Detroit’s annual Movement festival is something of a Mecca for fans of electronic music, especially those who have a fondness for its history and the integral part the Motor City has played in its development. It’s an event that has taken place every Memorial Day Weekend since 2000, and seems to have continually grown with each consecutive year, expanding its vision and curatorial approach. 2013 was no different, and from the moment XLR8R caught an early glimpse of Movement’s line-up for this year, we had our heart set on attending the festivities. Thankfully, the organizers obliged, and invited us out to spend the three-day weekend getting our fill of all the house and techno (and its many permutations) presented by the huge number of performing artists. Little did we know how much of an undertaking the whole experience would be, so we’ve decided to share a condensed, five-point breakdown of our time spent at Movement 2013.

Movement is not for everyone.
Spread across three long days and nights, Movement is basically a litmus test for being able to take on a big weekend and survive all of the non-stop music, dancing, partying, and other assorted activities that entails. Performers are slated to start as early as 1 p.m. each day, and the list of DJs and live acts is evenly spread across each of the five available stages without stopping until around 11 p.m. or midnight. By that time, all of the official and unofficial afterparties are already underway, and most of them go at least until 4 a.m. It’s unquestionably a huge amount of fun, and offers true lovers of electronic music a chance to completely immerse themselves in the culture and sounds it offers for three straight days.

Benjamin Damage

That said, Movement can turn into a bit of a grind. Since a lot of great artists are scheduled to play the earlier slots throughout Memorial Day Weekend, staying rested enough to catch their opening sets is something of a battle. We were lucky to see xxxy and T. Williams each warm up the festival with their excellent selections of bass-driven house and garage at the Red Bull Music Academy stage on opening day, but unfortunately only caught the last portion of Benjamin Damage when he kicked off the Underground stage on Sunday. Having stayed out the night before watching practically the entire Dirtybird crew bring its brand of raucous party music to The Fillmore and catching Kyle Hall drop some smoothed-out disco and house selections at the homegrown Deep Detroit Five afterparty, we took a bit longer than usual getting ourselves over to Hart Plaza to hear Damage’s entire set of dark and heavy techno. All of which is to say that the full Movement experience really isn’t for people who are interested in getting a full-night’s rest and taking time to wander about seeing the sights of Detroit. There are so many top-notch artists and events crammed into the three-day weekend, and very little of it is worth missing.

Moodymann

Ellen Allien

Movement is for everyone.
For better or worse, Movement is open to literally everyone, and as such, often feels like one massive, all-ages club. The youth contingent was apparently stronger than ever in 2013, and they often appeared to be the most enthusiastic of the festival attendees, too. Whether they were crammed up against the barriers at the Beatport stage (where Ellen Allien kept everyone continually hyped with her non-stop dance moves and Masters at Work played a glut of big-room house tunes to an immense audience) or crowdsurfing to Body High co-owner Samo Sound Boy‘s slick, bass-focused set of forward-thinking club jams at the Electric Forest stage, the youngsters made up most—if not practically all—of any given throng of people undulating in front of a stage.

Masters at Work

Though it often seemed to be, Movement wasn’t just a seething mass of teenagers decked in neon, sporting furry hats or boots, and/or wearing next to nothing. It was also full of industry types, aspiring artists, longtime local supporters, curious passersby, breakdancers, young professionals, babies, vacationers from around the world, chess players, and more. The festival’s diversity was more apparent during the daytime, when there was space for dance circles to form and people could move around leisurely without having to dodge running tweens or stumbling drunks. But by nightfall, Hart Plaza was packed with partiers of all ages, many of which seemed to be treating the music as more or less a backdrop to their attempts at getting wasted and dry humping the person nearest them. While we were keeping our focus on the massive sub frequencies and grimy riddims of The Bug‘s performance on Saturday night, the rest of the crowd seemed to be in a contest to see who could out scream and out flail one another. If we’re being honest, it was a fairly entertaining spectacle to watch (The Bug himself called it “the war against brostep”), but the excellent visuals provided by the stage producers were already more than enough ocular stumuli. And yet despite such distractions, the fact that Movement remains an all-ages festival is very much a positive thing, as it opens up the possibility for the performing artists to enlighten and entertain all kinds of people. We’re just glad that some of the festival-goers couldn’t get into most of the afterparties.

