Two years ago, somebody had a birthday party on this meadow.
Lio, now part of the organising team, had invited everyone out to the Ridderbeckshof — a farm with a lot of open grass around it, on the edge of Kerken in the Kreis Kleve. At some point that evening, after a few beers, came the sentence everything else followed from: "Lio, you've got this massive field here, it'd be perfect for putting up a stage and running a festival."
This Saturday, there is a stage on it.
The village is called Eyll, the address is Obereyller Straße — and the festival, accordingly, is called Eyllusion. Nobody who has ever been to the Lower Rhine needs the pun explained.
Who plays when
Gates: 13:00
14:10 Mechanical Bloodlines (Wesel)
15:30 CrashPilots (Moers)
17:00 END OF ALL KNOWN (Oberhausen)
18:30 One Hundred Days (Kreis Kleve)
20:00 Hereditary (Bonn)
21:30 Aegror (Kerken)
afterwards DJ
Ends: 00:00
A club founded over one weekend
The Eyllusion Open Air is a premiere. No anniversary, no tenth edition, no comeback after a break — the very first one. How the beer-fuelled idea turned into a festival is laid out by treasurer Paul Moosmann in a long interview with metal-heads.de, and the story is pleasingly unglamorous: a first meeting with a bigger team, a weekend spent sitting together, jobs divided up. Motivation was apparently high enough that they founded a registered association on the spot, and the festival is organised through it to this day.
What came next was less romantic. What caught the team out wasn't the workload but the waiting: how long it takes for an association to appear in the register, how long the tax office needs for paperwork. The budget runs on a plain Excel sheet — planned costs against expected income, quotes from stage, sound, drinks and infrastructure suppliers. Up to 999 guests are permitted this year. There would be room for more, but more guests would mean more regulatory conditions, and the team didn't want to take those on in year one as well.
Any hope of a healthy surplus for next year, Moosmann says, has already been abandoned. For 2027 it nonetheless looks "pretty good".
Six bands, and one of them was at the party
That it would be a metal festival was settled from the start — the team are metal fans, and members of Hereditary were at that very birthday party and were immediately up for it. The melodic death metal band from Bonn, active since 2013 and behind releases like "Disease" and "Sin", duly play in the early evening.
The last slot goes to Aegror, and that's the second neat coincidence on this bill: the band was founded in Kerken in 2009 — the band from down the road, at the festival down the road. There is deliberately no headliner; all six bands carry equal weight, and Aegror simply play last. Their dark, progressive black metal with melodic death metal edges rounds the evening off, and a DJ takes over afterwards.
Before that, the Lower Rhine largely keeps to itself. One Hundred Days come from the Kreis Kleve, founded in late 2013 by five friends and active again after several years away — melodic hardcore. END OF ALL KNOWN from Oberhausen (formed 2020) bring modern metalcore with a deathcore streak. The CrashPilots from Moers followed the EPs "Sins" and "Lost in the Dark" with a live album. And Mechanical Bloodlines from Wesel open proceedings.
Six bands, five of them from a radius you could drive in an afternoon.
"Von Freunden, für Freunde. Aber immer für alle."
From friends, for friends — but always for everyone. That's the motto, and it isn't just decoration. The team has worked out an awareness policy and states plainly what has no place on the site: sexism, racism, queerphobia, discrimination of any kind, physical violence, insults, boundary-crossing, and misanthropic or fascist ideologies. That comes with staffed points of contact on site and the Luisa-Code — ask at the bar whether Luisa is there and you get help without having to explain why. "Just all have a nice day and look after each other. The way friends do."
A beginning and an ending, on the same Saturday
Moosmann's message to readers is that of a festival-goer watching the landscape thin out: more and more established festivals are closing. He has no desire for a future in which only the big players have survived and going to a festival has become a luxury.
How concrete that is shows on this very Saturday. Some 250 kilometres to the south-east, in the Mehrzweckhalle Nord in Kelsterbach, the fifth Metalstorm Festival takes place — and according to its organiser, the last. "Our little anniversary, our first festival anniversary, but sadly probably also our last," writes organiser Schmiddo on the festival's own site. After 26 September 2026, Metalstorm will cease operations. There were 34 guests in Gießen in 2022, 180 the year after, 280 at the third edition, 200 at the fourth. What's missing, he writes, is really only about 50 more people.
Two small festivals, one date. One celebrating its premiere, one probably saying goodbye. That isn't coincidence or irony, it's simply the sum that gets worked out afresh every year in the underground — and it adds up or it doesn't, depending on how many people buy in advance instead of waiting to see.
Address, doors, ticket
The Eyllusion Open Air runs on Saturday, 26 September 2026 at the Ridderbeckshof, Obereyller Straße 113 in 47647 Kerken. A DJ plays after Aegror, and it ends at 00:00. Tickets cost 22 euros. The association is still looking for volunteers — and, in Moosmann's own words: "The best support for us is when people buy a ticket, party with us and tell their friends about the EYLLUSION Open Air."
