Strøm Festival: Who or What Performs Electronic Music?

Freddy Avis

13 August 2015

Strøm Festival: Who or What Performs Electronic Music?

Live electronic music is a tricky thing. When performed with playable instruments like analog synthesizers and electric drum kits, the music can lack the quantized mechanicalness often craved by fans of the genre. Conversely, when completely automated, pre-recorded or “DJ’ed,” the music may barely pass as “live” at all, only made “live” by the fact that the sound exists in a public space.

            Strøm suggests a clear goal in its motto, “Celebrating Electronic Music.” The festival spanned over a week in Copenhagen and occurred between several different city venues, one of which was Christiania. I traveled to the inner city commune and followed the sounds of pulsing sub bass until stumbling upon a small red tent, surrounded by roughly 50 festival goers sipping on local Christiania pilsners. Under the tent stood a buzz-cutted DJ, spinning a pair of vinyl records on a turntable playing what can best be described as Berlin house music, although it was unclear which of the three artists on the lineup he was. The attention around the DJ tent paled in comparison to the massive stack of speakers and subwoofers 10 yards across the small plaza. Unsurprisingly, this sound system powered and projected the music coming from the turntable out towards the communal space, and effectively drew the bulk of visual engagement from patrons. In an unorthodox switch, the sound system became the source of performance, intrigue, and awe.

            Perhaps it is best to shed light on this reversal in comparison to another performance that occurred simultaneously several hundred yards away within Christiania. At this show played a guitarist, bassist, and singer in a highly intimate acoustic folk set. The musicians happened to use a small, basic PA system to lightly amplify each instrument plus the vocal microphone, but the acoustic set would have been able to deliver more or less the same sonic experience without amplification, only quieter. By contrast, the Strøm house set, like most electronic music, depended largely on the quality and character of the speaker system. Kicks and sub basses, both vital to house music, sound vastly different from one subwoofer to the next, and volume/EQ balances inevitably shift the timbre of synths and other central electronic timbres.

Strøm benefited from placing the speakers at the forefront of the venue space. First, it highlighted a certain respect for the performative aspects of state-of-the-art music amplification technology, to which electronic musicians owe their craft and without which electronic music would suffer as a genre. Second, the absence of a central DJ persona elevated the highly social, environmental (with regard to one’s surrounding space, not eco-friendliness), and experiential aspects of live electronic and house music. House trades on the physical quality of sound, particularly the pleasurable vibrations of subs and kicks. Third, the festival setting challenges patrons to reconsider – and even doubt - the DJ as a performer. While DJs are often expert producers and curators, the craft of DJing lacks the intimacy, risk, and imperfection of conventional performance. The DJ in Christiania, for instance, did little more than switch vinyl and prepare for transitions, intermitted by sipping on that same Christiania pilsner. Ultimately, Strøm isolated the music in an intriguingly awkward space between two forces – DJ and speaker -  that barely or not at all pass as performing mechanisms.