The Bug

Nicolas Jaar

Shigeto

If the sun (or rain) gets to be too much, go Underground.
This year, Saturday and Sunday were very warm and sunny days. And even though Monday brought a full day’s worth of rain to the weekend, if attendees arrived in Detroit without a tan, there’s almost a 100% chance that they left with one (or, more likely, a sunburn). So, yeah, it got really hot sometimes while watching artists like Shigeto and Onra deliver body-moving beats on the main stage (not to mention a bit soggy when Dabrye and Nicolas Jaar played their sets in Memorial Day’s afternoon drizzle), and there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of finding shade except to take shelter in the cavernous Underground stage. Thankfully, loads of quality DJs and producers—like Ben Klock, Deadbeat, Silent Servant, and Nina Kraviz, to name a few—played there, and kept the incessant energy of the echoey room to a level somewhere in between an illegal warehouse rave and that huge, tribalistic dance party scene in The Matrix Reloaded. However, that also means that the area was at an almost maxed-out capacity pretty much around the clock, which made getting from one place to another extremely difficult and frustrating. But no matter—wherever we found ourselves once we took shelter at the Underground stage, there was never a shortage of dancing bodies surrounding us, and we quickly got into whatever hypnotic strain of techno was being pushed into the darkness from the glowing, monolithic stage.

The crowd for Nina Kraviz

Dabrye

Never miss a chance to see Terrence Parker, Mala, or Azari & III.
While Movement’s lineup this year was chock full of XLR8R favorites, the performances which stood out in particular came from Detroit’s own Terrence Parker, UK dubstep lynchpin Mala, and the four-piece live band of Azari & III. Why these artists wound up as our ultimate festival highlights was due to a number of different reasons, but if we had to boil it down, we’d say that it was essentially because of their showmanship and selections.

Terrence Parker

All of the DJs we saw at Movement were quality selectors who crafted coherent and moving sets with an array of different genres of dance music, and yet Terrence Parker and Mala stood tall above the rest. On opening night, the Motor City native took the headlining slot at the Made in Detroit stage, and with his signature telephone receiver in hand, delivered a performance that could only be described as “awe-inspiring.” Parker whizzed through loads of vintage house and techno tunes, inspiring cheers of adoration and flurries of applause when he dropped classics like Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Percolator” by Cajmere. The DJ also dabbled in some bits of old-school electro and breezy, disco-flecked cuts through the night, scratching and beat juggling like a madman without a care in the world. Just about everything he did was met with some kind of expression of amazement from the overjoyed onlookers, and it was sometimes hard to tell if Parker or his audience was dancing the hardest.

Terrence Parker

Mala

During the next day, Mala was tasked with an afternoon slot at the RBMA amphitheatre following a particularly bombastic and, at times, borderline unlistenable set from DJ Hatcha. (Needless to say, the mass of EDM fans at Movement were eating up his selections.) So when the longstanding dubstepper started off his hour-and-a-half mix with a 12″ of dusty reggae, the crowd’s attention immediately started to wane. But much in the same way that Mala’s first record eventually flipped into an outright jungle track, the energy of the people surrounding the main stage wound up growing exponentially. Each of the sub-heavy cuts being pushed through the main stage’s massive soundsystem sounded absolutely overwhelming, and the selector was having a blast dropping every one of them. He danced around flapping the records with excitement and laughing to himself or with friends watching from onstage. The Bug, who stuck around the festival after his own set on Saturday, looked on while Mala played the hyped-up audience his new “Dirty” tune, making everyone on and around the stage bob their heads and vibe with The Bug’s heavy production and Flowdan’s raw lyrics.

Azari & III

Azari & III provided Movement with a phenomenal live set during the late afternoon on Monday. By that time, the morning’s drizzle was on its way to becoming an all-out downpour, but none of that hindered the band’s intensity or the uninhibited enthusiasm of its fans. The quartet ran through big-room renditions of its hit singles—”Reckless (With Your Love)” and “Manic” proved to be especially outstanding—and a few of the more industrial-tinged instrumentals from 2011’s Azari & III, while Dinamo Azari and Alixander III each manned a pair of CDJs in the back and the pair of vocalists ran around the stage dancing and climbing on the various platforms around them. And even though the band didn’t have as big of an audience as, say, Richie Hawtin or Squarepusher did on the same stage, Azari & III’s pumping, non-stop house rhythms and infectious energy seemed to captivate its crowd more thoroughly than any of the other performers.

