Preview: Flow Festival 2016

Everything we envy about Scandinavia is set to come together in the form of Flow Festival this weekend. Think achingly cool design and architecture, award winning instillations and talks from Finland’s hippest digital thinkers and creators, complete with a huge line up and you’ve got the picture. 
Lest we forget another of Scandinavia’s genuinely unique treats – the Midnight Sun. Strictly speaking, you have to be within the Arctic Circle in order to see it. Those who live in Finnish Lapland for example, for 70 consecutive days of the year, never see the sun set. Nevertheless, situated on the site of a defunct power plant just outside Helsinki, the sun only dips below the horizon for a couple of hours each day, meaning Flow takes place in almost perpetual sunshine. Living in a country where the weather changes as fast as the shadow cabinet does, the prospect of constant sun feels pretty special. 

Flow 2016 boasts some almighty names including SIA, New Order, FKA Twigs and Stormzy. The festival also prides itself on showcasing new talent, as well as offering a venue to the alternative and experimental. The ‘Other Sound’ area will host the likes of William Basinski, whose penchant for old technology and analogue tape loops is creating increasing curiosity as well as hype. Finland’s very own ‘Pink Twins’ will also hit up the Other Sound, blending noise, psychadelia and dub with testing parametric animations, testing man’s perceptive strength. 

One of the most refreshing elements to Flow is the number of Finnish artists on the bill. Flow definitely comes under that umbrella term we Brits increasingly use every summer ‘big European festival’. However, a lot of those festivals’ line-ups are dominated by names from the US and UK as well as being built, promoted and managed by UK based companies. Flow on the other hand seems determinedly Finnish in everything it does, propagating its artistic, diverse, eco-friendly ethos from the top down. 

Buy tickets HERE.