- Helsinki's Flow Festival ticks all the usual boxes—great bookings, cool festival site, lovely host city—as well a few less common for events of its size. For instance, the distinct lack of zombie-eyed ravers wandering the site. Or the way organizers staggered the timeslots on the three big stages so that you never had to miss too much of anyone. Or, most notably, the wealth of delicious dining options, plucked from Helsinki's white-hot food scene. With dozens of vendors serving everything from lobster hot dogs to rabbit-and-duck pastillas, my festival partner and I had a harder time plotting our veritable Helsinki tasting menu than hashing out which acts we'd see.
If you're purely in it for house and techno, you'll certainly find better festivals, but I found the balance of underground acts (Tama Sumo), mega-rave crowdpleasers (Skrillex) and biggest-stage headliners (Outkast) to work nicely. Those seeking the former could plop down under a tree in the lantern-lit Red Bull Music Academy Backyard for the duration of the weekend and ignore everything else. On Saturday night, Fred P took the stage to its fullest potential: his utterly deep house found a gloriously receptive audience there, with each fleck of piano or diva vocal sending the normcore youths, Scandinavian surfer dudes and Freixenet-sippers—the Flow trifecta, basically—into hysterics. I-F's disco-to-techno dot-connecting pulled off something similar the night before, building a bridge between Ron Morelli's chin-scratchy set and the party that would come later. This culminated in a DJ set from Machinedrum, whose hip-hop and bass-forward club tunes could have kept the crowd bouncing well into the night (unfortunately, the festival had a hard sound curfew of 11:30 PM).
For DJs, the RBMA stage worked best by far—unless you count the Champagne Bar, where local jocks played disco, hip-hop, Madonna and Finnish pop music to a crowd seemingly unfazed by paying €11 for a few sips of bubbly. (Alcohol is pricey in Finland, but no one seemed bothered—the bars were uniformly rammed.) Jamie xx closed the sweaty and cavernous Black Tent on Saturday but had to create and maintain the vibe from scratch due to a lengthy interval between his set and James Holden's. His selections—moody house, dusty disco, his own recent tunes—were considerably more to my taste than what, say, Skrillex played in the Lumia Blue Tent on Friday, but it'd be hard to argue that Sonny Moore's unsubtle wobbles weren't better suited to such a time-slot. Jon Hopkins, who played the Black Tent the day before Jamie xx, managed subtlety in these confines as well as any electronic act: his live set had its share of bass blasts and rave panache, but cut with admirably musical flourishes.
The closer an electronic performance got to a concert, the better it worked at Flow. Backing bands lent acts like Little Dragon, Neneh Cherry, Holden and Bonobo the kind of stage presence needed to thrive in the festival's tents. (I suppose projecting the opening sequence of The Lion King to accompany a monumental drop, as Skrillex did, also encourages crowd engagement.) My favorite sets were non-electronic ones. Senegalese drumming group Jeri-Jeri's performance at the Balloon 360° Stage—the best venue at the festival, though it wasn't always large enough to meet demand for the acts that played there—was absolutely thrilling, with mind-boggling rhythmic interplay and oodles of on-stage charisma. The crowd responded in kind, dancing with such gusto that the band started inviting the best among them up on stage. At the Balloon on Friday night, Tuareg rockers Tinariwen were more subtle, with a narcotic swell that built through the entire set. On Sunday, Blood Orange's ace musicianship and songwriting lent the Lumia Blue Tent surprising intimacy.
Though I didn't engage in too much dancing at Flow, I still found much to enjoy. It was nice to be out of the gate by 1:30 AM, with a belly full of Burmese noodle salad and ears ringing from music that's a welcome departure from the endless house and techno of so many summer festivals. It's not a rave, but whatever it is, we could use more of it.
Photo credits: Jussi Hellsten (Flow sign), Samuli Pentti
(lights), Tomi Kukkonen (shadows)