The Summer Woodkid Played Berlin

The Berlin Festival had a particular quality back then—a thing that was genuinely good at the precise moment it existed. Woodkid headlining meant Yoann Lemoine, who makes music that sounds like it was scored for a film he hasn’t finished writing yet: all brass and cathedral reverb and emotional weight that should be ridiculous but lands anyway. K.I.Z. on the same bill, which is the kind of booking that says something specific about Berlin—a city that will put French cinematic art-pop next to some of the most corrosive political rap in the German language and consider it a perfectly coherent lineup. And then Warpaint, doing whatever Warpaint does live, which is mostly hypnotize you until you forget you’re standing in a field.

I went to a lot of outdoor festivals in those years. Most of them blur together now—same overpriced beer, same wristband logistics, same feeling on Sunday evening that the weekend had been expensive and more or less fine. The Berlin Festival had a different texture. Small enough to actually navigate. Big enough that the lineup was real. The kind of event where the city felt like it was justifying itself.