The stage during Squarepusher

Samo Sound Boy

Afterparty scheduling is more important than daytime scheduling.
Even though there are a myriad of exciting artists playing at any given moment on one of the five stages spread across Hart Plaza, it’s all in such convenient proximity that the only thing to worry about is having to split time between favorites. While we were in the middle of getting down to Samo Sound Boy’s tunes at the Electric Forest stage on Sunday, Matthew Dear was playing a live set as Audion less than a five-minute walk away on the main stage. Not wanting to miss too much of this rare occasion, we could only wait for 30 minutes or so before heading over to indulge in Dear’s punishing techno grooves and their arresting visual accompaniments. That kind of overlap wasn’t a constant issue, thankfully, and we largely were able to see whatever performance we desired. As such, on the festival grounds there wasn’t much scheduling that a quick, last-minute glance at the program couldn’t take care of, but the same could not be said for the Movement afterparties. Granted, most of the afterparties that go on in Detroit during Memorial Day Weekend are unofficial, and so ease of access, guaranteed entry, and overall quality of the events are not the responsibility of the festival organizers—which actually makes an afterparty schedule all the more important. Checking out the location of the party before buying a ticket is essential, as reliable transportation is not always guaranteed. There were a number of different events we had our eyes on this year that seemed to be simply out of reach, so we stuck to a few in the Downtown Detroit area.

Audion

Dennis Ferrer

But even jumping around a handful of events proved to be problematic. We had our heart set on hearing a set from Basic Soul Unit, so we made sure to catch him Sunday night at Motor City Wine. In the intimate balcony space, the Toronto DJ played a stellar mix of raw hardware funk and acid—a major highlight of which was Pépé Bradock’s “Lifting Weights”—to a sparse but enthusiastic crowd who danced around the dimly lit space sipping wine and beer. We’d hoped to split our night between that smaller party and the bigger line-up down the street which included Maceo Plex, James Holden, and Magda, but things weren’t so easy. When we arrived outside of St. Andrew’s Hall around 1 a.m., a sizable crowd was outside of the venue, some of them attempting to stand in an orderly line and others doing all they could to finagle their way to the front. We did our due diligence and waited outside for close to an hour, keeping our eye on the prize while arguing with our better judgement against walking away. But when we got to the front of the maddening crowd, our position was usurped by a large group who had just appeared off the street, and all of this after we were told the venue was already at capacity. No party was worth enduring that kind of shoddy organization, so we took our business elsewhere (deciding later that sticking to one afterparty a night would probably be the best the way to go). Thankfully, the streets of Detroit were overflowing with locals and festival-goers alike, everyone dancing and vibing to the soulful sounds of house and techno wherever they happened to be, and we were more than happy to join them.

In electronic music circles, Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival is always likely to be slightly overshadowed by the presence of Sónar, which takes place in the same city just two weeks later. It’s a festival that shouldn’t be overlooked by dance fans though; despite a line-up that’s generally weighted more towards rock and indie, in the last few years Primavera’s electronic game has been surprisingly strong. Amidst the guitar bands are lengthy sets by some impressive DJ talent, on stages with great sound systems, alongside a solid selection of electronic and dance-tinged live acts. With that in mind, XLR8R made the trip over to the Catalan capital and spent a week investigating what the festival had to offer—and compiled a list of lessons we learned along the way.

Four Tet is probably on the best form of his career.

It’s hardly news that Kieren Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) is an exceptionally talented musician, but it feels like—both on record and as a live performer—the last couple of years have seen him enter something of a golden period. His recent live sets have been particularly special though, and true to form, his performance at Primavera Soun d2013 was like a master class in how live electronic music should be done. Each tune built and elaborated on its recorded counterpart without losing any of the intricacies of the original. Throughout his set, Hebden clearly worked hard to keep the pace up, building tracks into one another while walking a delicate line between energy and complexity. Tracks like “Plastic People” and “128 Harps” got the crowd moving with their mesmerizing melodic lines and crisp shuffling beats, but recent Nonplus cut “For These Times” was the clear highlight, with Hebden dragging out its storming drum breakdown to glorious effect. Despite playing the festival’s opening night, by the time things wrapped up with a gorgeous, crowd-pleasing rendition of “Love Cry,” it was already clear that Four Tet had turned in one of Primavera’s highlights.

The Knife (by Dani Canto)

Despite what the internet might say, The Knife’s new live show is excellent.

It’s fair to say that The Knife‘s new Shaking The Habitual live show has received something of a mixed response from fans. When the Swedish duo—composed of siblings Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Dreijer—debuted the set in Germany back in April, it was met almost immediately with a tirade of online criticism, with complaints focused on the band’s overuse of backing tracks and the show’s emphasis on dance troupes rather than the duo themselves. In truth, while those criticisms aren’t entirely unfounded, they certainly seem unjustified. The Knife’s late-night headline set on the second night of Primavera was never not enjoyable, and felt like the perfect live realization of their excellent new record.

