ESBJERG FUZZTIVAL 2025 • Part 2/2: SATURDAY, May 7th • feat. DAEVAR, GREEN MILK FROM THE PLANET ORANGE, GRINDING EYES, SKYJOGGERS and WYATT E.

Read PART 1 here:

ESBJERG FUZZTIVAL 2025 • Part 1/2: FRIDAY, May 6th • feat. APTERA, CAUSA SUI, DAILY THOMPSON, DEAD MEADOW, DUNES and VESTJYSK ØRKEN




Good morning, Esbjerg! Shower, breakfast, going on a photo walk, milking the time to relax in my hotel room until shortly before check-out at eleven... and still three hours left before the first show starts...

But after exploring a huge chaotic second hand shop full of vinyl, CDs, comics, books, DVDs etc... and strangely enough weapons - is this the US? - and leaving with one seventies Jazz Fusion album it wasn't long until the second Fuzztival day finally started.

Unfortunately Karkara from France had cancelled their appearance on short notice, and I think their absence could have been handled a little bit better. Because the official break between bands was now forty-five minutes long, which is already a lot - and given that most groups played shorter than their announced time-slot anyway (as you do for safety), there were full-hour pauses now, which is way more than you need for any activity you could come up with. So even though I benefitted from those breaks a couple of times - like when I brought my merch all the way to my car and bought snacks and energy drink for my drive home before the super markets closed - I would have preferred if the whole thing had just started an hour later, or - even better - if every band would just have been allowed to play an encore!

But with all that being said, this day would still turn out to be pretty spectacular...

GRINDING EYES

The first Psychedelic Alternative Grunge, sometimes also a bit shoegazy trio of the day came all the way from Australia and more than warmed the audience up with a cool style close to what I'd call the festival's default sound. While the bass player also operated synths, it was especially the unpredictable wild and noisy guitar work which stood out for me.

SKYJOGGERS

Since I had seen them before at their hundredth show at last year's Dazed & Spaced Festival in Hamburg (where they also recorded a split live record with Sula Bassana), I knew that we were in for a wild ride of super high energy uptempo Space Rock. It was the last day of their sixty days tour through Europe, but you couldn't see any sign of them getting tired, no, this performance was absolutely mad, relentless and dirty. Heavy high speed Blues, punkish Prog and an almost overdose of wormhole-crossing Duracell Psych, in which the singing mics were mostly reserved for cheering woos and screams, when the music switched into the next gear. Happy exhaustion!

There was no instrument switch between drummer and bassist this time, but they assured me it wasn't a thing of the past, but just depends on the setlist and will be different again on future tours. I should have waited at least a minute shorter for my merch shopping tour later in the day, because I missed the last vinyl copy of their new album just by a hairbreadth.

GREEN MILK FROM THE PLANET ORANGE

The last vinyl copy I did get was a split LP of Fuckwolf and Green Milk From The Planet Orange. But of course there was a whole show before that.

Even though the Japanaese trio was sitting, it didn't mean things were going to calm down - well, at least not for the whole show. Because even though the band sported yet another absolutely mental drummer, their stylistic trajectory was pretty wide, ranging from funky or Robotik Kraut, eccentric Punk, Noise and unhinged Psych'n'Roll to freejazzy Avantgarde Ambient passages and epic pinkfloydish Prog.

The band also surprised with some extremely pained emotional vocals. All in all Green Milk From The Planet Orange delivered just the slightly weird yet still conclusive sound the band name promised. Definitetly a Fuzztival highlight!

WYATT E.

But now something completely different with the Belgian trio Wyatt E. performing their recent album "Zamāru Ultu Qereb Ziqquratu Part 1".

Bass, guitar, synths, bass pedals, drums, percussion and very alien New Age effects on the chanting vocals were the means to an end of mesmerizing hypnotic blend of Psychedelic Doom Metal with 4AD spirit and Near Eastern mysticism. Even having seen the band two years before on the other end of Denmark this was still an equally potent excellent rite of Doom ascension. Primordial and otherworldly.

Flooring the accelerator again with a third high speed Psych chase would have been the ideal change of pace now, but since Karkara weren't there the tempo stayed slower with yet another band I already knew from one previous show at another festival.

DAEVAR

Right between Doom and Grunge, with sometimes shoegazy vocals which also justify the album title "Sub Rosa" if you read it as an homage to the disbanded band of the same name, there isn't really much left to describe about the music of this German trio (yes, all bands of this day were trios). A much dreamier version of Lucifer seems surprisingly accurate - while comparisons to King Woman probably appear less misleading.

However, Daevar were a beautifully rocking festival closer for me. Great riffs and vibes!

Daevar were not the final group on the running order, but with the long breaks staying for Stoned Jesus would have meant driving home - since I wasn't staying for another hotel night - two hours later. And that makes a difference when you're alone in the car for three hours net in the middle of the night.

I certainly was satisfied with this neat little fuzzy festival again.

ESBJERG FUZZTIVAL 2025 • Part 1/2: FRIDAY, May 6th • feat. APTERA, CAUSA SUI, DAILY THOMPSON, DEAD MEADOW, DUNES and VESTJYSK ØRKEN

Read PART 1 here:

ESBJERG FUZZTIVAL 2025 • Part 2/2: FRIDAY, May 7th • feat. DAEVAR, GREEN MILK FROM THE PLANET ORANGE, GRINDING EYES, SKYJOGGERS and WYATT E.



