Prague, Seven Years Later

Prague in 2005 was a school trip and a blur. What I remember most clearly isn’t the city itself—it’s laughing strangers handing me burning absinthe to swallow, the specific color of that flame, the particular freedom of being somewhere entirely foreign without caring about anything. Whether it actually happened exactly that way, I couldn’t tell you. Memory keeps editing the footage.

Seven years later I went back for the Electronic Beats Festival, and the city was still great—probably—in the way a place feels greater when a specific event is waiting for you inside it. The lineup was genuinely strong: Grimes, who was at that exact moment the most interesting thing happening in music; Woodkid, whose video for Iron I’d watched about six times by then; Mike Skinner doing whatever Mike Skinner does live, which has always felt less like a performance than watching a man think out loud in public; and The Whitest Boy Alive, just elegant as ever.

Grimes was the reason, though. She had that quality in 2012 of feeling entirely homemade despite being technically precise—like she’d built her own world and was only barely letting you into it. Standing in a crowd watching her felt like eavesdropping on something not meant for you, which is exactly when music gets interesting. The fact that half the German blogging scene was apparently there too gave the whole thing a strange texture, all these familiar faces converging in an unfamiliar city, everyone behaving as if they’d organized a second school trip but this time with better music and no one’s parents knowing where they were.

The absinthe, I assume, was still out there somewhere in the city. Some things stay.