May in Cologne

Cologne in May seemed unlikely to be memorable. Cathedral, carnival, that one TV guy. But Electronic Beats Festival was booking the E-Werk, and the lineup meant something—The Kills, Miike Snow, Austra, Citizens, Hundred in the Hands. Not the obvious moves.

I didn’t end up going. Money, timing, the usual friction. But I remember seeing the announcement and scrolling the lineup and thinking maybe. That halfway moment before something else takes your attention and suddenly the festival’s happening without you and then it’s past.

That era of electronic music had a specific quality. Not the clean, algorithmic thing it became, but something that still seemed like it was discovering itself. The Kills were a mess in the best way. Miike Snow was doing something so exact it should have been cold but wasn’t. A German city suddenly hosting something that Berlin probably resented missing.

It’s all gone now. The scene kept moving, the artists moved on, the festival probably died or transformed into something unrecognizable. But that moment—that curation, that confidence in taste over obvious pulls—I still think about it. The evidence that something good was happening somewhere, and you either caught it or you didn’t.