Nocturnal Culture Night 2026: Across Stages, Sounds and Shared Moments

I genuinely never expected to return to Nocturnal Culture Night. I had visited Deutzen once, in 2023, and already then the sheer scale of the festival impressed me: several stages operating simultaneously, a programme dense enough to render any attempt at complete coverage slightly absurd, and an audience whose warmth remained one of my clearest memories afterwards. Three years later I found myself there again, towards the end of another long summer spent moving between festivals. For me, NCN effectively closes the outdoor festival season, although “closing” seems an inadequate word for an event that still requires its visitors to make decisions at the speed of something in full acceleration.

What is peculiar about NCN is that its physical scale and its social scale seem almost unrelated. The Kulturpark contains several music stages, spaces of very different dimensions and enough simultaneous programming to construct several entirely different versions of the same weekend, yet the atmosphere remains remarkably relaxed. That contrast was already one of the things I remembered from 2023, and this year it became even more apparent.

I have written many times that every festival develops its own social language, but the differences become particularly visible when several are visited within the same summer. At Wave-Gotik-Treffen or Castle Party, clothing itself becomes part of the artistic vocabulary: people construct silhouettes, visual references and sometimes entire characters, so that the audience forms a parallel exhibition of creativity. NCN feels different. This is neither criticism nor a claim that one form of participation is more authentic than another, but attention in Deutzen seemed to travel outwards rather than towards the self. People were there to hear music, catch up with friends, eat and drink together, dance, talk, discover bands and conduct the sort of informal networking that has always existed in music scenes whether anyone calls it networking or not.

For me, as a photographer, that difference became unexpectedly important. An extraordinary outfit already supplies the architecture of an image: colour, line, texture and shape can make a photograph visually compelling before any meaningful contact with the person has occurred. At NCN I found myself looking much more closely at faces. Personality appeared in concentration during a song, amusement between friends, exhaustion, affection, curiosity or the sudden transformation of expression when somebody recognised the opening seconds of something they loved. The portraits demanded slightly more patience because there was less external spectacle to depend upon; I had to wait for something of the actual person to become visible. That made photographing the audience harder, but ultimately more rewarding. People seemed wonderfully unpretentious and considerably more interested in what was happening around them than in attracting attention towards themselves.

Friday

My festival began with HORSKH, and there was never much uncertainty about that choice. I had first seen the French trio after they had been recommended to me for Castle Party, so by NCN they had already become one of those fixed points around which I constructed the rest of a schedule. Their combination of industrial electronics, guitars, live percussion and vocals works because aggression is never treated as an end in itself. The music is extremely disciplined underneath its apparent violence: sequences are exact, rhythmic structures are engineered with considerable care, and then everything performed above them seems determined to interfere with that control.

Onstage, this becomes intensely physical. The guitars do not merely thicken the electronic foundation but push against it, while the vocals repeatedly introduce a kind of organised instability that makes the songs feel much less obedient than their underlying structures actually are. Their interpretation of The Prodigy’s “Breathe” remains a particularly clever choice because it exposes a lineage instead of functioning merely as a familiar cover. The Prodigy understood that electronic music could possess the confrontation and bodily violence of rock without ceasing to be electronic; HORSKH take that principle into a harsher contemporary vocabulary. After almost six hours on a bus to Leipzig, I could hardly have asked for a more efficient recalibration of the nervous system.

I then moved to the much smaller Kulturbühne for frequen-C & TC75, the collaboration between Christian Bergmann and Tino Claus. I have followed and supported this project for some time, and what continues to interest me is how much room exists inside electronics that can nevertheless hit very hard. Christian’s structures are disciplined and precise, while Tino’s vocal presence brings a completely different temperature into them; the result combines electronic control with a performer who is visibly communicating rather than merely executing a vocal part.

The visual component worked beautifully without competing with the music, and the small Kulturbühne gradually turned into a very efficient dance floor. Something that happened away from the stage later gave me another way of thinking about what I had just watched. Tino participates in what sometimes seems like an improbable number of musical projects, so I asked him how many he would actually count as his own if we excluded occasional guest appearances. We eventually arrived at roughly five. I then asked whether he was ever afraid that dividing himself between so many different contexts might dilute his artistic identity.

He came back to the question the following day and said no, because every project is different. It sounds simple, but the answer stayed with me because creative identity does not necessarily become more concentrated by being restricted to one context. It can become more exact through contrast, as long as each collaboration develops its own internal logic rather than becoming another receptacle for identical habits. frequen-C & TC75 have exactly that distinct emotional temperature, hard without being merely aggressive, controlled without becoming emotionally sealed, and sufficiently communicative that the question of dilution becomes rather irrelevant once they are actually playing.

