Ferropolis Again

Ferropolis announces its lineup every spring, and it’s one of those things I always check because it tells you something about what’s happening in electronic music and performance art. 2019’s list landed recently—Bon Iver, A$AP Rocky, Bilderbuch as the names everyone recognizes, but the rest of it is what actually tells the story.

The deep cut starts with Solomun, Four Tet, Modeselektor, Charlotte de Witte, Ellen Allien, Helena Hauff—people building something real with sound, not just booking names to fill days. That’s different. You can feel the curatorial thinking there, choices that make sense together rather than just aggregation.

A$AP Rocky showing up is interesting too, hip-hop in a space that’s mostly electronic. It shouldn’t work but it does because the festival has enough confidence in what it is to let other things exist inside it.

The Melt Forest with Pornceptual and Pansy running the performance programming is where you see the actual stakes. That’s not a side stage; that’s the festival saying this is countercultural by design. It’s deliberately experimental, which is rare enough now that people genuinely plan their summers around it.

What keeps pulling people back to that industrial site—an abandoned power plant near Gräfenhainichen—is consistency. Over 120 artists, three days in July, no attempt to be everything to everyone. The scale is there, but so is the taste, and that combination is rare enough to feel worth the trip.