Marcel Winatschek

The Festival Named After a Finishing Move

Someone named a music festival after Son Goku’s signature energy blast, and it has now survived four editions. This either means the world is improving, or at least getting weirder, which amounts to the same thing.

The Kamehameha Festival—held across three days in June at the airfield outside Offenburg in southwest Germany—has quietly built itself into something worth making the trip for. The fourth edition’s lineup covered enough territory to feel genuinely ambitious: Marcel Dettmann, Pan-Pot, Chris Liebing, and Tale of Us for the harder end of the spectrum; Claptone, Anja Schneider, Matthias Tanzmann, and Ellen Allien for the more melodic house contingent; and Cro, Felix Jaehn, Maeckes, and Felix Kalkbrenner handling the pop and hip-hop side, which meant the crowd by day two must have looked like a very confused Venn diagram. Somehow that’s part of the appeal.

An airfield venue does something specific to music. It’s not a park squeezed between roads, not a festival ground that’s been used so many times the grass stopped trying. An airfield has a particular kind of horizontal emptiness that makes the sound feel bigger and the sky feel closer, which at night, with the right DJ, becomes something else entirely.

The name still delights me. The Kamehameha. You can almost hear Goku winding up somewhere just past the treeline.