creative Electric. The group was performing as part of the Stockholm Fringe Festival (Stoff) which runs from August 24-27.