Accompanied by an entourage of back-up performers, the pair came onstage cloaked like Druids and proceeded to slowly unveil an assortment of peculiar percussion instruments. An elaborate harp, oversized chimes, and something that resembleed a futuristic coffin strung with a single, gigantic bass guitar string all appeared, which the band used to perform a fractured version of “A Cherry on Top.” Within a handful of songs, the instruments had been moved aside to make room for the dance troupe, who were now clad in colorful, over-the-top aerobics wear with Karin and Olof amongst them. During most of the tracks that followed, it was certainly debatable what, if any, of the music was being created by anyone on stage. The were times when it was just about possible to make out Karin performing her vocals cloaked in darkness at the back of the stage, and there were moments when Olof and the other performers would lurk near percussion instruments or disappear into the unknown completely.

That said, the choreography was excellent; the group flitted between precise formations and rhythmic freakouts, made pantomime displays of stretching between songs, and at one point mimed cunilingus in an impressively acrobatic fashion. There were immense amounts of humor and energy to the whole thing; whether The Knife were playing anything or not, they made the audience engage with the songs in a way that radiated an infectious liveliness. By the time “One Hit” was played midway through the set, the Primavera stage had been turned into something resembling a ritualistic warehouse rave. The set peaked with “Full Of Fire,” which, live or not, sounded immense on a big soundsystem, before climaxing further with a joyous version of “Silent Shout,” which saw Karin emerge from the shadows to perform her vocals centre stage. Ultimately, the whole thing came across as clever, completely unique, and quite possibly the perfect way for The Knife to represent themselves in 2013.

Jackmaster (by Xarlene)

Jackmaster would make an exceptional wedding DJ.

On the surface, it would be easy to write off the Tweak-A-Holic set that Numbers co-founder Jackmaster played on the festival’s opening night as an easy win. He took to the Pitchfork stage at 3.30am and immediately dove into a set made up entirely of shamelessly retro, crowd-pleasing pop. He mixed Fleetwood Mac into Cyndi Lauper, threw out countless classic funk tracks, and milked ’80s pop tunes for all they were worth, unsurprisingly getting a huge crowd response throughout. In a way, it all felt a little like shooting fish in a barrel; an all-out voyage into pop nostalgia is essentially a guaranteed winner with a largely inebriated festival crowd during the early hours of the morning. However, there’s genuinely impressive DJ skill behind what Jackmaster does; when he suddenly cut from a live piano version of Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” into the original studio recording, it was a moment of crowd-pleasing brilliance, and there was something likeable about the way he stole the thunder from Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” by playfully teasing “Music Sounds Better With You.” The whole set was utterly ridiculous, but it was hard not to be won over by it.

Scuba’s live show makes more sense on the edge of the Mediterranean at 3 a.m.

Scuba‘s new live set-up comes across like the final step in his transition from the basement icon of Triangulation into the divisive big-room house DJ we’ve seen with his latest releases. His stage set—which sees him performing amidst a fairly large, asymmetric scaffold of neon lights, encircled by a ring of colored searchlights and an intermittently illuminating backdrop—has clearly been designed from the ground up to hold the attention of big crowds. The same can be said for the music itself; Paul Rose’s festival set went in hard pretty quickly and left little room for subtlety. “The Hope” came out early and from then on, it was all about big beats and thick synth melodies. Over the course of his hour-long set, he touched on most of the bigger moments from his career—bringing out his remix of Jimmy Edgar’s “Sex Drive,” a version of “So You Think You’re Special” that descended into an extended outro of jungle breaks, and a double-header climax of “Talk Torque” and Personality‘s most rave-ready moment, “Ne1butu.” For all the bombast though, it worked perfectly for the situation. Despite clashing with some of the biggest draws of the festival and being up against an energy-sapped final night crowd, Rose got one of the most energetic reactions the Pitchfork stage saw all weekend. Sure, it was a colorful set full of big drops and hands-in-the-air melodies—the sort of thing we might struggle with a little in a normal club at home—but amongst the festival atmosphere, with our backs to the Mediterranean, we were happy to go along with the energy of it all.

Heineken Stage Crowd (by Dani Canto)

Daphni is an immensely fun DJ.