The schedule then forced a split between Hinfort and Jesus On Extasy. Hinfort shifted the afternoon away from HORSKH’s physical aggression towards something considerably more inward. Florian Kerezovic’s relatively young Cologne project works with the familiar materials of post-punk and darkwave, cold bass, restrained electronics, melancholy and a low vocal register, but onstage the important element was not genre recognition so much as composure. There was no attempt to force an early festival audience into attention through exaggerated movement or artificial drama. Instead, the songs established their own pressure gradually, the bass carrying much of the forward movement while the vocals remained darker and more introspective above it.

What interested me was the contrast between that emotional reserve and the clarity of the performance. Hinfort did not sound tentative despite the project’s relatively short history; the musical language already felt remarkably defined, yet not so finished that it had lost the possibility of development. There was something attractive in watching a project still consolidating itself publicly, where the identity was already recognisable but did not yet feel hardened into a formula.

I saw only part of Jesus On Extasy, but even that fragment was difficult to mistake for anybody else. The performance was loud, restless and happily excessive, driven by the friction between hard guitars and electronics rather than by an attempt to make one disappear inside the other. There was a genuine sense of emotional disorder onstage, not because the music lacked discipline, but because the musicians seemed continually willing to push the songs beyond the neat boundaries suggested by their structures.

The result was extremely energetic and at moments almost chaotic in appearance, with movement, guitar force and vocal intensity creating a show that felt much less controlled than most of the electronic performances around it. That theatrical excess is part of the appeal: Jesus On Extasy do not seem particularly interested in the cool distance associated with much dark electronics. What I caught was hot-blooded, physical and deliberately larger than life.

With Melotron, the energy took a completely different form. I only stayed for part of the performance, but the audience reaction was immediate, and it was easy to understand why. There is an enormous difference between a band merely possessing a long catalogue and one knowing how those songs now function in relation to an audience that has lived with them for years. Melotron have that knowledge.

Andy Krüger’s presence was particularly effective because he never appeared to be fighting the scale of the Amphibühne. The performance did not need exaggerated movement to seem substantial; voice, melody and recognition were already doing the work. What I remember most is the collective response, people singing, moving and reacting to songs whose emotional vocabulary is deeply familiar by now. It was energetic without becoming frantic and confident without slipping into routine, the sort of festival performance where experience becomes visible not as professionalism for its own sake but as an unusually precise understanding of how to hold a large audience.

Friday ended unusually early for me. I had been awake since 04:30, spent nearly six hours travelling by FlixBus and gone almost immediately into festival work, so eventually my carefully constructed running order collided with basic physiology. I badly wanted to see Sierra Veins later that night, but the body vetoed the plan. Later I learned that heavy rain had complicated proceedings and produced delays, which made going back to rest easier to justify retrospectively, although not less disappointing. Festival timetables encourage the fantasy that the body is simply another logistical factor; sooner or later it tends to remind us that it possesses final authority.

Saturday

Saturday began before noon, with Rina Pavar providing one of the most elegant openings I encountered during the weekend. Associated with the Cold Transmission orbit, her music works within coldwave and dark electronics, but reducing it to either category misses the quality that matters most in performance: the relationship between an orderly electronic framework and a voice that is allowed to remain unmistakably human within it.

There is fragility in her delivery, but fragility should not be confused with weakness. Pavar does not treat uncertainty or restraint as shortcomings to be compensated for through greater volume; she lets them remain audible while the electronics underneath give those qualities direction and form. On Parkbühne the effect was extraordinarily elegant. The songs retained something private even while being projected into an outdoor festival, which takes far more confidence than simply making everything larger. The beauty came from proportion: voice, synths and movement all seemed to understand exactly how much space they required.

I also managed a short look at TonFehler, and the contrast was considerable. Their electronic body music is deliberately direct, but what makes the project more interesting than another exercise in hard beats is the presence of irony and social observation. The structures move efficiently, while the German-language vocal delivery allows humour and criticism to coexist without turning either into cabaret commentary placed outside the music.

Their performance immediately introduced a certain mischievousness into the day. The beats remained forceful enough to carry the set, but the interaction between the performers prevented the music from becoming another exercise in stern electronic discipline. Rather than standing rigidly inside the machinery, TonFehler seemed willing to acknowledge its absurdities, which gave the short part I witnessed a personality disproportionate to the amount of time I actually spent there.

Ambassador21 increased the physical temperature dramatically. Natasha A Twentyone and Alexey Protasov have spent more than two decades combining industrial electronics, rhythmic noise and punk hostility into something designed less to seduce than to confront. What can initially sound chaotic is in fact highly organised: repetition, compressed rhythm and the vocal interaction create a structure whose aggression is far more deliberate than its surface suggests.

Even during a relatively short encounter, the punk element remained unmistakable, not because of costume or borrowed iconography but because of the project’s fundamental refusal of politeness. Natasha’s delivery in particular attacks the tracks as much as it inhabits them, while Alexey supplies another point of pressure. The vocals are not placed elegantly above the electronics; they strike into them. The performance felt angry, but not vaguely so. There was purpose behind the aggression and sufficient control underneath it to prevent intensity from becoming noise without direction.

