From the impressive city of metal to the neon-lighted dancefloors – Germany’s MELT! FESTIVAL is always worth a trip. So, NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION took the chance in the hot summer of 2013 and took a closer look on what was hip and what was not. Because, well, the MELT! FESTIVAL has always been about hipness. But also, in the core of it, about music. Let’s try to summarize it all. But not in a tpyical way. Maybe a bit more contemporary. Something like hasthags maybe? Because it seems to be the thing to do at the moment. Let’s put this year’s open air into a bunch of hashtags that were actually not spontaneous enough and a bit too long to post them via Twitter.
#sweat_and_style
MELT! FESTIVAL is the festival of a highly fashion obsessed audience. But good to see that everybody sweats at 35° C on one of the hottest weekends of the year, even those hipster boys in their skinny jeans and and all the glitter glued girls.
But if we talk about fashion we should not forget the artists. We were impressed by AZEALIA BANKS in her catsuit that shows more than it hides as well as MYKKI BLANCO who successfully combined lingerie and classic Everlast boxer shorts. ATOMS FOR PEACE bass player and RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS member Flea played his show in a skirt.
#understatement
As we already told you, this year’s line up was kind of back to the roots. The booking team showed an excellent taste with presenting just a few big names like ATOMS FOR PEACE, WOODKID, DISCLOSURE and THE KNIFE but on the other hand a lot of insider’s tips like TODD TERJE, IAMAMIWHOAMI, and a bunch of nice hip hop acts like ZEBRA KATZ and GHOSTPOET. Highly talented youngster and MOUNT KIMBIE collaborator KING KRULE and his band surprised with a touching show and gave us one of the best moments of the whole festival.
#bounce:
Whatever ever you think this little word means, it’s da shit in 2013. We thougt some days about the perfect name, because never before we heard such an amount of deep and rough bass music as in this year. Main acts like AZEALIA BANKS showed everything that we know from her videos together with the fastest raps we heard so far. That girls “borrows” everything from UNDERWORLD’s Born Slippy to BAAUER’s Harlem Shake, but whatever, she’s definitely the queen of entertaiment. Sunday was made by FLYING LOTUS who joined the stage with is alter ego CAPTAIN MURPHY to throw an awesome mix of his unique sound as well as some dirty rap parts. That show was topped by his very special visuals, that placed him between two canvases right into the center of psychedelic shimmering and multicolored drawings and graphics. Furthermore the Meltselektor Stage delivered some of the deepest bass music on site.
#aerobics:
What firstly looked like a joke became well calculated game of hide and seek. THE KNIFE decided to entertain and confuse the crowd with an aerobic warm up 20 minutes before the show and later again between the songs. We expected everything from them, but this concept really perplexed us. It was followed by a vivid hustle and bustle of up to ten dancers and musicians on the stage while nobody was able to definitely spot Karin Dreijer Andersson or Olof Dreijer among them. Of course, they didn’t play their hits.
#meltselektor_stage:
This stage, exclusively curated by Germany’s finest in techno music, MODESELEKTOR, the MELT! FESTIVAL delivered a bunch of known and unknown artists of the artist’s personal taste. Gems like the Berlin based DJ team SICK GIRLS made everybody to nod the head. SIRIUSMO brought MC RAMON from his hit Corner Boy for a special life performance and the already mentioned rap beauty MYKKI BLANCO joined the stage with performance artist BOYCHILD and rap fellow PSYCHO EGYPTIAN. Finally MODESELEKTOR themselves played different sets together wit APPARAT and DIAMOND VERSIONS.
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