Portishead in a Field Full of Rust

Melt! 2014 landed Portishead, Recondite, and Chromeo on its lineup, which was enough to make me believe—briefly, in January, before the logistics could ruin it—that summer might actually be worth attending. The festival takes place at Ferropolis, a decommissioned open-pit mine in eastern Germany where the rusting skeleton of massive industrial machinery forms the backdrop for three days of electronic music and dissolving inhibitions. It’s one of those settings where the aesthetic does half the work. Everything sounds better with a hundred-foot excavator looming behind the stage.

Portishead headlining anything in 2014 felt like a genuine gift. Third had come out six years earlier and they’d barely toured since—Beth Gibbons’s voice over those corroded beats is the kind of thing you want to hear outdoors at night, slightly altered, with the specific clarity that only open air and temporary chemical assistance can provide. The lineup around them—Recondite’s murky techno, Chromeo’s absurd disco-funk—covered enough ground that you could spend three days drifting between stages without once feeling like you’d made the wrong call.

There’s a certain January optimism that arrives every year before the logistics set in, before the mud and the queues and the sunburn assert themselves. The Melt! trailer always delivered it—rust and strobe lights and silhouettes against a summer sky—and for a few minutes you’d believe again that this would be the one.