Rust and Bass at the Edge of the World
Ferropolis is not a normal festival location. It’s an outdoor museum of industrial machinery in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt—enormous decommissioned mining excavators standing in the dark like monuments to a different century, with stages built around them and thousands of people dancing in the shadows they cast. The Melt Festival has been using it since 1999, and the setting never stops being the right setting.
The 2017 lineup was the festival in its best form: M.I.A., who hasn’t made a bad show in her life regardless of what you think about her recent records; Die Antwoord, whose live performances exist somewhere between concert and theatrical crisis event; Bilderbuch, the Austrian band making art-pop that sounds like it was designed in a parallel universe where new wave never ended; Phoenix, who can be counted on to make a large field of people feel briefly but genuinely euphoric.
The electronic side was stacked in that Melt way—Jon Hopkins playing something that would probably make you cry if the sound system was loud enough, Ellen Allien and Adam Beyer representing Berlin’s harder end, Modeselektor doing whatever strange thing Modeselektor does that you can never quite describe afterward but always want to repeat. Dixon. Claptone. Ben Frost, who doesn’t belong at any festival and is therefore exactly where he should be.
Then the edges: Kate Tempest, whose work occupies a category I’d call spoken-word-for-people-suspicious-of-spoken-word; Maggie Rogers, who’d just been made famous by a video of Pharrell listening to her demo and visibly not knowing what to do with it; The Lemon Twigs, who play power-pop like they were born in 1971 and have been slightly confused about the decade ever since; Hercules and Love Affair; Warpaint; Glass Animals; MØ; Sohn; Bonobo.
And then, on the Thursday night pre-party: Fatboy Slim. Who is, against all odds, still exactly the right person to open a festival like this—not because Praise You is transcendent, though it kind of is, but because he makes twenty thousand people feel like they made the right decision driving out into the East German countryside to stand next to giant rusting machines and watch the sun go down.
That’s the whole proposition of Melt. The rust and the bass, and for three days the rest of it stops mattering.