H-Happening: The Skogbrann Festival 2012

For the second year in a row Alive Dance and its partners held the Skogbrann Festival (Forest Fire Festival) out in the woods South of the Norwegian city of Trondheim. This year we were in a new location close to a large lake. I was in charge of the technical set-up and it was mostly a blueprint of what we used at last year’sSkogbrann Festival. The most notable difference was a new mobile stage on wheels and the logistics operation needed to transport the gear further away from public road. Planning and installation of electric power to the area also had to be done.

Of equipment we were still based around a Yamaha M7CL with Dante MY16-AUD running into a ProTools 9 rig. I’m very happy with the M7CL, it is packed with functions and does the job well. Some people claim they can get much better sound from other boards, but with the stage-boxes the pre-amping actually sounds quite nice. I also believe there’s a limit to how big a difference it will make with another desk out in the woods of Norway. What you won’t necessarily get from any random desk is a piece of kit that works in damp and cold air at night, contrasted by warm and dry sunshine at noon and still “never sais die.” If I thought it sounded quite good before, it sounds even better after that assessment! The speakers were from Meyer Sound like last year. ProTools was running on a standard MacBook Pro and storage was done on a double WD hard-drive in ‘RAID 0’ set-up through FireWire. 32 lines were recorded at 48 kHz/ 24 bit. All sound-equipment was provided by Norsk Produksjon, while Snowdrift Productions brought some of the recording gear. We had a separate camera-crew through Hamstad Media.

The Skogbrann Festival and Alive Dance has built a strong relationship with Morningstar Ministries in the US. From Morning Star we had David Vallier and Amber Brooks. Amongst the local artists we had the magical little duo Snø, talented young songwriter Marion Winsnes and a dance crew from Alive Dance. Other international artists included Sue Rinaldi and Stephen Lynch aka. DJ Agent M from the UK.