Festivals always end up being just as much about who you missed as who you heard. A crammed program is one reason, limited venue capacity and the sun-beer-friends combo two others. However annoying it can’t be avoided and on SPOT Festival Saturday circled acts missed for whatever reason counted Maria Timm, Dísa, Rumpistol, Oh Land, Choir Of Young Believers, Baskery and Murmansk.

The gigs I did manage to catch, though, were all pretty damn great and the best reasons why I do what I do with ALL SCANDINAVIAN.

Like Kellermensch who completely blew my mind! With their eponymous debut at hand it was a massive sensory attack on the darker regions of the soul, lead by amazingly intense frontman Sebastian Wolff and followed through by the impeccably dressed and ditto playing band, leaving total surrender the one and only option.

Also calling for surrender is our Icelandic favorite Ólafur Arnalds. I really have a hard time putting in to words what it is about him, partly because I know shit about classical music theory, partly because words seem impossible to do him justice, but his little-big neoclassical compositions just move every melancholic bone in my body. Beautiful is what it is.

The biggest surprise of the night was Norwegian soul man Jarle Bernhoft. Sounding like a holy alliance between John Legend and Stevie Wonder, having more funk in his body than any pale Scandinavian and plain and simply just ripping it up with two acoustic guitars, a sampler, the songs from his debut ‘Ceramik City Chronicles’… Oh, and that brilliant voice.

And with that I elephantly skip to another unavoidable festival exercise: Gig hopping. Which basically is running around catching a little bit of as many bands as possible. Not ideal, but then again it means I can now give props to Finland’s Joensuu 1685 who, when I got there, had turned venue Voxhall in to a dramatic inferno of very well executed strobe light ‘n grungy noise-rock and Norwegian I Was A King whose semi-psychedelic fuzz pop had another pleasingly edgy dimension added live.

The latter is something much hyped Icelandic instrumental post-rockers For A Minor Reflection also managed. I must admit that I’ve only heard what’s on their MySpace and it hasn’t really drawn me in. To me there’s a hard to define lack of energy on their recordings – the production not getting the grandiosity across, I guess – but live they’re really making sense. And what better way to end SPOT Festival with a band proving just what it is concerts can do?

PS: If you want to hear what I unfortunately missed here are some links:

Choir Of Young Believers: MySpace II In our words
Murmansk: MySpace II In our words
Beta Satan: MySpace II In our words
WhoMadeWho: MySpace II In our words
Dísa: MySpace II In our words
Birk Storm: MySpace II In our words
Maria Timm: MySpace
Rumpistol: MySpace
Oh Land: MySpace
Baskery: MySpace