Freak Valley Festival 2024

I was back on stage in time for Alex Henry Foster & The Long Shadows and was extremely excited to see how this band would be received. Personally, I was a little surprised to see them in the line-up, but the Valley is always good for a surprise. For the hardcore doomer/heavy/stoner/sludge faction, what is now coming from the stage will probably not be so thrilling, but everyone else will enjoy this fusion of post-punk/post-rock with Gary Numan vibes and hard-driving rock/heavy passages, which merge with percussion and brass to create a unique, emotionally stirring melange of magnificent compositional art. Band leader and mastermind Alex Henry Foster, who is only 34 years old, can already look back on an impressive life story with ups and downs that would certainly be suitable for a biography in the format of “War and Peace”.

If you see him today, it is hard to imagine that he was involved in the right-wing scene at a young age, but that thanks to the help and support of his father he got out and completely turned his life around. His CV includes a wide range of activities, such as social worker, congress speaker, actor, speaker and member of Amnesty International, producer, composer and much more. The link between all of this is his spirituality. Shortly after founding “Alex Henry Foster & The Long Shadows”, he and his band were on stage at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2019 and topped the Canadian album charts for weeks with his debut album. Even more impressive when you consider that he and his musical “family” not only produced the entire album themselves, but also pressed it on vinyl, packaged it and shipped it themselves. The Canadian is obviously a driven workaholic full of musical passion and spiritual emotion. This unbridled energy took its revenge in 2023, however, when he had to undergo life-threatening open-heart surgery, which probably also meant a kind of renewal and a second life for him. And you can see that more than clearly at this performance here in the Valley. Foster seems highly emotional, deeply touched and has no qualms about showing this completely openly. This brutally honest vulnerability can be felt even more in every note of this concert, and it completely sweeps you away. You don’t even mind the few isolated people who are bothered by the fact that he repeatedly says how much it means to him to be able to be on stage again after this difficult operation. For me, next to Fuzzy Grass, he is definitely number 1 in my ranking today.