Berlin Festival

Berlin Festival: Berlin has its own festival too, and certainly in a rather original location: Tempelhof Airport, once the largest airport in the world and now a park and event venue. The first night is Friday, September 10th, and it's sold out for a lineup that has little to envy from other major European festivals, with bands such as Lcd Soundystem, Caribou, Robyn, Editors, Fever Ray and DJs like Fatboy Slim, 2many Djs, taking turns across the airport's various hangars. This year's Berlin Festival is an indie-electro festival.

It's around 7pm and it's a beautiful evening in Berlin, mild temperatures and few clouds in the sky - the night looks promising. We check out the arrivals board with the concert schedule and then head into the show area. We find ourselves in an immense space beneath an old hangar, while just a few metres away a huge park opens up where Berliners are out riding their bikes. Nearby there's even still a plane or two parked.

The concerts. Having filed away Adam Green's less-than-thrilling performance (which wrapped up at 8pm), we make up for it - so to speak - with a slice of pizza from Mario, plus the evening's second beer; Lcd Soundystem are on soon.

Meanwhile, thanks to a carefully designed, vaguely psychedelic light show, the unusual arena grows ever more fascinating and evocative. With the disco ball hoisted above our heads, the concert can begin on stage. The band comes on first, followed by James Murphy: "Us v Them" opens the setlist and the series of long electronic marches, percussion up front, and the crowd is soon on fire. The performance of the songs, drawn from Lcd's three studio albums, is flawless, with grooves and percussive interlocking that are hard to resist, and Murphy's voice, shifting between falsetto and deep tones, signs off on the whole dense sonic brew. We quickly arrive at the epic of "All My Friends", followed by the not-so-different "I Can Change" from the brand new "This Is Happening". Murphy certainly doesn't claim to offer anything musically original - he just wants to be cool - and at times his brand of cool (think "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down", which won't make the setlist) undoubtedly earns a musically meaningful weight, worthy of the critical acclaim and audience success that have made Lcd Soundsystem one of the most important bands of recent years, even if at times the inspiration (see their latest album) doesn't quite live up to the reputation. After "I Can Change" comes "Tribulation" (from the debut album), probably the most driving and successful track of the whole set, before closing with "Yeah". It was a highly anticipated show, and we can say expectations weren't betrayed; the band clearly has substance, especially live; James Murphy didn't look in dazzling shape, and he said so himself, but he was still able to deliver a setlist with real impact on the restless, dancing souls of the many young Berliners who flocked to the Festival.

Time to head to hangar 4, where the radiant Robyn's set began about a quarter of an hour earlier, at 9.45pm. Too late to enjoy "Dancing On My Own", objectively a great last single, but the show still delivers plenty of emotional chills. The hangar is packed and has eyes only for the blonde sprite who, backed of course by an all-male band dressed in elegant white suits, gives it her all in an electro-pop mix, the genre in which she's recently become a star again. Classic tracks alternate with more recent ones, from both parts of "Body Talk", up to the final flood of lights, synths and voice - a voice that doesn't dazzle through sheer power but through fragility and pathos. We reach, much to our regret, the end: "With Every Heartbeat" is the fitting close to a joyful electro-pop cauldron that entertained and won over the crowd, beyond any prejudice.

Time for Editors, on the main stage. Fresh off the synth-pop turn of "In This Light And On This Evening" (2009), the Birmingham quartet, headliners on paper for the night, deliver a show with no particular sparks. Classic tracks like "Sparks" and "Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors" and more recent ones like "Papillon" try to do their dirty rock work, but the band suffers from what seems, from the outset, a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of their music: the lack of a clearly defined musical identity, caught between sincere dark aspirations and equally sincere aspirations to stadium-sized choruses. The result is, consequently, music devoid of genuine emotion, which essentially seems to be rather than vibrates.

A band that does possess its own specific identity, however, are Fever Ray. The solo project of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer Andersson, already known for her role, alongside her brother, in Knife, who with "Silent Shout" left a deep mark on the electro territories of the 2000s. The self-titled 2009 album was unanimously praised by critics, and the group, in a live set that began at 11.30pm, embellished by stunning lighting effects and beams projected across hangar 4, fully succeeds in conveying to the audience the oscillations so characteristic of her music, at once glacial and gripping, spare and melodic. Among all the songs, we recall the splendour of "When I Grow Up", while "Triangle Walks" unfolds sublimely, with dozens of lamps marking the rhythm on stage, guiding the band members and the packed crowd towards the darkness and beauty of sound, of space.

It's now one in the morning when we reach hangar 5, on the other side of the airport, home to the stage of the City Slang label, celebrating 20 years in business (and it will do so in style come November, with three days of concerts featuring Broken Social Scene, Yo La Tengo, Calexico, Tortoise, Menomena, Lambchop, Alexi Murdoch). From a great vantage point we can watch the upcoming set from Caribou, the Canadian mathematician, deus ex machina of one of the most engaging electro-pop projects of recent years, with albums like "Andorra" (2007) and "Swim" (2010) that have shown an enviable ability to weave together electronic textures and a knack for melody (often quite surf-inflected and retro), placing the sound in territory not too far from that of Animal Collective and Four Tet. The hangar is packed when, at half past one, the four band members (Daniel switching between guitar, keyboard and drums) come on stage in a very easy-going manner and launch into "Leave House", one of the most inspired tracks on "Swim". "Melody Day", the emblematic track from "Andorra", is presented in a rather stripped-down version, but no less convincing, by a band that shows great chemistry. Daniel wishes City Slang a happy anniversary, then the packed crowd greets "Odessa", the single from the latest album, with a roar. The finale is reserved for "Sun", a techno-house-flavoured electronic build that closes out Caribou's set - a beautiful, thoroughly indie show.

At this point the unexpected happens: the organisers are forced to halt the concerts and DJ sets at 2.30am, practically right after Caribou's set, for safety reasons, due to problems with an excessive crowd build-up at the entrance to hangar 4, where 2many Djs' set was due to take place - it's cancelled, as is Fatboy Slim's. For Saturday night, it was then decided to bring forward the close of all concerts to 11pm.

The organisers put it this way on the Berlin Festival's official website: "Discontinuing the festival was indeed a very hard decision that many might think of as too cautious", clearly a reference to the tragedy of the Love Parade on July 24th, which claimed 19 lives. Something evidently went wrong; in any case, before the shutdown, we were able to catch several concerts of excellent quality.

It was, nonetheless, a night to remember, despite the early close of the programme, with several notable performances from major names in the indie universe. All of it set within a particularly striking space, certainly an added value for a Berlin Festival that, despite the organisational issues, showed undeniable potential - potential that suggests, why not, a prominent future in the years to come on the international music festival scene.

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