Techno usually reigns at Bar 25’s sprawling riverside club, but last weekend at Berlin’s second annual Down By the River Festival folk music held sway.
The festival brought more than twenty-four acts spanning the spectrum of music-made-by-people-with-actual-instruments from traditional singer-songwriters to raucous garage rockers. Some of the highlights included Chuckamuck, MoreEats and Coming Soon.
Compared to most parties at this venue which start in the wee hours of the morning and go for days, the live music started promptly at 1:30pm and ended less than twelve hours later. In between main stage acts shorter sets on the small stage were staggered, but the festival also organized DJs in the adjacent bar and throughout the day musicians were invited to perform inside a very small box designed to look like a living room, which broadcast the sounds and sights of the interior through microphones and a video camera. (Full disclosure: In the afternoon I performed a few of my own songs in this space, which at the time was surrounded by screaming children permeating the holes in the box with their tongues and fingers, making for unquestionably the strangest gig I’ve ever played.)
The families left when the afternoon passed. The evening brought an indie-club feeling while the late hours saw a dance party DJed by the festival’s well-prepped organizers, some of whom are also responsible for the “Berlin Songs” compilations, three excellent volumes of music showcasing “artists passing through or based in Berlin.” The festival had something for everyone, but most of all it illuminated the spirit and energy of Berlin’s loosely defined, but enormously adept local folk music scene, which I have admired from New York for years.
My favorites from the day’s eclectic program include the sweet old-timey songs of Martha Rose whose harmonies with Jessica Sea were devastatingly beautiful, and the energetic Kid Ikarus, a local rock band unlike most because they performed in animal masks and sang in German. Of course Susie Asado, Donna Stoltz, Stanley Brinks, Coming Soon, Freschard, Chuckamuck, Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains, and MoreEats deserve honorable mention too, but I don’t have the space here to elaborate on all my accolades. In fact, if I have any criticism it’s that beer was too expensive, but that was only in my relative haze of Berlin prices, since beer still cost half that it would in a New York bar.
