It’s been a while since I last reviewed a show here. And this time I guess it only counts partly as a concert review, since the Dämmerland-show is not only a concert, but so much more to that. It was a magical evening, so much I can tell in advance. And if you’ve never heard about Dämmerland before … you’re perhaps not German and / or not into medieval folk music. So if you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, don’t worry, I’ll explain.
Dämmerland – an audio play powered by Malte Hoyer and Hannes Braun
I might’ve mentioned Dämmerland on my blog before in my release posts. Dämmerland is a project started by Kissing Dynamite’s (almost ex?) singer Hannes Braun and Versengold’s singer Malte Hoyer. One day, Hannes Braun had the idea to create an audio book / audio play together with Malte Hoyer and they decided to play it big. Dämmerland is a fantastic story aimed at children from 7 years upwards as well as adults. So far, 2 parts have been published. A third one will be released in November and Malte Hoyer announced that there’ll be a 4th and final part as well. The story is available as books (hardcover with an incredible beautiful design and amazing illustrations) and audio books on CD or, if I recall correctly, via download. On top of that, there are audio CDs for each book that contain the „soundtrack“, since throughout the story there are various songs, usually written for specific characters and performed by a lot of popular artists out of the alternative German music scene.
A pretty big part is also played by Annie Hoyer of Alrūna (yes, former „Annie Hurdy Gurdy“). Other guest artists include for example Saltatio Mortis, Schandmaul, League of Distortion, Asenblut, Mr. Hurley und die Pulveraffen, In Extremo, Fiddler’s Green, Beyond the Black, Lord of the Lost,… The list is endlessly long and Braun and Hoyer seem to have activated all their contacts throughout the music business to turn Dämmerland into the beautiful story that it is.
Somewhen after the release of Dämmerland 2 they announced that they wanted to bring it on stage and heck, I was fast in securing those tickets. Until very late it remained a secret who would be featured on stage. And last night, the day had finally come.
My impression of Dämmerland live
We got tickets for their show in Wuppertal. The „Historische Stadthalle“ is an old historical building, kinda fancy, that definitely matched the event. I’d never been there before and I was kinda impressed by the architecture and everything. The whole concert was fully seated. Sadly, the floor in Wuppertal is flat, so when you sit in the back you don’t exactly have the best view on stage, but since the hall isn’t super big it was still mostly fine.
The stage set-up was fairly simple. The band was placed at both sides of the stage and in the middle there was the narrator telling the story. In the background there were huge video screens with visualisers for the songs and a bit of the narration.
I somehow expected that the story of the first and maybe the second book would be re-told with the accompanying songs or something similar. I was surprised when it was announced that the live tour was a bit of a sneak peek at the upcoming third book. So the story that was told on stage was completely knew, but based on the first two books (thankfully I had read the first part just before the show, I didn’t manage to squeeze in part 2 though, but I was still able to follow the narration content-wise) and it kinda showed how the story might continue. However, the focus was not on the storyline that followed the protagonists Fiete and Paloma, but rather focusing on what would happen „in the background“ with the side characters. An integral part of the story was based on a goblin that had a magical snow globe which was able to play songs like a juke box, which was how the songs were tied in (some more fitting, others a little less).
At the end of the show, Malte Hoyer clarified that of course the story in the 3rd book would differ a bit, be extended and some elements would be different, but that those who attended the live shows would certainly find some of the elements in the upcoming book that is to be released in about a month. So all in all I guess the live show might contain a tiny spoiler for the upcoming release, but also not too much. It does contain spoilers about the first two books somehow, though, and it definitely helps to have read at least book 1 so that you’re familiar with Dämmerland and its characters.
The songs that were performed live were mostly songs out of Dämmerland 1 (e.g. Drachen machen Drachensachen, Was muss, das muss, Alles hat eine Geschichte, Aber Kadabrah, Hunger hab ich, Brücken, Das Fast-Heldenepos and Fallen ist ne Art zu fliegen are the ones that I remember, besides the title track Dämmerland, from the top of my head), but also a few ones from Dämmerland 2 (Sand der Zeit, Schiff aus Glas, Mehr ist Mehr and Rosenrot). The choices on which guest artist got to perform which songs were pretty well made in those cases where the song wasn’t performed by the original artists.
