Fusion Festival XXV Scene Report
Contributed By CrimethInc. Ex-Worker’s Collective
A few legendary, long-running, DIY festivals dominate the summer tour circuit for hardcore punk in Europe: K-Town Hardcore Fest in Copenhagen, Fluff Festival outside of Prague, and Monteparadiso in Croatia. However, there is one towering midsummer festival that punks often overlook despite its grandeur—Fusion Festival in Lärz, Germany, near Berlin and Hamburg. With an attendance of 70,000 and a crew of 10,000 Fusion is Germany’s largest techno festival, so it’s understandable why touring bands might not understand it as a thriving mutant underground for pedal-to-the-metal rock’n’roll. However—for any freedom-loving, fist-pumping, snotty rotting pogo punker—this is a mistake. Bands: by hook or by crook, get booked at Fusion. Here’s why…
EVERYTHING ANTIFASCIST
The shortest way to describe Fusion Festival is Burning Man if everything hippie about Burning Man was antifascist instead. The grounds are a century-old airport developed by the Nazis before its capture by the Soviet Red Army. A plurality of the dancefloors are old airplane hangars with stages built inside and camouflagingly terraformed as hills, which you can climb for beautiful vistas of the festival lights and the sunset. The official program lists just over 40 stages, but there are even more not listed, including a nudist beach (with DJs, a bar, and food) next to a canal—not to be mistaken with the swimming lake where everyone is also nude. All in all I’d say there’s probably 100 different “worlds” you can fall into… but it’s truly endless. There’s always more. There are pop-up arenas with avantgarde circuses, a theater for plays and another for films (which is a great place to snag a nap when it’s too rainy or bright outside), a roller-skating rink, a few hidden saunas, fair games like slingshotting iron arrows at revolving dishware, a million cool couches and cushions and swings and rocking-horses (except they’re ostriches) to sit on, screen-it-yourself stations with patches and stickers and pins and anarchist literature, a million kinds of trippy vibey areas from enchanted psychedelic forests to dystopian concrete trash wasteland, there’s a childcare area with programming so developed that it should more properly be described as a weeklong alternative youth summer camp, and just much much much more. My favorite anarchist merch distro is an anti-border collective that provides mutual aid to migrants stuck in the kilometer-wide no-mans-land between the Polish and Belarus borders.
All the food is vegetarian, much of it is vegan. More importantly, the food is SO GOOD. Like, some of the best ever, no shit. If you work or play the festival, it’s free. Even when it’s not free, it’s easy to come by. The coffee is supplied by the Zapatistas. Workers, volunteers, and artists can double their money for alcohol.
Throughout the festival grounds enormous murals and banners proclaim the names of antifascist fighters held hostage by the state. Within a matter of days, almost all the surfaces erected at the festival are covered in graffiti proclaiming solidarity with insurrectionary people’s movements like Rojava or Standing Rock. Migrant solidarity collectives like Sea-Watch recycle left-behind camping gear for mutual aid purposes. Almost every “crew” hired to work at the festival is from a squat, or collective space, or radical project—making the whole thing a way to finance the autonomous left throughout Germany and much of the rest of Europe. The festival’s website describes itself as “holiday communism” (ferienkommunismus), but the sheer magnitude of DIY organized chaos makes Fusion a must-go-to destination for any anarcho-hedonist. ACAB and circle A’s everywhere.
Cops are not allowed inside the festival. The security is usually comprised of crews or affinity groups with experience at land occupations or other kinds of police-hostile scenarios. Polizei swarm the exterior of the festival. Much of the wheatpasted posterage you see advertises “clean drivers” who can pilot your car through police controls, because German pigs are allowed to drug test drivers on the spot. You see, one of the main draws of the festival is its open drug use, while miraculously remaining fairly free from mafia pusher bullshit.
Inside the festival, there are awareness and de-escalation teams for conflicts. There’s also the festival’s own first aid and ambulance team, with special training on drugs and overdoses. A drug awareness tent will test your stuff, explain chemical combinations, supply you with free harm reduction materials, and has a chill-out area if you need to come down with a soft landing. It also has fresh fruit.
Everything lasts from Wednesday afternoon to Monday evening, with round-the-clock music and activity while the festival is on, although there are still small performances and hidden container parties to be found for days after the festival officially ends. Fusion normally takes place the last weekend of June or first weekend of July, just one or two weeks after K-Town.