Another direct clash followed between Ozibut and Strikkland. I saw Ozibut only briefly, but this was one of those encounters where a few minutes were sufficient to establish that something unusual was happening. Musically, darkdance, synthpunk, EBM and cold electronic structures collided with an almost cabaret-like instinct for exaggeration, while visually the project was immediately distinctive.

What caught my eye was that the appearance did not seem designed merely to make a memorable photograph. The eccentricity belonged to the performance itself: expression, movement and styling all appeared to share the same slightly grotesque, humorous and decadent logic as the music. In full daylight, where many dark electronic projects lose part of their visual vocabulary, Ozibut remained strangely convincing because the personality did not depend on darkness to exist. I left far too quickly to write about the set as a whole, but not too quickly to know that I want a proper encounter next time.

I left because Strikkland were one of my priorities, and the larger Waldbühne revealed something I had already enjoyed about them on a smaller stage but perhaps had not fully appreciated: humour is not an accessory to the Swedish duo but one of the methods through which they understand EBM itself. Their music is genuinely hard-hitting, full of muscular sequences, direct rhythmic structures and Henrik Johansson’s forceful vocal delivery, but they refuse the peculiar genre assumption that musical seriousness requires permanent solemnity.

Henrik changed clothes, appeared in extravagant red fur, exaggerated poses, altered lines, used provocative gestures and played with Swedish and German symbolism and declarations of friendship between the two countries. In less capable hands this could easily have reduced the concert to parody. Instead, it worked because the music underneath was far too good to need irony as an excuse. They were not laughing at EBM from a safe distance; they were playing with conventions they clearly understand and love.

Afterwards Henrik told me that when he and Henric Ceder started the band, already approaching their fifties, they had briefly imagined becoming the “gothiest” band possible before looking at one another and essentially asking whom they thought they were fooling. That decision to interfere with the convention rather than impersonate it seems fundamental to Strikkland. The joke works because there is affection underneath it. Full afternoon sun is rarely generous to music associated with smoke, darkness and club lighting, yet here it almost improved the performance by exposing the absurdity more clearly. Self-awareness is considerably harder to perform convincingly than genre seriousness, and Strikkland manage to combine both.

AD:Key then took over the Amphibühne, and Andrea and René Nowotny delivered exactly the kind of controlled explosion I had hoped for. Their music has always depended on more than alternating female and male vocals; what gives the project its personality is the constant redistribution of energy between two people who know one another intimately enough to respond without making that response look rehearsed.

On a stage as large as the Amphibühne, this became particularly effective. Large spaces can expose electronic acts whose stage vocabulary consists merely of enlarging familiar gestures, whereas Andrea and René filled the space through actual communication. Andrea’s performance became increasingly animated until she moved into the audience, while René remained above onstage, and the physical separation paradoxically strengthened their interplay. Suddenly the crowd itself occupied the space between them. The rhythms remained rigid enough to provide the EBM architecture, but the human exchange continually disrupted any possibility of mechanical impersonality. It was an enormous, joyful release of energy and one of my strongest concerts of the weekend.

I then divided my attention between The Awakening and SIIE. I only caught part of The Awakening, but what stayed with me were the guitars: living, breathing guitars in the most literal musical sense, with sustain and space allowed to become part of the emotional information rather than simply supplying rock weight. Ashton Nyte’s long-running project has moved through gothic rock and darkwave for decades, yet the fragment I saw felt less concerned with genre than with atmosphere produced organically through musicianship.

Nyte’s voice gave those guitars a poetic quality, and for a few minutes the whole festival seemed to breathe differently after so much sequenced electronic precision. The guitars possessed weight, certainly, but also air around them, allowing the songs to remain expansive rather than merely loud. I would not pretend to reconstruct the complete concert from the portion I witnessed, but those minutes were enough to make the contrast with the surrounding programme especially valuable.

SIIE offered almost the reverse kind of tension to The Awakening. Their electronic language brings darkwave, EBM and techno into contact with French-language vocals, but what made the short part I saw particularly memorable was the way the visual identity altered the emotional reading of the music. The mask immediately creates distance: instead of presenting the performer as a conventional frontperson whose face supplies the obvious emotional access point, SIIE partially remove that route and force attention back towards gesture, voice, movement and sound. The result is strangely intimate despite the concealment. The mask does not make the performance colder; paradoxically, it makes the listener search more carefully for expression elsewhere.

And the music itself was genuinely beautiful. Beneath the direct, physical pulse there is a remarkable melodic sensitivity, with electronics that can feel severe one moment and unexpectedly delicate the next. The French vocal delivery adds another layer of elegance and slight detachment, while the beat keeps everything anchored in the body. What I liked most was the contradiction between concealment and emotional accessibility: visually, SIIE create distance, yet musically they invite the listener much closer. Even during the short fragment I caught, the performance felt carefully conceived as a whole rather than as music with an aesthetic added around it, with mask, movement, voice and electronics all contributing to the same beautifully controlled atmosphere.

