On 10 August 1996, in Tiefengruben near Bad Berka in Thuringia, about two hundred people turned up to what was supposed to be a birthday party with a band on it. Three years later, in the Czech Republic, a man called Curby had the same idea and threw the same kind of party. Both of those events are still running. Between them they are now two of the most important extreme metal festivals in Europe.
Nobody in this story set out to build a festival. That is worth holding onto, because it explains why these events feel different from the ones with sponsors on the barrier.
The ballroom, and the annual meeting
The American model came first and it was indoors. Milwaukee Metalfest was started in 1987 by Jack Koshick, who was twenty nine at the time, and it became the once a year building in which the entire American underground stood in the same room. Dozens of bands over a weekend at the Rave and the Eagles Ballroom, most of them unsigned, a good number of them broken up by the following spring.
What it did was collapse the postal network into a weekend. A trader who had spent two years writing to somebody in another state could shake his hand at a merchandise table. Labels signed bands off those stages. It ran from 1987 to 2004, put on a further edition in 2007 and then stopped, and the gap it left was never quite filled by anything American until Baltimore took the job on.
Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed bought the rights from Koshick in 2022 and brought it back over the Memorial Day weekend of 2023, nearly two decades after the last full run, with Immolation and The Black Dahlia Murder on a bill headlined by Lamb of God, Anthrax and Biohazard. It has run every year since.
The field, and what happened when it got out of hand
Europe went outdoors and lost control of it almost immediately.
Dynamo Open Air began in 1986 as a fifth birthday celebration for the Dynamo rock club in Eindhoven, in the club car park, with five thousand people. It moved to a local ice rink from 1988, to the military airport in 1993, and went to three days in 1994. Then came 1995, when a hundred and eighteen thousand people arrived, which made it the largest multi-day open air event ever held in the Netherlands and produced traffic jams long enough that people got out and cooked on the motorway. The municipality capped it at sixty thousand from the following year. It ran until 2005 and came back as Dynamo Metal Fest in 2015.
Read that sequence again. A car park to a hundred and eighteen thousand people in nine years, on a music that no radio station would play. Nobody was ready for it, least of all the local council.
A car park to a hundred and eighteen thousand people in nine years, on a music that no radio station would play.
The fortress, and the purist
The two festivals that now define the European calendar for this music both started in 1996 and 1999, both in the Czech Republic and Germany, and both from almost nothing.
Brutal Assault began in 1996 with a grindcore bill and moved around the country before settling into the Josefov fortress at Jaromer, an eighteenth century military installation built between 1780 and 1787 and sitting between two rivers. Seven thousand people by 2006, around fifteen thousand after the move, two main stages built against the fortress walls, and a stated motto against violence and intolerance. It is the only extreme metal festival in the world where the stage backdrop is a listed monument.
Obscene Extreme is the other pole. Founded in 1999 by Miloslav Urbanec, known universally as Curby, as a birthday party, it holds to grindcore, death metal and hardcore punk, and it has served nothing but vegetarian and vegan food since the first edition, which is not a detail anybody would have predicted for a genre with a reputation for the opposite. Czech Radio has described the atmosphere as exceptionally tolerant and friendly. Napalm Death, Possessed, Obituary, Sodom and Immolation have all played it.
And Germany's largest extreme metal festival grew out of the party that opens this article. Party.San ran on the gliderport at Bad Berka from 1996 to 2010 and moved to Schlotheim in 2011, with a capacity of around eight and a half thousand. By the early two thousands it was booking Amon Amarth, Marduk, Behemoth and Naglfar. Members of two of the local bands from those first editions later turned up in Heaven Shall Burn.
Before the field there was the van
Festivals did not appear out of nowhere in Europe. They were preceded by the package tour, which is the same idea moving at fifty miles an hour with worse catering, and one label ran the two that mattered.
Earache put four of its bands into one van in November 1989 and called it Grindcrusher: Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Carcass and Bolt Thrower, seven shows in seven days across Britain, from 10 to 16 November. Barney Greenway played his first show with Napalm Death on it. Morbid Angel had never toured anywhere before. Shows drew between one thousand and fifteen hundred people, where the same bands on their own had been pulling a couple of hundred. For the price of one ticket a teenager in a provincial city saw the four bands who between them decided what the next decade of this music would sound like, and most of the room had no idea what it was watching.
Three years later the label did it again with Gods of Grind, taking Carcass, Entombed, Cathedral and Confessor around Europe with a compilation released to run alongside the tour. Four bands, four different answers to the question of what to do after grindcore, and a bill that no promoter would have assembled without a label pushing it.
That is the missing link between the mail network and the festival field. A package tour is a label's roster made physical, and once audiences had learned to buy a ticket for six bands instead of one, a weekend with forty of them was only a question of finding a big enough car park.
What a death metal festival is actually for
Not the headliner. Never the headliner.
Look at what these events do that nothing else in the music can do:
- They put a band from one continent in front of an audience from another, which no amount of streaming has ever achieved on its own.
- They let a label see forty bands in three days and sign two of them.
- They give a band with three hundred records sold access to eight thousand people who already like the style.
- They are the only place where the network is physically assembled, which is exactly the job the Death Metal Fanzines did on paper twenty years earlier.
A sixty band bill is the postal network compressed into a weekend, and the merchandise tent is the mail order catalogue with the stamps removed. That is why the good ones grew out of parties and the bad ones grew out of business plans. The people who started them were traders first and promoters afterwards.
What it costs to keep one alive
Be honest about the other side. Milwaukee stopped for the better part of two decades. Dynamo was capped by a council and then closed. Party.San has been battered by storms, badly enough in 2002 and again in 2004 to threaten the whole thing. Neurotic Deathfest managed twelve editions, ending in 2015. Festivals in this music sit one wet weekend away from disaster, because there is no insurance product designed for an event whose audience will stand in a field in a downpour and whose margins were never more than a few thousand tickets wide.
The ones that survive do it by staying small enough to be run by people who care. That is also the finding of the largest and most successful of them all, which is dealt with on its own in maryland Deathfest. The wider machinery of tapes, zines and stages sits in the culture chapter, and the whole genre, from the first demo to the current revival, is KaosMetal on death metal.