Dan Snaith’s 90-minute DJ set under his Daphni moniker, which closed the Ray Ban stage on Primavera’s second day, was easily one of the better DJ performances we’ve seen this year. It was a little all over the place at times—veering between big cuts from the likes of Koreless, Joy Orbison, and Four Tet into dusty old funk numbers, via a brief excursion into UK garage and grime (Ruff Sqwad’s “Together” being a particular highlight)—but the whole thing hung together, thanks to a welcome amount of energy and a pretty exceptional set of tunes. It was Snaith’s own Daphni tracks that received the biggest crowd response though; “Ye Ye” got the crowd moving, but it was an extended edit of “Yes I Know,” complete with its thunderous bassline, that really set the sizeable mass of late-night dancers alight. The whole thing ended with Snaith—clearly enjoying himself and possibly slightly inebriated—rinsing the EQs over extended funk instrumentals as the sun came up, before having to be pretty much dragged away from the decks by festival staff.

Barcelona has plenty of promising DJ talent.

Thursday’s Primavera Boiler Room session was a pleasantly surprising last-minute addition to the first day’s line-up. Taking the opportunity to kill a couple of hours in the early evening kicking about the Boiler Room area, which was tucked away in one corner of the festival site, we managed to catch some of the local Barcelona names on the line-up and were certainly impressed with what we saw. BeGun kicked things off with a lively outing built around energetic controller work that touched on everything from house to grime, while Headbirds followed with a slightly deeper set built of lovely early evening electronic music, his selections packed with rich synth vibes and solid grooves. Meanwhile, Madrid’s Pional rounded out the Spanish names on the bill, providing an early highlight with a killer set of solid house tunes in a relatively similar vein to his touring partner John Talabot. In all, we were left with the impression that there’s plenty of health amongst Spain’s current electronic scene.

Pional (by Xarlene)

Primavera’s Auditori is the perfect setting for Apparat’s Krieg und Frieden.

The Auditori Rockdelux stage—a 3000-seat classical concert hall and museum—is one of Primavera Sound’s best features. While some festival goers bemoan the strict no-food-or-drink policy and the fact that audiences have to queue for some performances, the completely darkened, seated auditorium benefits from some of the most impressive acoustics we’ve heard at any venue. It’s here that Apparat performed his recent theater-inspired album, Krieg und Frieden, in its entirety, accompanied by a handful of musicians on strings, synths, and brass, and a pair of live visual artists. It was one of those performances where the venue enhanced the set perfectly; every musical element came through crystal clear, from the delicate string parts to some absolutely earth-shaking bass drones. The live visuals projected onto the the auditorium’s huge rear wall had the effect of making the band looked dwarfed by the huge imposing blocks of color and close-up imagery. The music itself was mostly enjoyable and engaging throughout, particularly the darker opening numbers, with each track flowing into one another to create one immense wash of droning synths and dark strings. However, as things got a little lighter and more beats and vocals seeped into the mix, the performance seemed to lose a little of its initial grittiness.

John Talabot’s victory lap is well deserved.

Primavera Sound 2012 saw local producer John Talabot perform his first-ever live show in the wake of his excellent debut LP ƒIN While that set felt a little like Talabot’s formal introduction to the international music circuit, the 2013 festival seemed to be something of a victory lap for him, with the DJ/producer returned to his home turf following the surprise success of that LP. He appeared twice across the festival, bringing his ever-superb live show to Wednesday night’s opening party and playing a DJ set to close the first day of the festival itself. The latter set saw him drop an excellent assortment low-key house and techno, peppered with moments of classic funk and soul, all mixed with deft, well-honed skill. More than anything though, it was just nice to see Talabot return to play to a substantial hometown crowd and claim his place as one of the most significant new names in modern house music.

Main Stage Crowd (by Xarlene)

Primavera Sound is a very well-curated festival.

There are a handful of subtle things that set Primavera Sound apart from a lot of similar festivals we’ve attended. The variety of the line-up is one major factor that impressed us—while we approached the festival from the perspective of an electronic-music fan, it impressed us how expansive and deep the line-up was on the whole. Plenty of rock festivals include the odd token dance act—a category that’s usually limited to artists with some sort of crossover hit—but Primavera seems happy to go a little deeper, offering a genuinely interesting mix of artists from across the spectrum. Throughout the week, we found plenty to entertain ourselves with outside of our electronic comfort zone, including drone, ambience, hip-hop, and the more experimental ends of rock music. Crucially, the program is sensibly structured too; far too many festivals are happy to book a great house or techno DJ and stick them on at 2 p.m. when nobody’s is really ready to listen, whereas Primavera line-ups tend to be structured nicely with lighter, more experimental music in the early evening, big live acts later on, and the most danceable artists booked between 1 a.m. and sunrise. Sure, we had the odd minor organisation quibble—one of the bigger stages suffered fairly badly from sound bleed from its nearest neighbor, there was something of a trash problem, and some of the pre-parties were a nightmare to get into—but on the whole, our entire festival experience at Primavera Sound 2013 was very positive.