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Forever Deaf Fest Will Showcase Chicago Heavy Metal Talent This Weekend

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Local talent is where it’s at. With the Invisible Oranges editorial team is housed in Chicago, we’d be remiss to miss out on the first installment of Forever Deaf Fest. Featuring heavy-hitters like Novembers Doom and The Atlas Moth — plus a slew of high talent from deeper underground — this two-night Chicago showcase is destined to rock. As the third largest city in the country, and with its tactical location, Chicago receives a healthy amount of out-of-city heavy metal. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the national (global, really) river of new tunes and developing scenes; but inversely, it’s also important to narrow down the focus and recognize bands who haven’t (or don’t want to be) broken out beyond the city’s own mad bustle.

What the “local scene” offers are the feelings of home, or Heimat as the Germans call it. It’s not necessarily your birthplace, but the place where you feel most comfortable, in-control, and at-one. A gamut of things make up this special place (people, stores, traffic, advertisements, music, etc.), but it’s ultimately the individual who defines the chaos and discovers the meaning within. Collectively, we then arrive at a pool of people who’ve derived important, personal meaning from the same environment. This is something we can share, and we definitely do: leave it to music (especially heavy music) as not only meaningful entertainment, but as a channel unto itself for connecting people who’ve arrived at entirely different conclusions regarding their life in the city… but all ended up at the same place.

To our friends in Chicago: we’ll be there, and we hope you can be too.

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When, Where, Why

This year’s Forever Deaf Fest will take place this Friday and Saturday at Beat Kitchen in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood. Tickets can be found here.

As a bonus, there is a pre-party at LiveWire Lounge on Thursday night, featuring TanZen, Repentance, Armored Assault, and Speedfreak.

We corresponded with fest organizer Nick Lawrie who offered the following insight into the event:

As for FDF, I want to highlight that the importance of the festival is bring a local scene together and be nationally recognized for having such a strong scene. This festival is about the bands and the people having the best chance to celebrate what their city has to offer the rest of the world. This all came from an idea me and my friend Peter had when Chicago Open Air 2019 was canceled. I had made the joke of doing a metal festival with all local bands and call it Chicago Closed Air Festival. Peter said, “If anyone can do it, you can do.”

We later hung out at the Exodus/Municipal Waste show and we decided this is exactly what we wanted to do. During our first phone conference, we decided on the name Forever Deaf Fest as a tribute to Lemmy and Motorhead’s “Deaf Forever.” We also wanted it to be on December 8th, the day we all celebrate the life of Dimebag Darrell of Pantera; we knew we had to make this as metal as possible since no one knew who we were or if this was going to work.

We followed up that by using the taglines “Destroying Ears One Riff At A Time” as well as “By Chicago. For Chicago. All Chicago.” This was about bringing some of the best bands together for one big local show on a national scale. I couldn’t be more proud to work with such great sponsors that have blindly supported us, I’m extremely happy with all the bands on the lineup and having them be a part of something this special to me.

I can’t thank everyone enough for taking a shot on me and getting behind this as I try to live out a life long dream of mine by throwing a wild and crazy metal fest in the city I love the most with bands that represent how awesome this city truly is for the metal world. Our goal at FDF is to have a great show for the bands, the fans, as well as everyone involved, and ultimately to be able to do it again next year.

https://youtu.be/ltP96NXpupA

Lineup

Friday, December 7th
Novembers Doom
*Bonus: Check out our interview with frontman Paul Kuhr.
Immortal Bird
Whut?
REZN
Snow Burial
Bloodletter

Saturday, December 8th
The Atlas Moth
*Flashback: Check out our interview with Stavros about his impressive wrestling figure collection.
Without Waves
Huntsmen
Zaius
Varaha
Meth.

Follow Forever Deaf Fest on Facebook.

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