KRAKE FESTIVAL

In Friedrichshain, KRAKE FESTIVAL does not fit in a single basement. The name is an octopus: several arms, several rooms, one head. In August 2010, from the 11th to the 15th, Nico Deuster (Killekill) and Holger Hilgers (Salon du Katz) joined those two club nights for a festival of what they called experimental dance music — a label that did not quite exist and served them for that reason. Anyone arriving in search of a Saxon-reservoir Kosmonaut has the wrong city. The ground here is Berlin and the ear is techno and house that will not settle for a weekend loop.

The opening was at Berghain Kantine, Am Wriezener Bahnhof: a small room, annexed to the club tourism had already turned into myth. The rest of the gathering moved to Suicide Circus, Revaler Straße 99, a mid-size club with an indoor floor and an outdoor floor, in the heart of Friedrichshain nightlife. The contrast is the thesis. An intimate Wednesday in the Kantine; then a site that lets the yard in. A four-day pass cost thirty euros. That figure is not price nostalgia. It measures a scale that still fitted two addresses, not a summer compound of fences.

Deuster later said it without disguise: Killekill nights had become more homogenous in order to build a crowd; the rest of what they loved no longer fitted a Tuesday. Krake was born for that remainder. Hilgers brought Salon du Katz. The octopus, they said, comes from the depths with many arms: different music branches, different venues. Plaid, Cristian Vogel, Bogdan Raczynski, Radioactive Man, Kettel, Frank Bretschneider, Der Dritte Raum, Sven Weisemann, DJ Flush are not a trophy list. They explain the range: Warp IDM, laboratory techno, odd breakbeat, British-lineage electro, an ear the weekly club could no longer hold every week.

The audience experience is inferred from the real format. You arrive by S-Bahn at Ostbahnhof or you walk Revaler. By day Friedrichshain still looks like a neighbourhood; at night Suicide Circus sounds into the yard and back inside. There is no camping. There is a friend’s flat, a hostel, the bar afterwards two streets away. Anyone coming from another country does not buy a field: they buy several club nights chained together. August heat in the yard, air-con that is not enough, the jump from the Kantine to the larger site: that is the route. The crowd is the Killekill-night crowd and anyone who wants to hear Plaid without being sold a ten-thousand open-air.

In 2011 the octopus opened more arms — Roter Salon, Festsaal Kreuzberg, Chez Jackie beside Kantine and Suicide Circus — and the calendar lengthened. This text does not turn that expansion into a pledge. It tells a consequence: if the festival exists for what the weekly club cannot hold, the map multiplies. Jimmy Edgar, Redshape, Bola, Bill Youngman belong to that second wave as proof that Warp, Delsin and Skam could sit with the house label. Killekill is not a sponsor. It is the ear that would not fit in a single night.

The octopus is not only a drawing. It is a way of moving: you do not live one floor. You chain a small room annexed to a myth-club with a Friedrichshain yard, and later with a Volksbühne salon or a Festsaal. Anyone who treats KRAKE as a Berghain night erases the jump. Tourism had already bought the myth; Deuster and Hilgers bought the remainder — the difficult stuff that will not fit a homogenous Tuesday — and spread it across arms.

This octopus must not be mixed with Kosmonaut Festival in Chemnitz or with a postcard Berghain. KRAKE FESTIVAL is Deuster and Hilgers’, the 2010 one between Kantine and Suicide Circus, Killekill and Salon du Katz’s. Mixing it with reservoir rock because someone confuses names is mixing a Friedrichshain yard with a pedal boat. The ground is Berlin. The ear is club-festival techno and house, not grass.

Anyone who steps onto Revaler at dawn understands why the weekly club was not enough. Between the Wednesday Kantine and the Suicide Circus yard, between Plaid and Bretschneider, between the drawn octopus and the two addresses, Berlin had a difficult dance festival that did not borrow a field from anyone. Nico Deuster lends Killekill; Holger Hilgers lends Salon du Katz. You leave the yard with the S-Bahn still running and Friedrichshain still a neighbourhood, not a field. What remains is a KRAKE that learned to be several arms without ceasing to be, at heart, two club nights that refused to choose a single branch.