I first heard about the Kontra Musik Festival from an excellent blog written by an old friend and clubbing associate of mine, Stephen Rennicks. Our Stephen (who happens to have a blinding cool first name) is a fanatical fan of all things Drexciya and Dopplereffekt related, his blog Drexciyan Research Lab delves into the dark depths of the Gerald Donald/James Stinton universe to a level never before reached by other mortals. Stephen knows so much about these guys that I’m convinced he is actually Gerald Donald himself. I myself am a huge fan of their work also, so when Stephen pointed out that Dopplereffekt *and* Black Replica (a side project of Donald’s which is fronted by an as yet unnamed female singer/performer who first showed herself to the world via her myspace page) I was onto the Scandanavian Air website in a shot had booked me a flight over.

Friday
The Kontra Musik event took place in Malmo, which is situated right at the bottom of Sweden, so the handiest way for me to get there was to fly to Copenhagen and then get the train across this mental bridge across the sea, the train only took 30 minutes to get from Copenhagen airport to Malmo! Upon leaving Malmo’s train station the first thing I saw was a truck full of screaming students dressed up as sailors celebrating their graduation from school (or college?), in Sweden they do this by piling into trucks and open topped cars, driving around the city blasting techno and beeping their horns all day long. My weekend was looking up already and I’d only been here five minutes! The festival wasn’t until Saturday, so on Friday night I had originally planned to find a bar or club in Malmo, but after a bit of interweb searching I discovered that there was a Hardwax night on in a club called Culture Box back in Copenhagen with a live set from Vanqueur as well as DJ sets from DJ Pete, Marcel Dettmann and some local lad called Trentemoller-rice or something playing downstairs. There were trains running from Malmo to Copenhagen once an hour during the night, could I be crazy enough to pull this off, travel to Denmark for a night out and then back to Sweden when I go to bed? It turns out that this is common practice over in Malmo/Copenhagen. When the train pulled in from Copenhagen at 12:15am about 200 drunken Swedes (and maybe also Danes, it was hard to tell, they’re all tall, blonde and attractive) all fell out cheering and swigging beer from their bottles of Carlsberg. A quick 40 minutes later and I was queuing outside the Culture Box club where the friendly bouncer asked me if I was English, seemed satisfied with my negative response and then let me in.

The Culture Box (I keep calling it the Culture Club in my mind!) is a great little spot. The upstairs “club room” was where the Hardwax lads were playing their mixture of Maurizio dubby techno along with a bit of harder Tresor type stuff, while downstairs Trentemoller was playing an “eclectic” trainwreck of same ‘ol electrohouse along with the odd “classic”, some Cure track I forget the name of, that Run Jeremy bootleg of Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker, “Try Again” by Aaliya (she was a great singer actually, shame she died so young!) etc. Once Trentemoller came on downstairs filled up to bursting, the Hardwax room had a healthy crowd also but could have done with another 50 or so people in there I think. The Danes seem to enjoy getting as drunk as the Irish, with the added bonus of having their clubs stay open until 6am or so, but with the slight disadvantage of having more expensive beer! I really enjoyed the club though, a proper techno venue, it reminded me of a bigger version of Dublin’s fabled Funnel club. I got talking to a couple consisting of a Swedish guy and English girl who had also travelled over from Malmo and we got the train back home together and joked about how many kids had probably been conceived on the train since the building of that bridge seven years ago.

Saturday

On Saturday it was a bright and early start, no hang on actually, when I got back from Copenhagen it was bright and early and I was greeted by the most attractive hotel receptionist ever (I stayed at the Plaza Hotel) who recommended I come down for breakfast in half an hour but when I got to my room I feel unconscious until about 3pm. Then it was UP AND AT THEM as I strode off to find the venue where all this business was taking place. Saturday was a scorcher of a day, blinding sunshine and 28 degrees of heat points that made me a tad warm. Luckily my hotel was close to the venue, some kind of arts space type place called Inkonst which has a trendy (proper Berlin trendy, not South William Street fake trendy) bar, a club room type venue and a more….live room type venue. Both spaces are small-ish, 200 people capacity places. When I got there a guy was out in the side open air area DJing and there was a ping-pong table set up that people were playing on. All very relaxed and civilised! I quickly ducked out of the sun and into the bar, grabbed myself a “Falcon Export” beer and went downstairs to catch most of an unusual live laptop + visuals act called Incite, a German couple who were making strange, sometimes harsh, clickly buzzy cut up noise in the style of a noisier Pole. They also had these cool looking visuals to go with their music which were projected onto them and also onto four big screens on the wall at the back of the room so you could turn around and face that wall and zone out watching the visuals.

