Three Days Under the Excavators

The Melt Festival is built around Ferropolis, a former open-cast mining site in eastern Germany where enormous coal excavators have been left standing as permanent sculptures. The "City of Iron," they call it. Dancing at 4am beneath a machine the size of a building, rust and sub-bass occupying the same frequency—it’s a specific feeling that most festivals can’t replicate because most festivals don’t have that.

The 2018 edition ran July 13–15 and had a lineup that felt genuinely considered rather than just famous names assembled. The xx headlining alongside Florence + the Machine and Fever Ray gave the whole thing a brooding emotional through-line. Then the rest of it kept going: Tyler the Creator, Nina Kraviz, Jon Hopkins, Odesza, Ben Klock, Modeselektor, Apparat, Cigarettes After Sex, Little Dragon, The Internet, Badbadnotgood, Princess Nokia, The Black Madonna, Ellen Allien, Mount Kimbie, Rex Orange County, Fatima Yamaha—the list kept going and kept being good in different ways, which is rarer than it sounds.

It’s the kind of lineup where you build a careful schedule on the first afternoon and abandon it by midnight when someone pulls you toward a different stage and you spend two hours watching an act you’d never heard of and it becomes the thing you remember most clearly three years later. The planning and the complete abandonment of the plan are both part of the same experience.

Canned ravioli in a backpack. A friend you told you’d be in an open relationship for the weekend. The excavator silhouette against a 6am sky. That’s the festival, in rough outline.