Marcel Winatschek

Strasbourg, Streamed

Arte’s Festival des Artefacts in Strasbourg had an unusually strong lineup that year—The Ting Tings headlining a bill that also included Patrice and Miss Kittin & The Hacker, all of it streamed live. That combination shouldn’t entirely work on paper, but festival lineups sometimes cohere into something with their own logic when you hear them unfold in sequence.

The Ting Tings were at the peak of their momentum in 2009. We Started Nothing had broken them the year before, That’s Not My Name following you around whether you wanted it to or not, and Shut Up and Let Me Go not far behind. Katie White and Jules De Martino were lean and confrontational live, which suited them—the songs held up outside the studio in a way that isn’t always a given with duo acts built on drum machine and attitude.

Watching it through a browser stream—the image compressing, buffering, occasionally pixelating into nothing—was a slightly surreal way to experience a concert. But the energy came through anyway. There’s something about The Ting Tings that survives compression.