ROCKIN’ & RAVIN’
There are a few reliable spots for rock’n’roll, all of which are relatively close to each other. The three hangar clubs where bands most often play are Triebwerke, Datscha, and Schuhkarton. It’s a five-minute walk from any of these hangars to the other, if you don’t fall into a random rabbithole that leads you to some other adventure, which you absolutely should fall into if it presents itself to you. I’ve caught great acts like THE SUBHUMANS and VICTIMS at Datscha, while Schuhkarton is for truly underground gems like Berlin’s ECHOES. Luftschloss is a round theater with risers on the old runway that you can rely on for dark music of all kinds: darkwave and EBM outfits, stoner sludge bands, and after bands it becomes a dark techno war machine. One year I was lucky enough to stumble upon an up-and-coming BOY HARSHER at the ‘schloss. The runway outside of Luftschloss looks like a cartoon punk motor dystopia ala the parking lot in Dead End Drive-In. Across the road from Luftschloss is Tubebox, which usually has techno inside the hangar but there is a “Punk Stage”—that’s its name—outside the hangar next to the bar and the skate bowl. Then there’s Fer A Coudre, the French welder steampunk squatter tent. Usually there are heavy blues, CRAMPS-ish style bands at Fer A Coudre but the only band I caught there this year was the delightfully absurdist rap-punk-noise duo WRONG CHICKEN. There’s also Roter Platz, a regular big ole outdoor festival stage, where years ago I saw the legendary Slime.
This year there was one true champion of the rock and it was 80s deutschpunk legends TOXOPLASMA. They fucking ripped!!!! Heads were banging and chains were clanging in a pit that was as tender as it was turnt up to 11. Smiles all around. All my German friends who recommended TOXOPLASMA also told me to see BÄRCHEN UND DIE MILCHBUBIS. Classic anti-globalization era anarcho-punks ACCIÓN MUTANTE and PETROGRAD also banged out some pogable tunes. New crops EGO and SAUFKNAST played too, who I was keen to see but missed—sometimes you gotta rave instead of rock.
Other punk bands that played:
DIE ANSTALT
ELEKTROKOHLE
FINISTERRE
GIF
H.i.T.
HOARSE
SHITSHOW
SNÕÕPER
SUCK
THE GLUTS
WEAK TIES
All in all, about as many punk bands play Fusion Festival as play the other big-name DIY punk festivals in Europe, and the bands are about as punk as the other festivals too, but there is a lower concentration of punk overall because the bands are spread out among more stages and genres than those other festivals. The punk subculture at fusion is just one strain within a larger culture of resistance.
Truth be told, I love punk but I just can’t be bothered to run around a festival—especially one with 100 different little worlds where you can always fall into something good—just to hunt down the right band, especially when the schedule always gets pushed back. And, as a punk who also loves techno, Fusion is one of the few times I can rave with cool spikey punks all around. The trancefloor is traditionally the best place to find the spikiest chain punx getting stoopid to really trashy computer rock beep boop bops.
Here's just a few of the DJs I found that were good, dark, and hard—techno for punk rock tastes:
CHARLIE CHEPPERT
NÚRIA
KOLLEKTIV FISCHMARKT
And on the theme of not-punk-but-it-rocked, the Trojan Records living legend HORACE ANDY opened the festival up with an amazing set of soulful, roots reggae and angry old-man anti-police diatribes like, “Me nah like the police in Jamaica! They raid the house, they grab the chalice, they smash the chalice to pieces… No, no no, me nah like them Babylon.”
MOTOR POWER
K-Town has bike wars, but Fusion has the Fusion cars. Being a large airfield, the Fusion festival site needs to be traversed, to some degree, by motor vehicle. And being privately owned grounds, the festival accepts plenty of donated non-street legal cars that become the the trash trucks, ambulances, delivery vehicles, intra-festival mail carriers (see header photo), taxis, and other motorized transports of the festival. Each of these vehicles is a graffitied, insane mutant of a car. If you work at the festival, the garage also serves as a DIY bike repair station, and there are ridiculous spectacular tall bikes too.
My favorite Fusion car is the “punk forever” wagon, which has a mohawk of stegosaurus spikes on its roof and a huge “anti-hippie wagon” warning on its back. In a fever dream of acid futures, it’s easy to imagine having to defend the Fusion grounds from the swarms of police outside it with a Mad Max style raid, where the Fusion cars serve as our cavalry.
FULL THROTTLE INTO THE FUTURE
2024 was the 25th anniversary of Fusion. The festival was born at the end of the century, at the end of history, the end of the world… but it continues to thrive in the afterworld because it is an underworld. If there is a solidly techno sentiment from Fusion that contrasts with punk sensibilities, it is that there is a future worth seeing. Not no future, our future. A party apocalypse that no punk would want to miss out on.
APPENDIX:
Documentary: Fusion - Ein Festival kämpft für Freiheit ohne Polizei (Fusion - A festival fights for freedom without police)