Distortion Festival
Distortion Festival takes place every summer in Copenhagen, and has done for the past 12 years. It started out as a street festival and has grown to encompass the entire city, taking over a different district of Copenhagen over the course of its four days. It’s also expanded into more of a festival in the usual sense of the word, bringing in big name DJs and artists from around the world. We traveled there to take some photos and soak up the scenery in one of the best cities in Europe.
I had been told before hand that everyone goes ‘a little crazy’ for Distortion Festival, wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but when I got there on day one, at 2 in the afternoon you had scenes like this:
Wasn’t much point in questioning how/why there was a tank in the streets but it served as a pretty decent setup none the less.
Lasse Kofod
Most of the streets were filled with impromptu sounds systems and DJs playing to either people going insane or just waiting for something to happen. You mainly end up spending most of your time hanging around rather than going to the official events. Which was handy as it meant as a festival you could dip in and out of the action whenever you wanted, even during quieter periods you never felt too far away from anything, without having to actually pay to get in anywhere. Well, my friends didn’t have to pay to get in anywhere, got guestlist mate.
The Korsgadehallen, below, usually a community sports centre by day, was converted into one of the few venues that I actually managed to venture into. And amazing as it would have been to see Madlib play a DJ set, technical issues and his own ego prevented anything other than a mess of indecision and arguments with the sound guy happening for the 20 minutes that he was on stage. Which left Kode9 to pick up the pieces, which he did quite admirably, albeit to a much smaller audience, with a set of heart massaging classics.
As a festival Distortion doesn’t claim to try and attract outsiders, their website’s in Danish and I don’t think their advertising hardly covers anywhere outside of their home country. When talking to people on the streets you get a sense that no one’s traveled particular far, maybe Arhaus, maybe Rosklide but overall the focus seems to be on the city and its inhabitants.
Despite the combination of drugs, drink, good weather and people usually resulting in a complete mess of casualites and violence, everyone had this unanimous unspoken agreement to be lovely. There’s something about the Danish character and culture that can support a festival like this that many other countries couldn’t. Speaking to a Copenhagen friend on the streets about Distortion he said it was all about music uniting people, and coming together in the streets, as equals, like democracy. And that might sound terribly trite and naive to English ears, but in that environment seeing something so full of energy and incredible working so well, it was hard to disagree.
Lasse Kofod
People love cycling in Copenhagen by the way, all their roads have massive bike lanes (that aren’t shared with buses or worse taxis) and everyone’s happy and smiling all the time, it’s stupidly serene.
Apart from concerts the Distortion had also organised several events during the day, including things like en masse pillow fights.
Lasse Kofod
This kid was standing above all this at the time just spraying aerosol into a firelighter, dancing to techno. Was about 4pm in the afternoon. Someone told me he fell off towards the end of the night and had to go to hospital, good lad.
By the end of the night, all the pillows had left a lot of feathers and mess on the floor, so someone simply set alight to them. Don’t even think the fire department even bothered to turn up.
One of the odd things to think about during the day was what was the population of Copenhagen over 30 doing during Distortion.
Fortunately our friend and artist Tamas Kovacs had provided us a great case study of this old women whom he videoed roaming the streets for almost an hour, the footage is amazing, don’t think she even realised she was being followed. If the video doesn’t load on the page the original link is archive.org/details/AnOldLadysOdysseyTroughCopenhagenDistortion10
Given that Copenhagen is set over a series of islands, a boat cruise through the local area seemed like one of the more fitting events. The trip summed up a lot of the festival for me, lots of infectiously friendly people having a great time, not especially memorable dance music, sensible partying (in this case a mid cruise toilet stop) and free alcohol.
You might have noticed quite a few people in animal costumes in these photos, they’re a group of friends who told me they do it every year and that the police had confiscated their their speaker system and the bike they were transporting it on, very wacky.
Wasn’t sure whether this part of tour or not but these guys just came up to our boat and started singing loads of traditional Danish songs, again, very wacky.
On the last night, the entire festival descended onto the Knippelsbro (Knippel Bridge) that connects Slotsholmen to Christiania for an unofficial two minute rave.
Two minutes ended up being more like 20 but afterwards everyone politely and calmly left, no hassle from the police, a few honking from lorries but all in an amicable nature. Within half an hour traffic was rolling through as if nothing had happened and everyone went off elsewhere to party, or to sleep.
Lasse Kofod
Despite not being actually part of the festival we were also lucky enough to catch Clipse play a show at the Pumpehuset, which more than made up for the amount of awful Danish Hip Hop I heard over the weekend. Even though with Clipse they were completely vibing off the show and genuinely seemed to love being there, given their prolific nature and ridiculously hard work ethic, you can’t help but feel sorry for them when they ask for a show hands of who’s bought their latest album and they’re confronted with just 500 palms, rather than 5000.
Overall
Distortion Festival 10/10
Coming back to London 0/10
Photos by Sebastian Ross and Bobby Jewell, unless stated as Lasse Kofod
Words by Bobby Jewell
Thanks to Heidi Hardgrove, Christian Langbelle and The Rigaloft