Vince festival in Karlskrona

There’s something wonderfully irrational about traveling across Sweden for a niche electronic music festival named after Vince Clarke. There are no corporate tents with freebies, no celebrity chefs, no VIP areas. Just a few hundred devoted pilgrims dressed almost exclusively in black, gathering in the naval town of Karlskrona to worship at the altar of synthesizers.

After stepping off the train and grabbing a quick meal, we made our way to Grevegården, a venue perfectly sized for a festival that survives on passion rather than marketing budgets. Voister Litz warmed up the crowd, followed by Mergel Kratzer, whose mechanical rhythms echoed nicely off the old walls. But then it was time for the main event.

Covenant.

Covenant is one of those bands where relentless electronic precision are backed by songs that have filled dark dance floors across Europe for decades. Watching them in such an intimate venue felt less like a concert and more like a reunion of old conspirators.

The only real enemy of the evening wasn’t poor sound or bad weather. It was the bar queue. The queue moved with all the urgency of continental drift. Eventually, survival instincts kicked in and half the audience migrated across the street to the pizza restaurant Sorrento. Within minutes the place had been completely occupied by pale people in black clothes discussing obscure B-sides over slices of pizza. I doubt the staff had ever experienced such a concentrated outbreak of eyeliner, but they seemed happy anyway.

Voister Litz.

We also wandered through the exhibition “Vi kallade oss synthare”, documenting Sweden’s synth scene from the early eighties until today. It’s a strange feeling when the subculture you grew up in suddenly finds itself behind museum glass. Weren’t we the future? Apparently we’ve become cultural heritage instead. Time has a habit of sneaking up on you like that.

Still, if ending up in a museum means that the music and the wonderfully odd people who built this little community are remembered, perhaps it’s not such a bad fate after all.

Someone just can’t get enough.