Nina Kraviz Alone Was Worth the Drive South

Following electronic music in Germany while not living in Berlin, Hamburg, or Cologne comes with a specific baseline frustration: the routing for major acts skips most of everything in between. Munich gets something, because Munich always gets something—but Stuttgart, sitting there in Baden-Württemberg with its own serious clubs and genuinely good audiences, tends to disappear from the itinerary entirely. The Stuttgart Electronic Music Festival felt like a direct answer to that.

The December 2017 lineup was not a regional consolation prize. Sven Väth, Nina Kraviz, Solomun, Chris Liebing, Len Faki, Dominik Eulberg—that’s a headliner stack most cities with more prestigious reputations would have been satisfied with. Alongside them: Emanuel Satie, Lexy & K-Paul, Moonbootica, Ninetoes, Victor Ruiz, Bebetta, Township Rebellion, Klaudia Gawlas. Twelve hours of people who know exactly what they’re doing inside a room full of people who came specifically to be there for it.

Nina Kraviz was the name I kept coming back to. She occupies a specific space in electronic music—technically rigorous and completely unpredictable in her sets, able to move between raw industrial techno and something almost playful within twenty minutes. A Kraviz set at three in the morning is one of those experiences that justifies the genre to people who’ve never fully understood what the genre is for. You’re not listening to music so much as being reorganized by it.

Stuttgart doesn’t need to apologize for itself. It has a music history and an industrial character that should make it a natural home for this kind of event. That it took an explicitly dedicated festival to get this caliber of lineup there says more about booking habits and perceived prestige than it says about the city or its crowds. SEMF was the right correction. Kraviz was more than enough reason to go.