After Incite DJ Mats Almegard (I think!) hopped on and played some brooding and dark downtempo IDMy (I hate that word!) tracks, and then the Black Replica show started. [This next part of the review is actually an email I sent to Stephen Rennicks when I came back from Sweden which he has already printed on his site but I’m going to reproduce it here again anyway!] A mic and monitor was set up on the floor in front of the visuals screen, nothing else. Then the visuals and music started, the first track was Mathematical Eyes, the visuals were a mix of bits from the YouTube videos they posted and other blurry videos of “the girl”(are we calling her Black Replica? Ms. Replica?). Then Ms. Replica herself appeared, crouched down on the ground, with her black cape covering her, the then sang along to the backing track. Great voice, sounded good live. She danced around, in an unusual pagan style, and sang along to some more tracks. I was pretty awestruck, the music is great, and she’s a beautiful girl too, and I was finally seeing somebody connected to this whole Dopplereffekt thing! After a while she discarded the black cloak and was wearing a black lycra bodysuit underneath it, oh yeah, and black high heel type boots. A few tracks in she put the mic down and ran off “stage” (it wasn’t a stage though, she was right in front of us, a very intimate show), a new track started playing and she came back on dressed up this time in a white lycra bodysuit with a big bunch of feathers sticking out of the head, which drew some cheers and good natured whistles from an otherwise completely silent crowd. She still had the black boots on. While wearing this new costume she performed the Black Feathers track, I’m not sure, she may have performed another track dressed in this costume but pretty soon she ran off stage again and came back on wearing a beautiful flowing silky red dress, with that pagan symbol on the chest, glowing red, and she was barefoot. She performed another two or three tracks (once again, all spooky dark and moody, great singing, a few tracks were heading towards the 120 bpm area, could possibly be mixed into my DJ sets if it gets released!) Before the end of her set she changed back into her black lycra and cape she wears in the video. I’d say she played for an hour overall. Everybody cheered and clapped at the end, I picked my jaw up off the floor, went off to get a drink and started mentally picturing the engagement ring I was going to pick out for her.

I went up stairs to the club room which was a bit bigger than downstairs and had a proper club sound system which was nice and loud and bassy. The DJ was playing some electro stuff, the last track he played before Dopplereffekt came on was Biomechanik by Anthony Rother. At this point on the stage (he was off DJing on a table to the right) there was a Korg Triton LE keyboard on a stand, facing the left of the stage. There was also an office chair in front of it. An Asian looking girl then walked out, dressed in a black top, black skirt and sat down at the chair. She was practically motionless throughout her set, moving her left hand over the keyboard a few times, pressing the odd key here and there, but mostly staying perfectly still, facing towards the left of the stage. There weren’t really many visuals for this show, just some text coming up on a screen every so often “Multiple universes”, “Calabi Yau Space”, “Extra Dimensions”. Then every so often a short video loop of the girl herself, a close-up of her face and it also showed her holding some folded paper diamond thing. The music was brooding, dark, along the lines of the new album on Rephlex but I’ve just heard samples of that off Juno, I didn’t recognise any of the tracks she “played”. All in all a very mysterious show. No sign of any Gerald Donald over at the mixing desk, on stage, or during the Black Replica show either. [end of my email to Stephen]

Other acts I caught were Kode9 and Spaceape (his MC for the evening) who were great. I’m not a fan of this dubstep fad at all at all but his stuff is definitely different, full of bass obviously but enough other bits going on to keep me interested. Unlike Various Productions who I also saw, after reading so much hype about them on the Boomkat.com record shop site I was thoroughly disappointed by their plodding live show. The usual “bwwwomb bwwwomb bwwwwomb” bass with a few sound effects and three poor vocalists. Apparently their releases are top notch but I none of them caught my ear when I listened to the sound samples. This dubstep stuff definitely isn’t for me, my attention span is too short for it! Krikor and then Minilogue finished off the night with some average to good quirky minimal house business. The kids in the club room loved it but I guess I’ve heard so much of that stuff nowadays that I got bored and ended up just staying at the bar chatting to the various friendly people I bumped into (they were all very friendly!)

Overall the Kontra Musik Festival is a pretty “arty” affair, you could say. Not really a techno hoe down like you’d get in London (or like I got the night before at the Hardwax night), but something different and unusual that I enjoyed immensely, I’ll be keeping an eye on their future line-ups for sure! Sunday was another blisteringly hot day so I went down to the beach and recovered from my hangover while sipping a diet coke by the sea. Nice!

Photos from the Hardwax night in Copenhagen
Photos from the Kontra Musik Festival (in Malmo, remember?)

And the videos, apologies for not giving them all funny titles but there are loads of them and it’s late and I want to go to bed! I seem to have not uploaded the videos from the Hardwax night yet, so they’ll be put up sometime in the future:
Black Replica 1
Black Replica 2
Black Replica 3
Black Replica 4
Black Replica 5
Black Replica 6
Dopplereffekt 1
Dopplereffekt 2
Dopplereffekt 3
Dopplereffekt 4
Incite 1
Incite 2
Incite 3
Incite 4
Kode 9 1 (1) hahahah!
Kode 9 2
Kode 9 3
Minilogue 1
Minilogue 2
Various Productions
Krikor
Some Swedish birds

Hope you like them! Apart from a little party on Saturday I won’t be going out again for the next few months in Dublin, but I’m still going to try to keep the site updated with videos and pictures, probably a few old ones I forgot to upload. Also I’m changing hosting so I’ll have more space for DJ mixes, unfortunately this means the site will be down for a short while (I’m not sure how long yet, I’m kind of tempted to try and do a redesign too!), just keep clicking refresh every few days if there’s nothing here! Bye bye for a while!