Contribution short abstract:

When people keep coming back to the same music festival without knowing which bands will attend, it means the festival has a post-consumerist value to them; a ritual; a place of belonging; a sense of community. At Roadburn Festival this is combined with the joy of doom and heavy music.

Contribution long abstract:

In the pilot practice-based research project "Archiving Heaviness; Collecting and Curating the Roadburn Festival with its Community" I am engaging as a long-time attendee and a researcher in order to understand if/how this group of people, its organisation, and its recurrence enact transformative values through attending and connecting with music.

Because organizing the next edition(s) always takes precedence for festival organizers, they do not seem to get around to collecting, valuing, researching and/or presenting who or what they actually are. Roadburn festival is a community-aware event. For the last 26 years it has built a community which – through the interfaces and platforms provided by the organization before, during and after the event – is quite self-aware and inquisitive into its own nature. The festival has emerged from a celebration of the heavy psychedelic rock and metal, through subgenres as industrial, stoner, doom, sludge and post-metal, into a much wider boundary spanning curation of music which is presented and perceived as heavy. Alongside this musical curation, the festival has also fostered inclusion, friendship and community values. It has connected these in recent editions through the prism of ‘redefining heaviness’. Its artistic curatorship is known for creating unique spaces for exploration and experiment. The tones and frequencies may have changes, but the community keeps coming back. What drives this loyalty to the unknown? To what extent does the role of the cathartic experience of heaviness form the red thread?