Covid-19 have greatly hit majority of industries including the entertainment industry. Live shows are canceled and have no choice but to wait until the pandemic ends before they can perform in front of a crowd again. But thanks to technology because it paved way to reach out to people bummed of canceled events. They do live streams or streams of their past events to stay connected and keep the people, most especially their fans, entertained in the midst of a suffering world. Recently, Rising Sun Rock Festival, a music festival in Japan aired their previous guests performers on Youtube.
Rising Sun Rock Festival is a summer music festival in Japan that takes place in Hokkaido, Japan every August. The music festival established on 1999 features mostly rock and indie artists. Due to pandemic the Rising Sun Rock Festival 2020 was held online featuring a selection of performances from various artists from the festival's early years until 2019. The program began at 22:00 JST and ended at 06:00 JST. That's 8 hours straight! Just the right time for sunrise befitting the festival's name. The program was live and so the MCs and guests were also up the whole time.
(LiSA on 00:05 - 00:07) Hehe!
The festival featured a lot of artist on the online festival and so they only showed one performance from each artist. The performers I waited for were MAN WITH A MISSION who performed "Fly Again", Ellegarden performing "Supernova", ONE OK ROCK with their song "Cry Out" performed in 2014, and LiSA with her song "Adamas" performed last 2019. Watching a music festival is also good for discovering new artists. I've been seeing the name BiSH and through the online music festival I've finally get to watch and hear a song from them. They're a girl group, but not the typical cutesy idol kind of group, with interesting music. No wonder a lot of people like this group. Other artists that captured my attention were Superfly and 9mm Parabellum Bullet. Well, aside from the beautiful outfit of Superfly's vocalist, her voice really stands out which made me stopped what I'm doing and watched her performed. Another one that I liked were the performance of two pianists. The song started slow then turned fast at the end. It was very spectacular! There are more artists that are good but I failed to remember the names because their names were written in Kanji or I wasn't looking when their names were flashed on the screen.
There's one group that seems very weird. The musicians and conductor looks tipsy. There were fire dancers, topless dancers,and even this musician making sparks from his cello.
Aside from the performances, the program also has a short cooking show where a band member showed how he cooked a rice meal with edamame and fried beef. There was also merchandise selling portion where Rising Sun Rock Festival 2020 merchandise were featured. They have shirts, cans of curry in different flavors, even chops of wood? I don't fully understand Nihongo so I don't know what those chops of wood are for. Lol.
The online stream of the festival was replayed three times (or maybe more) because I was able to watch it twice and it was about to begin the third replay when I'm about to sleep.
Anyway, this won't be the last music festival that will be streamed online. Tomorrow, August 21 until August 23, Fuji Rock Festival will be streaming too on Youtube. Check their Youtube channel Fuji Rock Festival for the schedule. The festival will feature performances from Japanese and foreign artists.
Rising Sun Rock Festival isn't the first music festival to hold an online event. Last month or two months ago, Download Festival, a music festival in Europe already held their 2020 Download Festival on Youtube. They also had live interviews with the artists through video call. I watched the festival to see BABYMETAL's performance and watch other metal bands. I must say, there are lots of good metal bands out there.
That's all! Don't forget to loosen up and give yourself some entertainment in this problematic situation our world is going through right now.
Thanks for reading! :)