Independence-d was an event that the Japanese independent labels took the lead to organize and promoted more than 100 independent artists from Japan and overseas. While the number of the performing acts and the reasonable ticket price provided the event a great success, the last day of the event, March 13 th made the best record of its ticket sales. In another words, it was promised that there would be many great bands performing on the day, and it definitely would become an advantageous experience.
During one of the “visual bands”, Merry who creates extremely heavy sound in spite of their pretty name was heating up the fans from the main stage, Thine Eyes Bleed formed by a brother of Slayer's member gave rise to crazy mosh pit with their metal-core sound on the third stage. At the fourth stage where you could kick back and see the shows, the enthusiastic sound of Wheel of Doom from Tokyo was roaring, and Edge of Spirit from Osaka was fanning the fires of audience's combative instinct with their intense performance on the second stage which reminded me of a small club house in the city. All the live performances were simultaneously going on these four stages, and such spec of the venue brought out the great flavor of the entire program of this event. The sound from each stage was not conflicting with each other, and there was no panic or trouble for the audience to move one stage to the other. It even seemed that everyone was enjoying the shows on their own pace and a manner to respect the event naturally was kept among them. It was doubtful that there were common aspects between the visual band fans and heavy metal fans, but these two groups peacefully coexisted in the limited area of the event and it was worthy of special mention.
Although the performance of Church of Misery and From Hell knocked me out, the upper billings of the main stage were the best of the day. The new Misfits, Markie Ramone joined played both sets of original Misfits songs and Ramones songs, and it was like a punk rock reunion. After Misfits performance, Muck showed us their strong originality of their stage and their sound reminded me of some kind of mixture of heavy rock and Showa (70's to 80's) pop. Their fans were of course got excited, but at the same time those heavy metal fans giving them good reaction to their stage. As the headliner, the speedy and destructive sound of Loudness was widely different from the others. They announced that they would release their 19 th album in April. I could say that they were calm and composed with their performance and that again made us recognize the power of their career.