Schöngeist brought another kind of theatricality to the Amphibühne. Their dark-rock vocabulary allows broad guitars and emphatic rhythms to coexist with more melodic and almost cinematic elements, and the large stage suited a project that is not embarrassed by dramatic presentation. What prevented the material from becoming generic was the contrast within it: harder structures were repeatedly interrupted or complicated by more lyrical textures, while Timur Karakus’ vocal delivery carried enough character to avoid reducing German-language dark rock to its most familiar gestures.

The band looked comfortable with scale. Some groups visibly attempt to fill a large stage by increasing the quantity of movement; Schöngeist seemed more interested in using space compositionally, allowing the guitars, voice and more delicate textures to expand and contract around one another. The result was dramatic but not ridiculously inflated, and the performance benefited from the fact that they do not appear embarrassed by emotional or visual grandeur when the songs require it.

With Menticide, virtually all of that ornament disappeared again. Their set was based on something more elemental: repetition, pressure and the authority of rhythm. The old-school EBM vocabulary was obvious, but onstage it felt less nostalgic than brutally functional. Sequences were allowed to repeat until they acquired physical weight, while Johan Damm’s vocal delivery became almost another rhythmic device inside the construction.

What mattered was the economy. There was very little unnecessary information in the performance, and precisely because of that, small changes carried enormous effect. A shift in vocal intensity, an additional layer or a harder pulse could alter the entire atmosphere. On the Amphibühne, where elaborate productions can easily dominate attention, Menticide demonstrated the opposite principle: sometimes very little is required if every element has enough authority. There was also enough grime within the control to prevent the music from becoming a laboratory reconstruction of old-school body music.

I also caught Debdepan only briefly on Parkbühne, but they made an immediate impression. The Margate-based project is centred around Chelsea Tolhurst and Grace Bontoft, childhood friends who formed the band after writing together during lockdown, with Chelsea handling guitar and lead vocals and Grace bass and vocals; onstage they frequently expand the duo format with live drums. Their music has developed from the darker, more ethereal mood of the early Omen material towards something increasingly difficult to place neatly between dark alternative rock, post-punk, grunge, art-pop and dance-oriented electronics.

What I saw at NCN had exactly that appealing refusal to settle into a single category. There was considerable weight in the bass and guitars, but the music never became conventionally heavy; rhythm remained extremely important, giving the songs a restless, almost danceable momentum underneath the darker guitar textures. The vocals added another contrast, capable of sounding restrained and slightly detached before suddenly becoming much more immediate, while the musicians appeared completely comfortable allowing rougher edges to remain visible rather than polishing everything into immaculate dark-pop surfaces.

Their more recent material makes particular sense in that context. The 2025 Lovers & Others EP moves through grunge-inflected guitars, electronic pulses, heavy rhythm and a much more visceral form of alternative pop, with songs such as “The Girl” and “Habit” relying on sharp contrasts between apparent restraint and sudden bursts of physical force. On Parkbühne, even the few minutes I caught had that same quality: young, direct and slightly unruly, but with enough control underneath to make the collision of influences feel intentional rather than accidental.

I did not stay long enough to judge the complete set, but this was another of those NCN moments where a short photographic stop became a genuine discovery. Debdepan had personality immediately, both visually and musically, and there was something refreshing about a band entering a dark-scene festival without sounding as though they had constructed themselves specifically to satisfy the expectations of that scene.

Another overlap required movement between The Beauty Of Gemina and Lovataraxx. I saw only part of The Beauty Of Gemina, but the fragment was beautiful. The guitars were much more physical than the word “melancholic” might suggest, pounding and expansive without turning the material into conventional hard rock, while Michael Sele’s voice brought an entirely different emotional texture above them.

His delivery has something almost literary about it. The words seem considered not only for what they say but for how their sound changes the emotional meaning of the instrumentation around them. That created a beautiful opposition onstage: muscular guitars underneath, poetic vocals above, neither cancelling the other. The music could become forceful and still retain enormous inwardness. I would have liked considerably more time with the performance, because what I heard suggested one of those concerts in which the power arrives not through obvious aggression but through the coexistence of physical sound and reflective writing.

Lovataraxx approached physicality through reduction instead and were among the most elegant performances of the weekend for me. Their coldwave and minimal electronic language can initially appear restrained, but onstage that restraint becomes surprisingly energetic. There is excellent interplay between the performers, and rather than standing separately inside predefined roles, they seem continually to react to the same pulse.

That interaction gives the music a warmth that is not always immediately apparent within its colder surfaces. The structures are reduced enough that every movement and every change in vocal or electronic emphasis becomes visible, while the beat remains sufficiently insistent to keep the audience physically involved. I found the whole thing extremely graceful but never passive; the beauty came from precision and communication rather than decoration.

