OH. MY. GOD. I’m so relieved that after all those years I can finally blurt it out without being unsupportive of Berlin’s own precious music festival: I HATED Tempelhof as the venue for the Berlin Festival. I don’t know why, I totally love Tempelhof for all the exhibitions and trade shows. But for some reason for the festival it never worked for me. Too big, to annonymous, horrible sound, and it always seemed a bit too empty to create a real buzzing atmosphere. And how inconvenient that they had to stop playing music quite early in the night because of the noise complaints from the neighbors.
So when the news broke a couple of days ago that Berlin Festival was moving to Arena Park I was actually excited about it. I’m sure people will have all sorts of ideas why this happened. I can recommend an interesting read over at our friends from Mit Vergnügen where Berlin Festival booker Stefan Lehmkuhl talks about the reasons for the move and the newly founded Arena Park area. After the jump you can get a little overview of the new festival grounds at the Spree that you can see for yourself live from September 5-7, 2014.
As you can see in the overview above the newly founded Arena Park includes several established and some new locations such as the Arena, Hoppetosse, Badeschiff, Glashaus, Arena Club and Club der Visionäre, as well as the new White Trash Fast Food, Ypse and a big open field in front of the whole area where they will build a big main stage. The Art Village will now be on the big free field towards the street.
We hope the new constellation of all these smaller new stages will provide a more intimate and Berlin-esque experience. We are certainly looking forward to this new era of the Berlin Festival.
More details and the line-up which includes Woodkid, Moderat, Editors, K.I.Z., Jessie Ware and many more you can find here: