- Aside from a few flyers advertising what looked like a local drum & bass night and magazines scattered at the doors of various clothing stores, references to Uppsala's club scene were virtually non-existent in the sleepy city when I visited there recently for Volt Festival. As such, it makes sense that a hefty portion of the Swedish festival's target audience is Stockholm-based. With travel to-and-from the capital a relatively easy undertaking, roughly half of the event's attendees are commuters.
Once you make your way inside the multi-leveled Uppsala Konsert & Kongress, however, you immediately understand why they make the journey. Multi-leveled, minimal and spacious, the centrally located building is unique in many respects. For Volt, escalators, not stairs, transported attendees from one floor to another, and non-festival-related stimulus—save for a window allowing for a panoramic view of downtown Uppsala—was kept low, meaning that, once you stepped in front of a DJ booth or inside one of the two rooms housing music, it felt like you were stepping into a venue of its own. Sharp angles and a dulled colour palette define the Konsert & Kongress centre's interior, and this only worked to complement the atmosphere throughout the night.
Photo credit: Mathias Cederholm
For the festival's fourth edition, organizers enlisted what was arguably its most adventurous lineup yet. Save for a few names—The Black Dog, Abdulla Rashim and Jonsson / Alter, for example—this year, presenting club music was not a high priority. With this in mind, it's quite extraordinary that this music shift coincided with a massive boom in crowd numbers, with the total attendance close to tripling in size (up from last year's 700-odd). Despite this expansion, at no point did the venue feel overcrowded. Inside the Uppsala Konsert & Kongress, though, some of the reasons for Volt's rapid growth become apparent. Rather than presenting itself like a festival—even in the most non-traditional sense—their takeover of the hulking modernist complex rendered it more like a series of concerts than anything you'd associate with warm beer and overheated teenagers.
Different & Stig Larsson opened proceedings at one of the four stages—and one of the two "rooms." Larsson read (in Swedish) from a notebook while the members of Different worked with a number of instruments, a modular synthesizer among them. The performance ran through an array of emotions—from what appeared to be anger and frustration, through to happiness and melancholy—all helped along by the simple but remarkably effective mood lighting and visuals.
Photo credit: Mathias Cederholm
At the ground level stage closest to the venue's entrance, local DJs ran through bass music and classicist house to a dedicated crowd as other attendees filed past on their way upstairs. After the final jock dropped Todd Terje's "Inspector Norse" melancholic house duo Jonsson / Alter wisely gave the energetic crowd an extended respite before embarking on what was the night's highlight set. The hour-long showing ran through the best of duo's 2011 Mod full-length, slowly stripping away melody in exchange for rhythm as time went on.
Harsher sounds then ensued courtesy of Ikonika and The Black Dog. The former offered up wide-ranging selections of techno, house and dubstep, keeping the intensity high for the entirety of her slot's 90-minute duration. Sheffield's The Black Dog did exactly what was expected of them with their closing set, delivering rolling, seamlessly blended techno to what was the night's most enthusiastic crowd.
Photo credit: Mathias Cederholm
Aside from a handful of niggles (expensive drink prices; Abdulla Rashim was placed awkwardly next to a bar for his DJ appearance), Volt 2012 was a resounding success. If the organizers continue to build upon this clearly winning formula, with a little luck they'll have a Swedish electronic music institution on their hands—despite the fact it's overall running time is shorter than an average European club night.