The Amphibühne later moved into the much denser artistic world of Samsas Traum. My own attention was primarily on Samsas Traum because I had particularly wanted to see Alexander Kaschte’s project again. My previous encounter had been years ago at Amphi Festival, and I had also interviewed him for Side-Line more recently, so this was one of those concerts in which past impressions, recent conversation and present performance inevitably entered the same frame.

Samsas Traum have never seemed entirely contained by the idea of a band playing songs. The project operates more like an extended artistic system in which music, literature, poetry, imagery and a dense network of references continually interfere with one another. The musical vocabulary has shifted radically across the years, through metal, electronics, gothic forms, orchestral elements and theatrical songwriting, but the continuity lies in Kaschte’s tendency to construct worlds rather than isolated tracks.

The beautiful Amphibühne lighting mattered enormously because Samsas Traum benefit from visual depth, yet it was not decoration. Light, language, gesture and sound appeared to participate in the same construction. Kaschte’s theatricality has always been pronounced, but what saves it from empty theatrical effect is the density behind it: phrases carry literary and philosophical associations, melodic beauty can coexist with violence, and apparent grandeur can suddenly expose something intimate, grotesque or painfully human underneath.

Calling this merely “poetic” is almost insufficient because poetry here is not synonymous with prettiness. It is compression, allowing several emotional registers and possible meanings to occupy a single image without obliging the listener to resolve them. Seeing the project again after so many years was therefore less like revisiting an old band than returning to an artistic language that had continued changing while I was away from it.

What I found especially moving was that the project still seemed capable of revision. I was not watching a beautifully preserved version of something I remembered from Amphi. Kaschte had changed, the language had changed and naturally I had changed as well. Yet the fundamental proposition remained recognisable: Samsas Traum as a place where music and language are not parallel components but parts of the same act of storytelling. In the Amphibühne light, the result felt less like a concert built around isolated songs than a temporary piece of theatre assembled

ACTORS presented a rather different logistical problem. Our Love Will Live Forever had been released only the previous day, on 4 September, so this was not simply another festival appearance by an established band but one of the first opportunities to hear material that had quite literally just entered the world. Having recently spoken with ACTORS about the record, I was especially interested in what would happen when songs I knew through headphones and conversation were suddenly placed in front of an audience.

The Parkbühne, however, was almost comically inadequate for the level of interest. ACTORS have long since grown beyond the dimensions of a stage that intimate, and with a new album arriving at precisely the same moment the problem became very physical: people packed tightly around the stage and sightlines disappeared almost immediately. At points it was practically impossible to watch what was happening unless you happened to occupy the right few square metres. There were technical problems as well, which complicated matters further, although neither the crowd nor the band appeared particularly willing to surrender the concert to them. If anything, the circumstances demonstrated rather efficiently that ACTORS now occupy a very different position from the one such a stage assignment might suggest.

What I could properly observe was interesting precisely because the new material did not arrive carrying an enormous sign announcing a new era. Jason Corbett and the band did not turn vulnerability into spectacle or insist upon a dramatic rupture with what came before. The songs entered the existing ACTORS vocabulary naturally: the visual precision and instinct for melodic shape remained intact, but beneath those carefully constructed surfaces there was a greater acceptance of instability, as though polish was no longer being asked to conceal quite so much.

Corbett’s delivery remained controlled rather than demonstrative, Shannon Hemmett supplied both electronic detail and an essential visual counterweight, while Kendall Wooding and Adam Fink gave the material considerably more bodily weight than its studio elegance might initially suggest. That contrast became particularly useful in these less-than-ideal circumstances. The performance could not depend entirely on perfect presentation – the stage was overcrowded from the audience perspective and the technical conditions were not flawless – yet the songs still survived contact with that disorder.

Leaving Parkbühne afterwards proved almost as complicated as watching the concert in the first place. The crowd had become so dense around ACTORS that simply working my way out and across the festival grounds took considerably longer than expected, which meant I reached SKYND very late and managed only two songs. I would therefore not pretend to review the set as a whole; this was genuinely a glimpse rather than a concert I properly experienced.

Even within those two songs, however, SKYND’s visual and musical identity was impossible to mistake. Since forming in 2017, the project has built its work around real criminal cases, combining industrial electronics, metal weight and heavily processed vocals with a visual language that places the singer somewhere between narrator, witness and deliberately constructed character. What struck me immediately was the precision of that construction. The make-up, movement, voice and sound do not feel like separate elements assembled around the songs; they appear to belong to the same unsettling system.

The vocals can move from something almost childlike or eerily detached into much harsher distorted registers, while the electronics underneath retain a heavy, deliberate pulse. What little I saw was intensely controlled visually, yet the subject matter continually destabilises that control because it refers back to actual human violence rather than fictional horror. Around the time of NCN, SKYND had also moved into material dealing with abuse protected by power and public status, with “Jimmy Savile” followed by “Johnny Kitagawa”, which suggested another shift in emphasis within the project.