The entire show was about 1h40min with a 20 minutes break after the first hour. And if I remember correctly, the break was also basically a break between both parts of Dämmerland, so in the first hour there were songs from part 1 and I think after the break they mostly switched to songs from part 2).
Here’s the (hopefully correct, partly deducted from Instagram :D) live cast of the tour:
Narrator: Stephan Benson
Drums: Sebastian Berg (Kissing Dynamite)
Guitar: Felix Rehmann
Violin: Maline Zickow (amongst others: Eklipse)
Keyboard & Vocals: Hannes Braun (Kissing Dynamite)
Bass, Guitar and Vocals: Eike Otten (Versengold)
Hurdy-gurdy and Vocals: Annie Hoyer (Alrūna)
Vocals: Malte Hoyer (Versengold), Tim „Tetzel“ Schmidt (Asenblut), Anna Brunner (League of Distortion), Simon Erichsen (Mr. Hurley & die Pulveraffen)
My personal downside: What I would have wished for
While I think the whole event was kinda magical and very well put together, there were a few things, particularly organisational matters, that really annoyed me. One of them was the fact that while the whole event was basically rather a musical theatre, it was more treated like a concert. So while you were sitting in a dark hall, seated in rows, trying to follow a narration – a story, the spoken word and not just music – people behaved like they were at a concert. That means for example phones out for large parts of the show (and especially in the beginning there were multiple careless people that hadn’t checked their camera settings and started filming / photographing with their flashlights on, which is incredibly distracting and annoying in a pretty dark room).
It also means that some people were terribly late and then kept walking and talking throughout the hall while they were searching for their seats in the dark. Whole families of four, some of them chatting unreasonably loudly while they were trying to read the numbers of the rows on the chairs. And not only that – people also kept standing up to leave the room all the fucking time.
I guess it was particularly bad in our spot because we were sitting at the end of the row, right next to the doors, so obviously most people who wanted to leave the room went past our seat. It also meant that most people arriving late were walking past our seats. But good god – I’ve only recently been to the musical The Lion King in Hamburg with my class and before the show, we were asked to instruct out class on the rules of the theatre, which included a) filming and photographing not being allowed and b) informing them that if they had to leave the room to go to the toilet or whatever, they would not be able to get back in until the break or, in the second half, until the end of the show. And seriously, I would’ve wished for similar rules for this event. Or at least a tiny tiny bit of respect and reason from the other people in the audience.
I get that people want to film during such an event to keep memories of it. But is it too much to ask that you check your phone settings before switching on the camera with a flash of light highlighting the whole area? Is it too much to ask for that people should not have their phones high up in the air all the fucking time? And is it honestly too much to ask for that people show up on time for an event that cost everyone a decent amount of money? The venue was open an hour before the beginning of the show, you could spend time in the foyer, grab a drink, have a snack, buy some merch, you could access the toilet. The parking garage had an evening / event rate where you had to pay a fixed price if you arrived after 5pm (and the show started at 7pm), so you didn’t have to fear that you’d have to pay extra because of longer parking hours. And if you show up late, is it too much to ask for to try find your seat without chatting all the time? (Would’ve been nice if the venue staff had guided the people to their rows so they wouldn’t have had to search for them on their own). Also it baffles me that apparently a big amount of people is not able to sit through one hour of a show. And I’m not talking about the children (haha school conditions them well I guess). I get that sometimes there are emergencies. But urgh.
All of that was horribly distracting. In the end, it’s my very own problem (once again) that I was awared with the „super powers“ of ADHD, which makes it even more difficult for me to block out disturbances like that. But honestly, I can’t imagine that people with normally functioning brains were not pissed at those people that showed up late and then talked while trying to find their seats. I missed out on huge chunks of the narration because people can neither be on time, nor stay seated for about 60 minutes apparently.
So … yeah. Idk. On arrival, there were flyers announcing the pre-sales for the next Dämmerland tour and while I would absolutely love to experience this again, the audience has partly ruined it for me, especially given that the tickets weren’t exactly cheap.
All in all, show 12/10, but audience -20/10.
