Indian flavour in German electronic music festival

COLOGNE: Cologne has been home to C/O Pop, one of Europe’s premier electronic music festivals and fairs, for several years now. This year, Ralph Christoph, artistic director and head of strategy, C/O Pop, visited India and Pakistan, in a bid to bring the best there is in Indian electronica to Germany, and “also work on something more sustainable, which sees artists from Germany perform in India, and vice versa, on a regular basis,” says Christoph.

What is unique about this festival is that, apart from turning all of Cologne into one ginormous stage for its duration (running as it does in little venues across the city simultaneously), it also provides a platform for everyone connected with the music industry — festival promoters, record labels, music software manufacturers and other suchlike — a platform to network and scout for all that is new and best in world electronica. Running from August 13 through to 17, one of the highlights of the festival this year was the launch of a CD titled ‘The Asian-Pacific Plate’; the culmination of a year-long undertaking by the Goethe Institute (the Max Mueller Bhavan, as it is known in India) and C/O Pop, to bring about collaborations between German electronic music artists and their counterparts in South East Asia.

Nieswandt, DJ, producer and music advisor to the Goethe Institute set the ball rolling when he visited Bangkok, Hanoi, Singapore, Sydney and Auckland last year, to scope out the local electronic music scenes there. “The next step was to come back to Germany, and identifying people here who I knew would ‘connect’ with the artists I’d found out East,” says Nieswandt, adding, “we then brought some of these artists to C/O Pop last year, and sent some of our musicians to South-East Asia. They got into the recording studios last year, and ‘The Asian-Pacific Plate’ is the result of that interaction.” Following close on the heels of this collaboration was the tie-up with electronic musicians from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

What makes C/O Pop interesting, even for a world-wearied festival regular, is the way all of Cologne seems to be in on the fun Simultaneous gigs across Cologne mean that one never realises that there are, in truth, tens of thousands of people attending the festival, since they number no more than a thousand at any one venue.