Two songs are nowhere near enough to judge how successfully the complete set developed that material, and I will not pretend otherwise. What I saw was visually striking, sonically heavy and immediately recognisable; mostly, though, the experience became another illustration of NCN’s logistical cruelty. Sometimes the running order does not simply force a choice between bands. First it gives you ACTORS on a stage far too small for the audience they attract, and then makes escaping that audience part of the journey to the next concert.

Sunday

Sunday opened with Zalvox, and after two very dense days this was exactly the kind of performance I needed. Ribi’s electronics have an unusually tactile quality despite being carefully controlled, while Dorain’s voice gives the project its emotional centre. What continually surprises me about them is how naturally those two components converse.

Nothing seems overperformed. Ribi reacts to Dorain’s presence, Dorain inhabits rather than simply sings over the electronics, and small exchanges between them become part of the atmosphere. Her voice was especially beautiful at NCN. There is fragility there, but also confidence and considerable control, and the contrast with the electronic structures creates warmth without diminishing their precision.

The result was atmospheric without becoming sleepy, intimate without being withdrawn, and sufficiently detailed to pull an already festival-tired attention span back into focus. Their communication is one of the loveliest aspects of the project because it never feels as though one person supplies “the music” while the other supplies “the voice”; both participate in directing the emotional movement of the same material.

Grundeis then occupied the Amphibühne, and the contrast could hardly have been stronger. The Hamburg band move through post-punk, shoegaze, noise and gothic guitar textures, but what interests me is not the number of genres available for description; it is the way those textures continually change the emotional pressure of the songs.

On the largest stage, their handling of guitar density became especially impressive. Shoegaze can become indistinct outdoors because so much of its intimacy depends on saturation, while skeletal post-punk can seem disproportionately small once expanded into open space. Grundeis managed to preserve both density and definition. Layers of guitar accumulated, withdrew and blurred without becoming an anonymous wall, the rhythm section maintained genuine forward momentum, and Laura Müller’s vocals cut through without needing to overpower everything around them.

The stage suited them surprisingly well. Their music expanded into the space rather than merely occupying it, and there was enough movement inside the guitar structures to keep the performance engaging without resorting to excessive theatricality. It was post-punk in one of its more convincing contemporary forms: informed by history, certainly, but far too alive to resemble historical reconstruction.

The schedule then created an impossible choice between Lovelorn Dolls and Mayflower Madame, so I only saw short sections of each. Neither deserves the false certainty of a complete concert review based on a few photographed songs, but both left very clear impressions.

The Brussels project Lovelorn Dolls has always placed electronic gothic rock, heavier guitars and Kristell Lowagie’s expressive voice inside a visual universe where childhood imagery, dolls and apparent innocence can coexist with considerably darker emotional material. The short portion I witnessed still carried that tension strongly. There was theatrical colour, but also a much heavier musical foundation than the visual language might initially suggest.

Lowagie’s voice was the element binding those contradictions together. She can appear fragile one moment and considerably more forceful the next without either register feeling theatrical for its own sake. There was emotional intensity in the performance that made leaving particularly frustrating, and knowing the difficult history behind the project’s current chapter inevitably added another layer without needing to dominate the experience.

Mayflower Madame, from Oslo, created an entirely different kind of atmosphere. Their guitars seem to expand horizontally, creating a large sonic field rather than simply increasing volume, while the rhythm section continuously pulls that field forward.

The short portion I heard had an almost narcotic quality. Vocals were partially embedded inside the guitar texture, giving the impression that the songs were emerging from within the atmosphere rather than being placed over it. Yet the music never became static. There was always enough rhythmic tension beneath the psychedelic and shoegazing elements to prevent the set from dissolving into beautiful haze. It was dark, hypnotic and immediately distinctive, exactly the sort of performance where leaving after only a few songs feels particularly unfair.

The same problem returned with Mildreda and The Foreign Resort. Mildreda had been particularly high on my list because Realities had appeared only days before NCN, and I had already spent an unusual amount of time with the material, first while reviewing the album and then while discussing it with Jan Dewulf. That inevitably changes the experience of a concert. Instead of encountering the songs as unfamiliar objects, I arrived knowing many of their structures and emotional tensions in considerable detail, which made it fascinating to watch what happened when music I had previously examined almost microscopically was released into a festival environment.

What happened was not simply that the new material became louder. Onstage, Mildreda changed its proportions. Rhythms that can function almost architecturally on record became intensely physical, harsher electronic textures acquired actual impact, and Dewulf’s voice moved much closer to the centre of the experience. The new songs contain considerable vulnerability, but the performance never treated that vulnerability as fragility; if anything, the emotional openness made the aggression feel more purposeful. There was real force in the set, yet the quieter and more delicate passages retained their significance precisely because they were surrounded by so much pressure.

The circumstances made this even more interesting. Mildreda had to perform in uncompromising daylight, which is almost an act of sabotage against the usual visual grammar of dark electro. There was no darkness to extend the atmosphere, no possibility of disappearing into smoke, projections or carefully sculpted light, and therefore very little external assistance available to the music. Instead of weakening the performance, the exposure made its internal construction easier to perceive. Changes in density, rhythm and vocal intensity had to carry the dramatic weight themselves, and they did so remarkably well.

