Photos by Milan Šabić
Part Two:
Welcome to Part Two of Echoes and Dust’s coverage of Bear Stone: if you’re unfamiliar with the fest, it’s probably best to check out Part One of our review first. But here’s a brief overview anyway, so you that Part Two makes sense on its own. Bear Stone is a festival that has already achieved legendary status in its third year, for the atmosphere and location just as much as the bands. Our home for three days is a glade, lovingly established along the bank of the Mrežnica River, in the Slunj region of central Croatia, with at least forty bands playing here over three days, mainly in the stoner/psych/doom genres.
Bear Stone is a liminal zone where only the best values of the outside world still apply. When the sun’s out, it’s beach vibes all day; when it goes down, the trees seem to close in and create a fairy glade where real magic and pleasant madness can occur.
Day Three: Saturday
It’s the weekend now so it feels a bit busier on-site, and – as if in sympathy – the musical lineup feels generally like even heavier day. Take the first note of the day, for example, provided by Croatian metallers Extroft: it’s pure sludge, down-tuned and filthy, and it literally rumbles the ground on the hill facing the Mill Stage. As signposted by the bass player’s Acid Bath t-shirt, it’s all about the nasty groove – which gets the crowd digging in, heads down – briefly broken by moments of frantically-intense hardcore fury. Their super-heavy cover of ‘Come Together’ by McCartney and co. works perfectly and really gets the dust billowing, with one clearly keen fan at the front pulling some killer funky mosh moves.
Auto, a trio from just over the border in Ljubljana, play hard Kraut rock like robots that had a heart all along. As if I hadn’t danced enough at the end of last night, their hard four-to-the-floor beat is utterly infectious, and you’re driven along at a frenetic pace as you start taking in all the jazzy synthesiser solos, the intricate sparklings of guitar harmonics, the slamming swerve of nifty key changes, and the trippy space-out textures of the Middle Eastern instrument (an Oud?) run through swirling effects. Just as it’s getting too intense, they drop into a super chill blues lull; just as it’s getting too chill, you realize that we’re already en route back to the krautrock highway. Marvellous.
Shell, another power trio – and who doesn’t love a good honest power trio? – hail from Croatia post-hardcore and post-rock scene, establishing a very pleasant vibe to begin, with chill instrumentals on the Mill Stage. At these points, Shell again seems to reference Yawning Man at their most energetic, especially in the frenetic drum work. But swiftly we move through some more math territories, with vocals always full of melody and emotion, complimented by glittery high notes on the guitar solos. Teasing Deftones’s classic ‘My Own Summer (Shove it)’ on bass gives another clue into the musical background of this extremely solid band.
Karkara
Next up on the Jam Stage is Karkara, the third in this meta-power trio; and holy shit are they fun! Hailing from Toulouse, France, these guys mix the very best elements of stoner rock, catchy psychedelic songs, cosmic freak outs, and kosmiche grooves, but it’s difficult to put your finger on what makes them stand out from the many other laudable acts who do something similar on paper. The super-tight, well-crafted, looping bass lines sure help, giving us a reliable and hypnotic bedrock from which to transcend.
It’s during their popular anthemic track ‘Anthropia’ that one of the most iconic moments of the whole festival occurs. At this point, I’ve got my head down, eyes closed, lost in the endless groove, booging along happily to myself, when I hear everyone screaming and going wild. I look up just in time to see someone – someone I recognise from about the fest, clearly known to many here – perform an absolutely immaculate stage dive, which he smoothly surfs for the full length of the crowd, the arms and swirling music coming together to form a brief glorious sea.
Actually, I now what sets Karkara apart: it’s the songs and the melodies working with all psych, allowing for sing-along choruses that keep you engaged, ensuring direction and purpose through the jams.
King Buffalo
We’re really spoiled for power trios today. I’m at the Main Stage now for King Buffalo, who are on tour in Europe from across the pond in New York. Stood in front of Bear Stone’s ever presiding mascot/logo, it’s time for liquid psychedelic projections, and frantic displays of red light and purple light; enough to set the trippy atmosphere without being overwhelming. I only started properly listening to King Buffalo when researching Bear Stone, and I was so pleased to discover them. It’s the minimalism that’s core to their sound, I think, songs stripped back to deceptively simple-sounding parts that overlap, catch up, artfully lag behind; vocals reminiscent of Yob or Crack the Skye-era Mastodon soaring up over the top. The set peaks during ‘Centurion’ as a twangy, minor-third pull off riff drones and builds infectiously; you can see the eagerness in the crowd’s faces as the riff eventually changes key, resolves again, changes…and eventually the roiling heaviness kicks, prompting some pretty serious moshing.
There are not many ways to close a festival Main Stage after such a strong day of bands, all with their own sound, their own energy. Someone who brings together something of all styles present, perhaps, with a huge punchy sound and an arsenal of anthemic songs. Well New York’s A Place to Bury Strangers certainly fit the bill in that regard, with driving post-punk anthems like ‘Playing the Part’ scratching the crowd’s itch for gloomy goth sing-alongs.
