Hellfest is not only France's biggest festival, but also one of Europe's biggest, specializing in extreme music. On the six simultaneous stages, up to 350 bands will take to the stage one after the other over the two weekends of this year's festival. This fifteenth edition, originally scheduled for 2020, but postponed to this year due to the pandemic, has a completely incredible line-up. However, rather than describe the festival in detail and what it's all about, I'd like to take a look at the violin's place in it. Because even if guitar, bass and drums and their musicians clearly steal the show during this series of concerts, the violin family doesn't remain on the sidelines. That's why I invite you to discover together, where to find the violin at Hellfest.
Violin at Hellfest
Whether or not you like rock, metal and its derivatives, it has to be said that the Hellfest program is so vast that you can always find something to latch onto. In fact, the violin is perhaps a good way of getting used to these sounds, as it is often synonymous with soothing harmony between the frantic rhythms generally proposed by these bands.
Hellfest bands that play the violin
I'm going to take you through a few musical passages and give you some background. However, these videos may not be Hellfest-related, nor a live recording.
Epica
Epica is first and foremost a symphonic metal band from the Netherlands, which has been around for around twenty years. A worthy representative of this musical genre, Epica's music is a blend of the construction, melodies and timbres that might be found in classical music, thanks in particular to its female lead vocal, regularly supported by choirs and string ensembles. The piano and synthesizers also add textures and sonorities derived from classical music and opera.
Of course, the very metal side, with its galloping, very straight rhythm based on guitars, drums and guttural vocals, draws on more telluric tones to create this very interesting marriage, which I'll let you hear in this extract.
Eluveitie
Eluveitie was formed in the heart of the Swiss mountains some twenty years ago. Their compositions are akin to folk-metal, a blend of traditional music, in this case Celtic, and metal. As you listen to their compositions, you'll hear a succession of sounds, each more folk than the last, featuring bagpipes, hurdy-gurdies and fiddles.
This is festive, rhythmic music with heady melodies and lots of energy, which will speak to you if you like Celtic fiddling.
Septicflesh
Let's now enter the lair of Greek Symphonic Death Metal with this band formed in the 90s. It's a very different, much darker universe, but one that nonetheless bears many of the musical colors and textures of the greatest symphonic ensembles.
You'll be able to appreciate the scale of the concert in the video extract, where the band joins forces with an orchestra and choir to deliver an impressive visual and auditory experience.
So epic, it could very well be the soundtrack to 300...
Igorrr
For me, Igorrr is a bit like the David Lynch of metal, a scary and improbable yet dreamlike mix of big riffs, operatic vocals, more traditional tunes and electronic sounds. You'll also find the Makita disc player solo at 50 seconds.
They're the only French band in this selection, both fun and surprisingly musical despite the apparent difficulty they represent.
Mono & Jo Quail quartet
In a much more static vein, Japanese post rock band Mono join forces with cellist Jo Quail. She is accompanied by her quartet for the occasion.
Musically, they evolve long layers of sound to drown our eardrums in a very noisy hypnosis. No vocals, just strings, blades and percussion.
Dirty Shirt & the Transylvanian Folkcore Orchestra
Here's what you get when you combine a metal band with a traditional Romanian orchestra. These cheerful, lively Slavic sounds blend seamlessly with heavy guitars to create a driving, charismatic folkcore sound.
Fiddling at Hellfest also causes problems
The violin, like many acoustic instruments, is not easy to sound in concert. It's not easy to capture the vibrations of a resonance box, as it picks up everything that happens around it. You can try this out at home: if you speak next to your violin, you'll probably be able to feel your voice making the instrument vibrate.
The same thing happens in concert, except that the levels are incredibly higher. That's why if a microphone or transducer is deployed on a violin, there's a good chance it will pick up the other instruments, and fall into an amplification loop. This is commonly known as feedback. Guitars seen on stage don't have this problem, because the transducers they are equipped with are quite different. They create a signal from the magnetic field that is disturbed by the vibration of a steel string. It is possible to create feedback in this way, which is also a form of expression for guitarists, but it is much more difficult.
The electric violin solution
An electric violin is specially designed for amplification. It has no resonance box, which makes it much easier to amplify. On the other hand, its sound is far less interesting and will require modification, for example with a pre-amp, to give it a satisfactory tone.