What I appreciated most was the sense that this was not a carefully preserved studio object being reproduced for an audience. Dewulf seemed fully inside the material, allowing it to become rougher, more immediate and more physically animated than its recorded version while still preserving the contradictions that make Mildreda interesting in the first place: severity beside vulnerability, precision beside abrasion and a very private emotional language projected through something much larger and more forceful. The daylight may have denied the band an obvious visual atmosphere, but it also proved that they did not need one.

My glimpse of The Foreign Resort was similarly brief, but the band’s physical understanding of post-punk was obvious immediately. Their guitars produce enormous atmosphere without sacrificing attack, while the rhythm underneath is far more urgent than the melancholy surface might initially suggest.

Even during those few songs, there was a strong sensation of movement. The sound expanded outward, but the pulse continually dragged it forward, creating the tension that makes The Foreign Resort more interesting than a purely atmospheric guitar band. I would have liked to stay because the performance seemed to be building rather than simply presenting its character immediately, but NCN’s simultaneous programme made that impossible.

One performance I deliberately refused to leave was Supersimmetria at Kulturbühne. Armando Alibrandi’s project occupies the borderlands between industrial techno, atmospheric electronics and detailed experimental construction, but its real fascination comes from gradual transformation.

The music does not depend on theatrical drops or obvious moments announcing that something important is about to happen. Rhythmic cells appear and begin changing function, frequencies thicken, microscopic details become suddenly structural, and only retrospectively does one realise how far a seemingly stable pattern has travelled. There is substantial intellectual precision involved, yet none of it feels academic because the body is implicated from the beginning.

This was one of those sets where I eventually put the camera away because continuing to photograph became a less adequate form of attention than dancing. The Kulturbühne’s relatively compact dimensions concentrated the sound beautifully, and the whole performance developed into that rare territory where analysis and bodily response stop competing. I stayed, I danced, and for music designed around the transformation of repetition, that may be more useful criticism than a catalogue of technical terminology.

Peter Heppner & Band changed the Amphibühne completely. There was already something celebratory in the atmosphere, particularly with Heppner’s birthday immediately approaching, but what made the concert emotional went considerably deeper than the occasion itself.

Some songs eventually stop belonging exclusively to the musicians who created them because listeners absorb them into their own biographies. “Dream Of You”, “Once In A Lifetime” and “Kein Zurück” have long since crossed that threshold. They become attached to relationships, departures, particular rooms, years, people who are no longer present and versions of ourselves we can remember without necessarily wanting to become again.

From my position with the camera, this accumulated history was visible across the Amphibühne. There were raised hands everywhere, people dancing, others almost motionless, and tears in more than one pair of eyes. Heppner’s voice still carries an extraordinary amount of emotional information without requiring theatrical demonstration, and the band gave the material enough scale to inhabit the amphitheatre without turning the songs into inflated festival versions of themselves.

Looking across that sea of heads and moving hands, I had the strange impression that thousands of people were listening to different songs despite the sound system playing exactly the same ones. Each listener had accumulated another version through the years spent with the music. That is one of the rare privileges of songs that survive long enough to acquire biographies beyond those of their authors.

Diary Of Dreams on the Waldbühne produced a related feeling for me, although in a far more private register. It was one of the few concerts at NCN that I experienced from beginning to end, and that completeness mattered because this was not a performance built around a sequence of isolated peaks. It developed gradually, with guitars, electronics, percussion, voice and light continually changing their relative weight, so that the emotional direction emerged through accumulation rather than through obvious theatrical cues.

At one point Adrian Hates raised both arms towards the musicians, and for a few seconds he looked almost like a conductor standing before his own small orchestra. The association with Diary Of Dreams’ work with the Philharmonie Leipzig was unavoidable, but what interested me was not any literal symphonic quality. It was the sense that Hates was directing movement, density and emotional pressure, allowing one element to rise while another withdrew and treating the band less as a collection of separate performers than as parts of a continuously changing structure.

That image also connected with something more personal for me. I have known Diary Of Dreams’ music for such a long time that I no longer hear many of these songs as fixed compositions. They have accompanied different versions of me, and what they meant when I was twenty is not necessarily what they mean now that I am over forty. When I was younger, a Diary Of Dreams concert could feel like being allowed into an intensely emotional private world, almost like opening a book whose atmosphere temporarily replaced everything outside it. Now the experience is more layered. Certain songs return with memories attached; others have gradually detached themselves from the circumstances in which I first heard them and acquired completely different meanings.

That, to me, is one of the more interesting measures of durable songwriting. A great song does not merely preserve the emotional conditions of the time in which it was written, nor does it require the listener to become their younger self again in order to respond to it. It changes because we change. Adrian Hates approaches the material differently after decades of performing it, the musicians around him alter its texture, the audience brings new biographies into the room, and the songs absorb all of that without losing their internal identity.