Last weekend I made a little trip to Denmark for my second edition of Esbjerg Fuzztival. There was some back and forth about the event's location, since the original place wasn't available and the alternative in a tent outside the center of town proved unpopular. So ultimately it moved back to the original venue, but onto the first floor instead of the ground level. Was this a downgrade? I cannot really say, because when I was there back in 2023 the festival took place at yet another different venue altogether. But I wasn't under the impression that anyone was disappointed.

It would definitely have been convenient to return to the Huset Esbjerg just for the close proximity to my car which was standing in the free public parking lot next to it. On the other hand the Tobakken venue as well as my hotel were both only a ten minute walk away. And even though the Huset vibes had been cool, it felt less crammed this time - and I also preferred this year's smaller, more intimate stage.

There was a spacious merch room, many sitting accommodations for inbetween the shows, a food truck that offered a good shawarma and the weather was much better than the rain during my drive had promised.

All in all I found only few general things to complain about, like serving zero zero sugar soft drinks at the bar. Or claiming it was a smoke-free room, when one specific guy smelling like a hundred years of lung cancer rendered that sign a total joke.

And even though the old-school Psychedelic projections light show surely is cool and a trademark of the event, it gets tiring after a while. And once again I'm not only saying it, because it were challenging conditions for my little toy camera or I just want to be that edgelord with the unpopular opinion.
In my mind it would just be more effective if it were reserved for those shows, where it actually fits the mood. Because some music simply works better with punchier lights actually interacting with the sound instead of just being an endlessly floating space trip.

For the first band of the afternoon however - the space trip it was!

VESTJYSK ØRKEN

Like every year the Fuzztival opened with its house band. And I learned that Vestjysk Ørken either are a trio now or always have been and the bassist was just missing the last time I saw them.

Once again their fuzzy Stoner Psych sound set the tone for a lot of what was to be expected on these two days. Their sound surely was heavier this time. The long movie dialogue samples, which mainly occupied the spaces without vocals or lead guitar gave them a nice recognizable touch.

And the song "Dune" logically lead to the next band on stage...

DUNES

Dunes weren't bad, but I must admit that I needed a YouTube reminder to refresh my memory of them. They probably were the purest Desert Rock band on the billing, pretty cool live for sure, but if they had any special sauce that should be mentioned, I'm sorry that I don't remember it. It's just not the style that clings to me or makes me want to listen to it at home - and I was quiet tired at this time of the day.
See what a big bag of excuses I have?

APTERA

Wakey, wakey! My homework for the festival had been brief and weeks ago, so I was genuinely surprised what a raging alarm call awaited me with this all-female quartet from Berlin.

Most videos you can find of Aptera will show you that only a couple of years ago the band was centered much more around Blues and Stoner elements, which would instantly qualify them for this festival. But now their sound seemed much more like a mixture of Crust Punk furor, Speed Metal lead guitars and thunderous Brutal Thrash even escalating in blast beats. And with how much joy the drummer delivered those! Her whole performance was incredibly fun to watch.

Yeah, this show was the one which made me feel like the festival had just truly started. Definitely the most atypical band here, but just as much a highlight of the day. 

DAILY THOMPSON

A bit of Punk flavour also spilled over to the next show, but that was only one of many ingredients of Daily Thompson's sound. The German trio with alternating male and female lead vocals combined Hard Rock, Grunge, Psychedelic Stoner Rock, yet also some surprises like Surf and Country vibes with a cigar box guitar to an entertaining whole. Rock'n'Roll!

CAUSA SUI

Besides various artists on Saturday Causa Sui playing one of their rare live shows was once again one of the biggest pulls for me to buy the Fuzztival ticket in the first place. And the Danish Instrumental Psych Rock masters didn't let me down.

With a setlist that included tracks from at least five albums since "Euporie Tide" (2013), while of course also focussing on the recent release "In Flux" they made sure to present a wide spectrum between Desert and Mediterrean, California and Latin America, Fuzz, Fusion and Kraut. Everything this group does just feels so intuitive and tasteful. A dream to float in, both in its featherly lightness and its crunchier and wilder crescendos.

What a band. Flawless! 

DEAD MEADOW

No, I didn't mix up my pictures! That's still Causa Sui's Jakob Skøtt behind the drumkit. I actually still don't know what exactly happened, but somehow the drummer of Dead Meadow had an emergency. And as Skøtt told me after breakfast (we happened to stay in the same hotel) the next morning, he actually only knew directly after Causa Sui s show that he would fill in for this gig.

The original plan was to play maybe one song together and then let singer/guitarist Jason Simon do a solo set afterwards. But during soundcheck they made a couple of ten-second test runs through various other tracks ("yeah, we could do that") and suddenly it became almost a complete full band performance. Since I'm not familiar with the band's original material I can only assume that they probably sounded a little more like Causa Sui than usual this night, but both on and off stage everyone was impressed by how smoothly this solution worked.

Given how great the interplay of this unrehearsed spontanous constellation already worked, I must imagine that a regular show of the group would surely have been another level of amazing. Given the circumstances however this show couldn't have been saved better.

Simon still ended the show with a couple of solo songs, but I didn't stay for all of it, because it had been a long day and I was eager to fall into my bed.