- Düsseldorf's Open Source presents several very different festival experiences. It repurposes a horse track for one day, and as crowds shambled onto the property last Sunday, there was an appropriate feeling of leisure. Casual punters made their way over to the main stage, with its typical racetrack bleachers, to catch headline sets from Death Cab For Cutie and Metronomy. The Carhartt WIP stage catered to the less casual fans, hosting acts that wouldn't have been out of place at Unsound. Throughout the grounds, installation artists staged various interruptions—in Düsseldorf, throwing a straight-up festival with big-name headliners seems to be impossible, such is the legacy of the city's arty freak scene.
As if to outline the various strands informing the festival's programming, the Friday prior to the main event marked the debut of the time_based_academy, situated in the Kunsthalle, the exhibition hall which houses Salon Des Amateurs. Recently, we've made a fuss over the elegant anarchy that club fosters, and that energy seems to stem all the way back to the establishment of the Kunsthalle. When construction on the brutalist building wrapped in 1968, pupils from the nearby art academy immediately occupied the hall. The time_based_academy's programming also felt democratic and haphazard, with lectures, impromptu performance art and a few experimental musicians scattered throughout the building.
Thomas Klein of the band Kreidler performed in the building's lobby, a tabletop show where he built hypnotic rhythms by drumming on a contact-mic'd piece of wood run through various effects. Later that night at the Salon, Laurel Halo played a rare DJ set of dance music that would have felt quite weird in any normal club, but seemed straight-ahead by Salon standards. Halo is one of two DJs I've ever heard mix in Japa Habilidoso's dreamy "Agronomia Setorial," NTS Radio's Jon Rust being the other. As the night went on, she dropped another Future Times cut, Jack J's "Thirstin," which shared some lyrics with her next selection, Vincent Floyd's "Your Eyes." After an extended (and welcome) electro section, Organic Music boss Chee Shimizu took to the decks alongside Salon resident Vladimir Ivkovic. The pair worked their way through extremely obscure psychedelic cuts until the sun came up.
The next day, Open Source proper started in a far more pedestrian manner. A band called Shipwrecks turned out rote post-rock, while inoffensive indie unit Robbing Millions tried on some silly dance moves in the main area. Then there was the Carhartt stage. Ndagga Rhythm Force splintered the afternoon haze, as several percussionists handled difficult rhythms while the group's backbone, a patient drummer and a keyboardist playing basslines on a DX-7, hung tough. Up front, two singers went totally nuts. Though the group was billed as Mark Ernestus's Ndagga Rhythm Force, the dub techno legend was not onstage. He was back in the mixing booth, making everything sound just right. (Ernestus also drives the band's tour bus and would later be seen accompanying the raucous crew around the festival grounds, thrust into an unlikely new role as tour manager.)
Salon founder Detlef Weinrich's performance as Tolouse Low Trax was nearly as compelling, if about 40 BPM slower. Weinrich plays in Kriedler as well, but his mannered take on Krautrock veers towards sensual, gently psychedelic Balearic music. Laurel Halo tried out mostly new tracks—she's currently plying an aqueous modern electro, mirroring her selections from the night before. During Future Brown's set, J-Cush had time to roll multiple spliffs onstage, snapping iPhone photos as his bandmates Asma Maroof and Fatima Al Qadiri held it down on the decks. Once their MC, Ruff Sqwad's Prince Rapid, stopped toasting and delivered some bars, the outlook improved considerably. Hearing Rapid spit over Future Brown's Chicago bop tribute, "Big Homie," was odd and entertaining.
Düsseldorf's creative lifeblood stems from its Kunstakademie (art academy), and the first of two official afterparties took place on the first floor of the 18th century building. Future Brown's Daniel Pineda and J-Cush, joined by Prince Rapid, fared much better in this sweaty, cramped setting. Over at the Salon, the second event kicked into madcap gear when Detlef Weinrich started DJing, well after dawn had broken. Weinrich, performing his second set of the day, dipped liberally into the Salon's in-house record collection, a cache of rarities built up from the art bar's profits. As such, Salon fixtures like Arne Bunjes (of Themes For Great Cities) knew most of the tunes, pointing to the labels of cued-up records and shouting, "that one's insane!" I recognized virtually nothing. Düsseldorf's anti-authoritarian creative current flows as constant as the Rhine. Even a festival like Open Source, which on the surface, appeals to a broad cross-section of music fans, refuses to play it straight.
Photo credit: Markus Felix Photography (stage/sky shot)