Booming basses, dancing people and lots of colorful light: the “Back to the Woods” festival will take place in Garching for the eighth time on Saturday, August 27th. There is not only something for the ears, but also for the eyes. In addition to electronic music, various light, laser and pyro shows await guests on the grounds of the research center in Garching from noon to one o’clock in the morning. The festival is organized by the “Kellerkind” collective, which has already organized another open air festival this year with “Schall im Schilf”.
“Electronic music in the fresh air” is how Gabriel Schneider, one of the organizers of the Back to the Woods, describes the concept of the festival. He has been with Kellerkind since the very beginning. A lot has happened since Back to the Woods premiered in 2013. With space for up to 10,000 dance enthusiasts and four stages, the open air is now twice as big as it was almost ten years ago. This time, however, all available festival tickets were not sold in advance as usual. According to Schneider, many organizers are currently feeling the aftermath of the last Corona summer. “Pre-sales are bad across the board,” says Schneider. One’s sorrow is another’s joy: hitherto undecided and spontaneous friends of electronic music shouldn’t be unhappy that there will be a box office for the Back to the Woods for the first time.
Over the years, the team of organizers has also grown. That’s why Gabriel Schneider likes to use the word collective when he talks about “Kellerkind”. Up to 250 helpers now support the core team, which has been made up of a circle of friends from Garching since 2010. Back then, Kellerkind didn’t exist, just a group of friends who had started getting larger groups of people to dance while they were in high school. “We have always organized parties together, but when we were in high school they still took place in the former farm of a friend’s parents. They had an old potato cellar, so we always hung up,” said Schneider some time ago in an SZ interview.
A mood maker at the electronic music festival
(Photo: Alessandra Schellnegger)
Despite the expertise that the Kellerkind team has gained over the years, according to Schneider, the collective tries to stick to its roots: “We’ve become a bit more professional without losing the family charm.” For this reason, one does not want to make the festival bigger or extend it to several days. Even the cheap ticket price could no longer be maintained at a multi-day festival. Tickets cost 30 euros online. “We’re happy the way it is now.”
An asset to the campus
The organizers came to the research center in Garching because some members of Kellerkind studied there themselves. Over the years, a close friendship has developed between the organizers and the research center team, says Schneider. He describes the Back to the Woods as a cultural enrichment for the Garching campus of the Technical University of Munich (TUM). “There used to be little study life in Garching. People always said: move to Munich if you’re going to study in Garching,” says Schneider. The Back to the Woods should have changed that for at least one day a year.
The festival not only enriches the campus culturally. With the help of the visitors, genuine research has even been carried out. From 2013 to 2016, an interdisciplinary research team from TUM made up of mathematicians, computer scientists and sociologists investigated how visitor flows behave at major events. It therefore made sense to use the flow of visitors to Back to the Woods for a reality check of the theoretical models. “For this purpose, we developed our own technology. During the festival, we recorded the movement of smartphones with the help of various WLAN receivers. Using the anonymous movement profiles, we were then able to see where the visitors went, how long they stayed where, whether they were in a There were queues and whether it was getting tight somewhere,” says the university’s website.
The “Schall im Schilf” festival at Lake Garching led to a handful of noise complaints from City Councilor Daniela Rieth last month. “We definitely don’t ignore this and take it very seriously,” says Gabriel Schneider. For this reason, the Kellerkind team is already in close contact with the city councillor. A meeting is planned, says Schneider. According to the organizer, the reason for the noise problem was unfavorable wind conditions. At the Back to the Woods, the systems should now be set up at a steeper angle so that the sound is not carried so far, explains Schneider. In any case, the buildings of the research center at the festival this Saturday would have a better soundproofing effect than the area where the annual sound in the reed takes place.
If you still have enough energy after 13 hours of dancing, you can continue at the after-show party in the Blitz Club on Museum Island. With the festival wristband from Back to the Woods you get free entry to Munich’s popular Technoschuppen on the night of August 28th.