Ferropolis, Germany

As one of Germany’s most prized large-scale festivals, Melt! rolled into its 18th year with its loyal, cross-generational audience firmly intact. Despite the ever growing number of European festivals, Melt! has managed to retain a global appeal by consistently conjuring up adventurous line-ups and thrilling its attendees with the unique infrastructure of the festival site.

The Ferropolis provides an austere but epic backdrop to the festival. No kitschy bunting or hay bale coliseums to be found here, instead the huge industrial machinery from a bygone era creates a constant sense of intimidation. Alongside standard camping, the wider site includes the infamous sleepless floor (more about that later) as well as a vast lake that almost the entire festival can swim in and a vintage train that houses festival goers who decided to splash out on a carriage. Testament to the planning and precision of the production crew, the site manages the movement of 20,000 ravers around the site with no major problems. Organised chaos at its finest.

  • © Robert Winter

  • © Robert Winter

Nozinja provided the perfect cure for jet lag, and his flamboyantly dressed Shangaan dancers were a welcome break up in a line-up which primarily consisted of serious-looking blokes in t-shirts. Glasgow’s Hudson Mohawke, who’s quirky synth-driven sound is not unlike a tablespoon of pure MSG, delivered a set that was a sickly-sweet gorging of the senses, unnatural yet irresistible as it poured full-throttle from the unregulated stacks of the festival’s Gemini stage. Evian Christ’s Saturday set provided a subtler, more UK-rooted angle on a similar trap-inspired formula with his aggressively minimal visual set up and reworked trance synths. In contrast to these visionaries, US duo Odesza took the wooden spoon in this category with a deflated effort at imitation that, at its best, could generously be described as a poor man’s HudMo.

Our first dalliance with the main stage was to witness Nils Frahm succeed in taming a Friday night crowd. A welcome interlude of finery from a booking that could well have got lost in the post between concert hall and rave, the amphitheater also served its purpose beautifully as a platform for Frahm’s host of weird and wonderful instruments. Kylie was also a stroke of genius from the Melt! office, and despite been considered as a curveball booking, the universally loved pop icon couldn’t have felt more at home among this open-minded crowd. Django Django and Alt-J were less inspiring but not uncharacteristic acts for Melt!, who have always opted for a more accessible booking policy when it comes to guitar-based bands.

  • © Stephen Flad

The main course of the festival inevitably came from the more techno driven stages of the industrial playground, the most substantial of which is The Big Wheel stage. The winners from where Crack was standing were the two glorious closing sets from Ryan Elliot on (Saturday) and Nina Kraviz (Sunday), with the latter proving all the dance world’s comments section misogynists wrong once again with an athletic finish. Sven Vath, on the other hand, was particularly poor – finishing with some flat cosmic twaddle that sounded like an overexcited teenager who had just got into Innervisions.

The more eclectic of the electronic stages was the Meltselektor stage, which suffered from sound at times but had the locational benefits of a beach and a view across the lake, and The Bug did the honours of pulverising attendees with an onslaught of radioactive bass mutations. Finally, there was the Sleepless Floor – the end/beginning of everyone’s night and the roughest of the festival’s diamonds. It stands outside of the festival both geographically and visually with a kind of Mad Max rebel camp vibe that you can’t fake. This stage was seemingly accessible to non-ticket holders, which gave it its very own unique vibe. Undoubtedly the place to go if you were looking to run into the right kind of trouble.

  • © Stephen Flad

  • © Stephen Flad

With countless other three day rave events nipping at its heels, Melt! still stylishly entertains the youth of Europe en masse while keeping an atmosphere that, let’s face it, is more amicable than the average UK festival that draws in crowds of this size. Though it’s in its twilight years, the night is still young for this German institution.