The current year marks as the beginning of some new techno festivals, but concurrently is the last year of Freqs of Nature, a six-day-long festival right outside Berlin.
Founded in 2012, the Freqs of Nature has been the grand gathering of various electronic music styles, alternative artists and even scientific experiments. Organised this year between the 4th and 9th of July, the festival promises to deliver all of this, once more.
The venue, an old airport at the outskirts of Berlin, consists of art installations, scientific experiments, synthesiser workshops and in total of staggering five stages of music targeted not-for-the-masses.
Monument is especially excited about the of the offering of the Kreuz&Quer Floor, dedicated to atmospheric techno and headlined by names like Mike Parker, Cio D’Or, Rrose, Kanding Ray, Dasha Rush, Peter van Hoesen, Blazej Malinowski, CNCPT, Luigi Tozzi and Anthony Linell.
Another interesting detail for the guests is that some artists of the Kreuz&Quer stage will make a re-appearance at RelaXperimental stage, where they will craft another, experimental-ambient or IDM/electronica styled set.
For example of the fans of Mike Parker, who has not put his feet of the European continent this year, the double-performance will be one of a kind experience – not to mention the trips acts like Rrose and Takaaki Itoh will deliver from behind the decks of the two stages.
The six day extravaganza will sadly be the last one for Freqs of Nature. The creative managers, Ankur and Naty Seres, reasoned their decision due the creative limitations, difficulties with tax issues and the constant need of taking the festival towards more commercial direction.
The main reason we are ending this project is that we feel we have achieved what we wanted with this concept and that we got with this years line up and creative concept to our personal visionary maximum, they write in the statement.
Monument spoke to the creative heads, who happen also be the founders or Atmophile Electronics, behind the festival’s concept and booking selections to find out more about the last-in-history Freqs of Nature, that will definitely keep the goers busy with the indefinite offering.
1. Five stages and artists. What is the inspiration behind the festival?
There are many motivations and ideas behind FON, one of the main ideas from the beginning was to create a space for peculiar art that is chosen for the art itself, not for political or economical reasons. Furthermore, we have always mainly focused on art that some way has an organic feeling. This thought counts as much for the music as all decoration and art galleries we have.
2. Tell us about the venue.
The venue is like many other festivals in the North-East Germany: A former airport, with a good dose of nature around the area – it is maybe not the most beautiful just by itself. Exactly that gives us even more reasons to turn the whole location into an art gallery with different decorations and art installation projects that reach into the last corners. We have been working with this for months with up to 200 workers and artists.
Over the 7 years that we have been doing FON festival we have invested to a great extent into the infrastructure, to be able to create an efficiently comfortable festival experience for our guests. For example, we installed about 4 kilometres of water pipes from the next village to be able to provide free quality drinking water for our guests all over the venue. Also, we are offering free warm showers as much as many other little things that make the stay with us more enjoyable.
3. Kreuz & Quer stage interests us the most, and it seems to be a nice combination of deep and experimental techno. Can you tell more about the inspiration of this lineup, why these artists?
As with all our stages the selection of the music bases mainly on our taste of music. Naty Seres and Ankur (Sharad Sood), who are selecting both art and the music, grew up with the electronic music genre. Besides DJ’ing, they are huge collectors of music and constantly on the hunt for individual and innovative music. Both of them are trying to get as many favourite artists on the lineups as possible.
The booking of the whole festival is entirely based on our taste so we really like all of it, and for us every single set is a hot tip.
5. It’s the last year of Freqs of Nature, also because of challenges in taxes etc. How does it feel ?
In the post where we announced we are ending the festival, we said is not that it´s becoming more difficult to organise an event like ours, but all this new tax and other regulations is taking too much time and leaves less and less room for our creative work.
Freqs of Nature has always been about innovating, experimenting, exploring and evolving, and to us this project is way too dear and too precious to be running it down or turning it into something we never wanted it to be.
6. Something else about the festival you would like to share with Monument readers ?
We definitely want to thank everybody who supported us over the years and became part of the festival, we really appreciate the strong feeling of a family bond that got manifested as much in our crew as with our guests and we are looking forward to celebrate one more time with everybody the last Freqs edition.
Before the festival, please enjoy a trip curated by Luigi Tozzi, one of the artists playing a double-set at the festival.