PREVIEW: STEELFEST 2016

Steelfest opens the season of the Open air “summer” festivals in Finland. It will take place in Hyvinkää, a city located around 1h drive north from Helsinki. The festival started already in  2010 on it’s current format and has been gaining the reputation of one of the finnish festivals that presents the most extreme metal lineups, with a clear Black Metal genre orientation.

The festival area, Villatehidas, is located pretty much in the center of the city, less than 1km walking distance to the train station, fact that makes the travelling to attend the festival fairly easy. The city offers places where to stay but the demand in the last years has been growing and the closer hotel has been sold out long time ago. Currently available sleepover options are the hotels in the closest cities or staying in the local school were steelfest made arrangements where you can stay for a cheaper price (check the official webpage and Facebook event page for details). A warning that the festival tickets are starting “to run low” was also made by the organizers in the social media webpages.

The usual setup of the festival areas is divided between two stages (indoor and outdoor), a restaurant area that usually provides a decent variety of food options (to cover all the possible dietary restrictions) and drinks stands available around both the inside and outside stage. Merchandise from the festival and bands is available as default in any festival, together with other selling points of CDs, clothes and body piercings stands. On top of that you will also find a blacksmith forging and selling his creations.

As the organizers already got the audience used to, there is a strong component of Finnish bands complemented with many big bands on the scene from several nationalities. 

This year lineup can be called anything, but surely not disappointing or boring. Today organizers announced on the social media pages one more band for Friday and a cancellation with respective replacement band for Saturday (see below).
We will keep you updated in our social media pages of any further changes, but hopefully this should be very close to the final lineup (organized alphabetically since show times and stages will be disclosed latter):

All information can be found here (unfortunately mostly in Finnish): http://steelfest.fi/
But here you have a brief set of informations that you might consider useful:
Being a +18 festival your I.D. might be requested upon entry in the area. Also the standard security control will be performed upon entry, checking your baggage might be request and you should keep in mind that alcoholic drinks or any kind of considered dangerous objects is strictly forbidden. You are allowed to take with you unopened <0,5liters plastic bottled non alcoholic beverages.
One day tickets are not exchanged for bracelets so you cannot get back in once you leave the festival premises .
The organization reminds the visitors that finnish weather is unstable and at least cold nights are highly expected (if not some rain, check the weather forecast before heading there).
To make everyone’s life easier, a cloakroom in the format of cabinets, that you can access via a smart card will be available in the area where you can store your belongings during the day.

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