I’m an anxious host. When I throw a party, I constantly check on the snacks and refill the punch bowl. Sitting down to socialize? Forget it.
So it was much to my surprise that I saw Nick Carroll, the curator behind this past weekend’s Kremfest, drinking a beer and looking relaxed on Thursday night. Surely, I asked, he must be running around like a chicken with his head cut off?
“Nah, the hard work is over,” he told me, nodding along to the beat as TUF’s DJ Bricks warmed up for Detroit techno scion Robert Hood in Kremwerk’s cozy subterranean confines. “Now I can sit back and enjoy.”
Not so fast, I warned him. Throwing a festival is a marathon, not a sprint.
Sure enough, over the course of the four-night festival in Denny Triangle’s Kremwerk/Timbre Room complex, the hardest working talent buyer in Seattle—and a formidable DJ in his own right—stayed on his toes.
As I wandered upstairs and down for blisteringly good sets by Sinistarr (keeping Detroit techno fresh), Hodge (late night funky house) and Djrum (all around weirdness)—and a few stinkers (I’m looking at you Mike Huckaby)—I spotted Nick everywhere I went.
There’s Nick escorting a DJ through security. There’s Nick portaging beers over to the booth. There’s Nick schlepping someone’s record bag through the crowd. There’s Nick soldering a broken turntable while a record on the other deck is still playing. (Ok, that last one didn’t happen, but I would have believed it.)
Running a festival is hard work after all, but it damn well pays off. After a combined four-night stand of well over 24 hours of music—including a Saturday ultra marathon that wrapped up at 8 am—Kremfest laid down the gauntlet. It cemented Kremwerk as the undisputed monarch of Seattle nightlife, and made a plausible claim to inheriting the mantle left by Decibel, the grandparent of Seattle electronic music festivals that went on hiatus in 2016 after a 12-year run.
If anything, Kremfest was too successful for its own good. Lines out the door on Thursday and Friday night were novelties, an encouraging sign that the word got out and ravers of all stripes were heeding the call. By Saturday, a line that stretched almost to Re-bar foretold a tale of overcrowding. A sardine-like situation in Timbre Room was the last straw for me, and I called it an unexpectedly early night. Dare I say Kremfest’s ambitions exceeded the size of the venue and next year it might be time to branch out, Decibel-style?
Those quibbles aside—it was peak hour, after all, and I’m sure coming early for the patio session or holding out for post-last call would have yielded fewer crowds—Kremfest pulled off a remarkable feat. It felt simultaneously like a night at Cheers, where everyone knows your name (even that guy on acid sitting quietly in the corner), and the first day of high school, where you’re a minnow swimming in an ocean.
I ran into several fellow travelers in electronic weirdness, where phrases like “Did you hear that pitched-up ‘Strings of Life’ explode into a million drum and bass breakbeats?” make sense, and made new friends to boot—shout out to the Korean crew double-fisting Jameson shots, with whom I bonded over our shared love of Yaeji.
But I also found myself in a room full of strangers when I descended to the Noise Complaint! showcase, a reminder that even in a scene as small as Seattle, people can run in entirely separate circles. Oh, and the Minnesota transplant in the entry line humble-bragging to his friends that he lives in the most expensive apartment building in town? Maybe that’s one better left a stranger.
Still, as he and his two friends plunked down cash for a night out at Kremfest, it gave me cautious optimism. With the money coursing through this town, is the time ripe again for an expansive underground electronic music festival? Kremfest’s overflowing success suggests if you build, they will club.