At NCN I was unusually aware of that movement between past and present. The music still carried the same recognisable emotional language, but my relationship with it had become more reflective, more nostalgic in places and, paradoxically, more open because I no longer needed it to mean exactly what it once meant.

That is why the concert felt so complete. Its emotional weight was not forced; it accumulated through pacing, detail, restraint and the extraordinary continuity of a musical world that has been changing for years without losing its centre. The image of Hates with his arms raised stayed with me because it seemed to capture precisely that process: not an artist preserving his past, but one still conducting it into new forms.

Finally, Die Krupps walked onto the Amphibühne. By then I had spent three days moving between stages, photographing, listening, talking and repeatedly forcing my concentration to reset for another performance. Familiarity should also have worked against them: I have seen Die Krupps enough times that I am not automatically impressed simply because “Nazis Auf Speed”, “Schmutzfabrik” or “Der Amboss” suddenly appear in a set. Yet from the opening sequence it became obvious that this was going to be one of those concerts where prior knowledge makes the reaction more meaningful rather than less.

The sound was phenomenal. Electronics remained hard, sharply defined and rhythmically exact, while the guitars had enormous abrasive weight without collapsing the mix into undifferentiated noise. With Marcel Zürcher back, that part of the sound had genuine physical presence again; his guitar did not simply reinforce the electronic structure but rubbed against it, destabilised it and introduced the friction that is essential to Die Krupps at their best. Their music may be founded on repetition, programming, steel and discipline, but its real power onstage comes from the moment when those controlled systems begin to sound as though they might exceed their own boundaries.

Jürgen Engler was outstanding, not because he resorted to exaggerated gestures but because he seemed constantly aware of the amphitheatre and of how the audience was responding. The chemistry across the band was equally strong, and that communication is one reason the performance could remain extremely tight while still feeling dangerous. The lighting was exceptional, the stage arrangement gave every musician visual and physical room, and the entire production seemed calibrated to increase impact without sacrificing clarity.

What surprised me was how quickly the analytical part of my brain disappeared. I know this material, I know how Die Krupps construct their concerts, and I have photographed them often enough to recognise many of the mechanisms involved, yet somewhere in the middle of the set I stopped evaluating them against previous performances and simply thought: they are astonishingly good tonight. That is a significant reaction precisely because novelty was not available to assist it. The band had to overcome familiarity through quality alone, and they did.

The concert had the physical force of a blow to the solar plexus, but it was not crude force. It was adrenaline organised with remarkable precision: excellent sound, magnificent light, aggressive electronics, guitars with real mass and a band operating with the confidence of musicians who understand their own history without behaving as though they are obliged to reproduce it ceremonially. Nothing about the set suggested a heritage act displaying evidence of its former importance. The songs were attacked rather than preserved.

As a finale to NCN, it was difficult to imagine anything better. The Amphibühne was packed, the audience was completely with them, and all the accumulated fatigue of three festival days was converted for a while into something much simpler and much more physical. I have seen Die Krupps many times; this was nevertheless one of the strongest performances I have ever seen from them, an absolute knockout and an almost perfect way to close the festival.

What remained

What remained with me afterwards was the same thing I had noticed while photographing the audience at the beginning of the weekend. For a festival with such a dense programme, so many stages and enough simultaneous attractions to keep everyone permanently negotiating with their own schedule, NCN feels remarkably unpretentious on the human level.

Every day can produce several completely different versions of the same festival depending on which direction someone turns, and yet the weekend rarely felt like a competition for maximum consumption. People stopped for conversations. Carefully prepared schedules were abandoned because someone had encountered an old friend. Audiences danced without appearing to calculate how visible they were while doing it. People ate together, exchanged recommendations, talked about what they had just seen and allowed the festival to become social rather than merely consumable.

That was also what changed my photography. I searched less for costumes and more for expressions, less for surfaces and more for those brief moments when somebody forgot there was a camera nearby. It required a different form of looking and occasionally a little more patience, but I think that difference explains something essential about NCN. The festival has an enormous programme and a range of music broad enough to move from fragile coldwave to industrial violence, from literary theatricality to post-punk guitars and large-scale synthpop within a matter of hours, yet the infrastructure never entirely becomes the subject.

Returning after 2023 therefore felt less like repeating an experience than correcting an assumption. I had remembered Nocturnal Culture Night primarily as an extraordinarily large and complicated festival that I was glad to have experienced once. Three years later I understood that its scale is only the visible part. Underneath it is a surprisingly human mechanism: musicians moving between very different artistic languages, audiences moving between stages and one another, and a festival whose constant motion somehow still leaves room for people simply to spend time together.

For me, after another long summer of festivals, that combination of musical abundance, physical intensity, curiosity and remarkably uncomplicated human contact was a very good place to finish.

Audience gallery

The full set of audience photographs Karo Kratochwil took at Nocturnal Culture Night 2026.