But A Place to Bury Strangers haven’t earned their reputation as the world’s loudest band for nothing. This is not extremely loud in the way that Sunn O))) are extremely loud: warm, immersive, textured. Strangers are loud in an overwhelming, excoriating, punishing kind of way, with every syllable sharp, every bass line reverberating internally, and each guitar chord like a football in the face. Not that it’s unpleasant you understand, just intense. But it’s the drums that go especially hard, providing a hard sense of constancy underneath the huge waves of hypnotic noisenoisenoise that result from Oliver Ackerman’s penchant for guitar destruction. Afterwards, someone next to me comments that this show, in which he smashed around three guitars, was actually fairly conservative by his standards – a sentiment I heard repeated a few times around the site. Personally I find this kind of planned excess borders much more on the contrived and juvenile rather than wild rock ‘n’ roll debauchery, and get little from it aside from a small pang of excitement upon seeing Ackerman’s initial, admittedly energetic, act of destruction. But anyway, it’s quiet a show, and quite a way to conclude the day, even if I remember the overall colossal impact of their set, rather than many details.
A Place to Bury Strangers
It’s not the end of the day, of course, just of the main stage – as we still have our “after party” bands still to go on the Jam Stage. Oil x Gas, an synth rock due from Latvia, provide yet another truly astonishing and deeply, wildy entertaining set. Immediately, there’s a huge crowd stood before the stage, bathing in a wash of deep gurgling electronic noise, and immediately dancing as their robotic, motorik rhythms finally kick in. Both clad in blue boiler suits, the whole performance is tinged with a faint surreal air, trying to reconcile the mundane gas-man chic with their unhinged yet accessible music. Just as they start playing a very familiar drum intro – Queens of the Stone Age? – I’m distracted by the oddly wonderful sight of someone dancing away in their own world beside me with what appear to be many stickers of children pulling silly poses stuck to their chest. “They’re playing ‘Song for the Dead’!”, I scream to my partner beside me, as presumably do many other people, as the Oil x Gas drummer absolutely nails all of Dave Grohl’s parts, and the main riff kicks in, sending the entire crowd into a feverish piling mosh. It’s the main riff alright, but rather than Josh Homme’s warmly dissonant guitar part and quirky fills, it’s jagged synth stabs and shrill bleeping responses.
That moment had to be the climax of the day for me, even if our final band Iskra were also excellent, picking up exactly where Oil x Gas left off, mixing obscure samples (“Directing the cargo cult…”, “The weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful/Let it snow/Let it snow/Let it snow”), striking futuristic visuals and yet another round of mad keyboard-led, dance-friendly anthems.
Day Four: Sunday
Leaving the Beat Stone site around 3am the previous morning, I’d started to wonder if I’d find the energy to return the following morning – but, by the time the morning arrived, there was no question.
With fewer stages, and a nearly finish time, it seemed likely that the final day of Bear Stone 2025 would be a chill one. But that’s not what the organisers had in mind: in fact, they set out to make it as heavy as possible. As their name suggests Tons, an Italian sludge/doom band, are astonishingly heavy – their first boggy, deep chord rumbling the river bed beneath me as I enjoyed my afternoon swim.
Earth Tongue
Leaning more towards pysch and stoner, Earth Tongue – a duo travelling all the way from New Zealand to be here – also delivered rippling waves of heaviness through the floor of the Mill Stage. Frontwoman Gussie Larkin, clad in a head-turning green and white dress, compliments swirling, eddying chord patterns with an eerie catchy vocal style, alongside Ezra Simons’s quirky rhythms. Their sound is more accessible perhaps than many bands on the bill, but in the best way: strong songs that stick in your head, and not relying simply on a well-developed overall sound. Catchy, well-crafted, yet with that deep, heavy fuzz tone we all crave.
Lazarvs, a Hungarian power trio, have the honour and responsibility of filling the very final slot – and it doesn’t significantly less busy, down at the front of the Jam Stage, than most other days. Playing low-slung, groove-oriented tunes, clearly powered by a love for Seattle grunge as well as Nola sludge, it’s a great choice; but when the double-kick comes in, followed by brutal, thrashing riffs, we realise that they achieve extreme metal – for what feels like the first time in the festival. We could have floated away, transported beyond the glade of trees, beyond the embrace of the mountains, beyond the gaze of our bespectacled bear. But instead, we conclude in a glorious, dirty mosh pit: bedraggled, exhausted, and filled with happiness.
Lazarvs
Bear Stone genuinely feels special. It would be somewhat trite and cliche to compare it with the Summer of Love, although that thought did briefly pop into my head at one point. There were certainly quite a few canoodling couples occupying quiet corners, dim spots on the river bank…
Perhaps it’s more like how it might have felt attending a Joshua Tree generator party during the 1990s. Certainly I wouldn’t be surprised if bands have formed from the jams on the Bear Stone stage, if not a whole scene (yet). It was my first taste of any Croatian music scene, so it was amazing to see many local bands, both new and established, from the stoner, doom, psych scenes in the country, who form the base of the festival, and with some inspiring younger acts from neighbouring countries.
I’ll admit that sometimes I get a bit bored of “one genre” festivals, even in areas I love like stoner and doom, longing for someone to stretch the boundaries, mess with the programme, while working to refine the core expectations of the genre. At Bear Stone, I never felt this way: the curation was impeccable. At no point did I walk from one band to another thinking they sounded too similar, too different, not suitable. One thing that really stands out for me was the dancing: I’m too reserved and British to attempt it at all unless the music and atmosphere really compels me too. There were so many moments at Bear Stone, though, where I could un-self consciously get my groove on, not just in a heavy stoner rock way, but as part of dance music, created for that purpose and executed organically. Then there is the beautiful location, of course. And plenty of big names in the mix.
Most importantly, the organisers got all of the core, essential details right: they just nailed it. If you’re in anyway interested and you can make it work, you’ve got to go – it’s that simple.
