Five Acts and a Power Station

Cologne has the cathedral and the carnival and a reputation for functioning competently without ever quite catching fire. Which makes it the right kind of neutral ground for a festival that arrives from outside, occupies one building for a night, and leaves. The Electronic Beats Festival at E-Werk did that—a former power station with all the industrial ceiling and residual mythology you’d want, paired with a lineup that read like a specific argument about where music was in 2012.

The Kills headlined. Alison Mosshart at that point was operating at a level of controlled ferocity that made every other performer on any stage look decorative. Jamie Hince made minimalism look like the hardest skill in the world. Blood Pressures was recent enough that the songs still had edges. Miike Snow played synthetic pop with something warmer lurking underneath it, the kind that catches you off guard after a few drinks. Austra were probably the best reason to arrive early—Katie Stelmanis’s voice fills a room in a way that more famous singers only gesture toward.

E-Werk is the kind of venue where even a moderate sound system sounds enormous. I’m a sucker for that. Put good music inside a building that used to generate electricity for a city and something transfers—whether it’s real or just the brain reaching for metaphor doesn’t matter much on the night.

Cologne still isn’t Berlin. It probably never will be, and Berlin’s self-consciousness about its own coolness has its own exhausting quality. For one evening in late May, none of that mattered.