MELT!
FERROPOLIS, GERMANY | 19-21 JULY
Ask any sandwich lover. You know why nobody—not even Heston ‘drizzle on some truffle oil and sauté it in quail’s tears’ Blumenthal—ever tried to reinvent the PB&J? Because if it ain’t broke, you don’t fuck with the ingredients.
The same goes for festivals; why start sloshing on unnecessary extras when you’re clearly onto a winner? Germany’s Melt! Festival has served up a well-balanced diet of world-class bands and DJs for 15 years now, all in one of the most visually arresting festival locations on the continent (a former open cast mine, complete with colossal, 1000-tonne abandoned digging machinery). So, this year, Crack set off for another sold out seat at the dinner table.
Arriving in the midst of a sweltering German heatwave on the Friday afternoon, it was clear the notably international crowd (both the English and the Dutch have made Melt! a perennial favourite over the years), were already a few bratwursts deep into the party buffet. With the campsite situated on the fringes of a giant lake, the sunshine and good times were flowing thicker than treacle, and we wasted little time in getting down to savour them for ourselves.
Friday’s offerings came largely from the Main Stage. Los Angeles dream-pop warblers Local Natives opened proceedings, easing an impressive early doors crowd into the weekend with a beefed up collection of hits from their 2012 LP, Hummingbird. This rather skewed the mood for Daughter, whose fragile liltings were undeniably moving, if a little sedate for the party-hungry, sundowner audience. By the time James Blake took the stage, however, darkness had firmly set in, and people seemed happy for the vibe to oscillate between the candle-waving croonery of his slower material and the loopy, bass-heavy, sound walls cooked up by Voyeur and Retrograde.
Mercury darlings Alt J wheeled out a satisfactory, if a little jaded, set, and we can’t help wonder if the stratospheric success of the past 12 months hasn’t started to take its toll by this point. Still, things took a turn for the awkward shortly after, when a baffling 15-minute hype session from an embarrassingly overzealous female MC saw half the crowd leave before The Knife even took the stage. The show that followed was every bit as slickly choreographed and self-indulgently bombastic as anything the band has produced before, but sadly many didn’t even see it at all.
DJ-wise, Friday seemed a little confused in its programming. In keeping with the current clubland zeitgeist, a Berghain-friendly triple-whammy of Function, Marcel Dettmann, and Ben Klock had been booked for the Big Wheel Stage. However, an outdoor venue with just two speaker stacks is most certainly not Berghain, and the muscular techno onslaught they brought felt largely hollow and without substance. Luckily, Todd Terje & Lindstrøm on the Gemini stage were the perfect late-night/early-morning antidote, cranking up the tropical vibes before bedtime.
One of Melt’s principle attractions is the Sleepless Floor—a sandy-bottomed, open air pit of 24-hour hedonism on the festival fringes that lives up to its name in true Ronseal fashion. Here the vibes rarely dip below fever pitch, and Saturday got off to an impressive early start with Motor City Drum Ensemble ladling out bouncy, soulful grooves to an ecstatic crowd dancing like Peter Pan’s lost children under the baking afternoon sun.
By the early evening, Woodkid’s gloriously histrionic live show over on the Main Stage looked and sounded thoroughly at home in the neo-apocalyptic surrounds of Ferropolis, warming things up perfectly for a night at the hands of the Big Wheel’s kick-drum. There DJ Koze was laying down three hours of the darkest, sexiest, most satisfyingly strange techno jams we’ve heard all year, causing more than a couple transcendental tingles in our trouser area.
Next, James Holden’s seamless, exploratory journey through the melodic beat spectrum had us floating somewhere off the coast of Jupiter for what felt like an eternity, returning to Earth only for a climactic 20th anniversary sunrise set from Kompakt boss Michael Mayer and labelmate Barnt at the Sleepless Floor. If the previous night’s music had felt a little cold and clinical, Saturday’s had more warmth and heart than a sunny butcher’s shop window.
Sunday is supposedly the quiet day at Melt, and after two days and nights of non-stop leg shaking (there are many Sleepless Floor antics that are just not fit for these pages), the almost catatonically smooth vibes of Rhye on the Gemini Stage were a welcome spot of respite. That was all the break we got, however, before Brownswood signings the Owiny Sigoma Band took to the stage, mixing up all manner of tribal Zulu rhythms with everything from rudebwoy bassline to latte-sipping chillwave. A real surprise treat for the teatime crowd.
Onto the festival big guns, and the pre-headline set from Flying Lotus on the Main Stage certainly wasn’t lacking in West Coast beat scene swagger. It all came unravelled around the halfway mark, however, as a detour into rather garbled live hip-hop laid bare FlyLo’s undeniable shortcomings as an emcee. The words ‘day job’ sprang to mind on more than one occasion, and the whole ‘press play, grab mic’ routine felt rather mismatched with his skills behind a MIDI controller.
Finally, it was time for the reason many people attended the festival at all. Atoms For Peace defied many longstanding negative ‘supergroup’ preconceptions earlier this year with their debut album Amok, although performing live they weren’t entirely without their flaws. Where the album had been impeccably mastered to give each band member their own clear place to shine, on stage it was occasionally unclear whether Yorke’s wailing vocals, Flea’s funktastic bass, or Godrich’s anodyne synths were the true star of the show.
Still, when it worked it was fantastic, with many songs being spun into marathon 15-minute sessions that percolated over time into something expansive, immersive and new. Across an epic two and a half hours (complete with two encores), they nailed the coruscating echoes of Default, the electric-funk stomp of Dropped, the melancholic torrents of Amok, and even had time for an impromptu cover of Yorke’s erstwhile collaboration with UNKLE, Rabbit In Your Headlights. It was the kind of scene-uniting performance that satisfied fans of both electronic and guitar-based music alike, straddling Melt’s at times disparate demographic—a rare stroke of fortune.
As portions of the festival drifted off to bed, others headed for one final helping of fun from the table, courtesy of Ellen Allien’s now legendary Monday morning bPitch slot at the Sleepless Floor. Wiping three days of party dust and fun crumbs from our lips, it was clear—when the pickings are this good, why would anyone want it to change?
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Words: Alex Gwilliam
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