“No other festival does anything even approaching this” – a weekend at Helsinki’s Flow 2024

In our sort of late-period cash-strapped AI-addled age of music journalism, a standard form of festival recap article has emerged – a sort of pseudo-listicle ticking off the major acts with a one-phrase descriptor of each, inevitably kicking you over the requisite word count in no time thanks very much and let’s get this one bashed out before lunch yeah? It’s a form that works on one level, appeasing the gods of SEO and general content churn, but it also seems a bit joyless, like describing a restaurant dinner by just listing off the ingredients on the plate. Then again, there’s a reason this has become the received form: a great deal of big-box European festivals don’t really deserve much more investigation, themselves sticking so close to formula (find some brownfield on the outskirts of a city, whack up a few stages, book some buzzy bands and a couple of heritage acts, secure an Aperol Spritz activation) that everything reduces down to indistinguishable fashion–music–Instagram mush, with culture and creativity being stripmined for content and clicks and the potential to make a lifelong memory or two passed over for a thousand opportunities to go briefly viral.

All of which is a roundabout way to say that if the festival–industrial complex is starting to wash over you like a parade of faux-gourmet burgers with wordplay names eaten standing up while watching that band that Pitchfork recently gave a 7.2 to, then I’m very with you – and so, thankfully, is Helsinki’s Flow festival, which resists homogeneity at almost every turn. And with that in mind, in honour of Flow’s refreshing mindset, and in place of a slew of big-name performance overviews, here are a handful of memory-moments that are cutting through my post-festival Blue Monday goop.

Walking onto the site for the first time on the Friday afternoon, I’m suddenly immersed, baptism-dunking-style, in big industry: the ex-power-plant gasometers and chimneys tower above me, and clunking machine techno (courtesy of a duo going by Mr Velcro Fastener, but of course) goes far harder than 4pm on Day 1 strictly demands. Finns in catwalk fashion mill about as if it’s no big deal, but the multisensory scene is heady and exhilarating and transporting, to the extent that I instantly feel almost drunk on just the atmosphere (which, incidentally, is far more cost-effective than the traditional method out here at €13.50 a can).

Two hours later, still broad daylight, and some rogue on the main stage who turns out to be the Finnish equivalent of Justin Bieber is spending his entire fee on flamethrowers and fireworks that go off with every chorus. Five thousand locals in front of him go bananas, singing lustily and punching the air. The restless genre-hopping, like a musical game of the-floor-is-lava, is confusing; the collective euphoria is pure and contagious.

To the other end of the site now, where beside a giant brick cathedral to Helsinki Energy (whimsically reduced to HELEN written high up on one side, as if advertising some ageing maiden aunt) sits the extraordinary Balloon stage, Flow’s secret weapon. No huge acts are billed on the stage, but its architecture ensures that it’s impossible to see a bad show all weekend: 360° tiered seating surrounds a circular stage, above which is tethered a giant floating balloon, lit pink and blue in the dusky Nordic sky. No other festival stage anywhere looks like this. Like watching a gig in an opera house or, I don’t know, Stonehenge, it feels special just to be there: you could stick the proverbial Mongolian nose-flutist on here and it would still be pure vibes. At 11pm, a brief but torrential downpour rolls over the Balloon; in response, the Congolese dancehall/scrap-metal-percussion act Kokoko ramp up the tempo, and every dancing crowd member is dry again in minutes.

Saturday, early evening, and I’ve just had a festival-music detox courtesy of The Other Sound stage, a womb-like all-seater hall in the middle of the site with thick concrete walls and steel doors that clank shut during performances. It programs avant-garde sound art and contemporary classical composition throughout the weekend, and for the past hour, a string quartet, harpist, flutist and harpsichord player have been playing the long drones and virtuosic explosions of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho that sound like abstracted steam trains and church bells. In this sealed, dark, off-world environment, it’s blissfully strange. I emerge from my cocoon into blinding sunshine and a hail of hard trance from a nearby pair of decks (this time DJ MCMLXXXV, who else), and the gear-shift at that exact moment is the aural equivalent of sauna into plunge pool (how very Finnish): instantly breath-taking and invigorating, kind of stomach-flipping, offering a complete renewal for the night ahead. Again, I think to myself, no other festival does anything even approaching this.

Then, barely an hour later: PJ Harvey [top image] is on all fours on the main stage wailing, “I’ll tell you my name, F-U-C-K, fifty-foot queenie, I could have ten sons!” in front of a mixture of fashion kids and long-term Peej Stans with homemade signs. She feels imperious, like some aloof solemn godhead who will not yield, and acts it. It’s first uncomfortable, then thrilling: the contrasts continue.

As night falls, rave day starts: Helena Hauff flips actual 12-inch records and hunches her left shoulder to her ear. The graphic projected behind Barry Can’t Swim is partially obscured by the right-hand speaker stack, changing Barry’s stage name to suggest that, actually, he can. The game of Opposite Band Names is created.

Sunday, and after 45 minutes of tasteful indie to feel indeterminately sad to (that’s Alvvays, search-engine fans), another proper moment on the main stage, as Jessie Ware covers Cher’s ‘Believe’ and everyone from indie kids to tanktopped bears mimic the auto-tuned “I can’t break through” of the first verse in technicolour manual-tune. Delighted giggles. More punching the air. 

Seemingly minutes later, I’m back in the teleportation chamber that is The Other Sound, addicted by now to the exquisite juxtaposition of extreme musical temperatures that the space offers. This time it’s for the clarinet/accordion/electronics of The Zöllner–Roche Duo, whose dynamic drones and spikes are the perfect reset after three days of compressed (but nonetheless intensely satisfying) douf–douf–douf. Same as yesterday, I’m reborn back into the festival with new ears and legs, ready for the biggest set of the weekend.

Ten minutes before they arrive, I’m silently amused by the thought of a band called Pulp playing in the very country that produces most of the world’s paper. Four songs in, that thought is gone, along with all others, replaced by the feeling of being both rapturously in the present and also transported back 26 years to their Glastonbury performance in the exact same Sunday headliner slot, an early gig memory that left an indelible mark aged 15, the one gig that made me want to listen to and talk to other people about music more than any other. Even the weather obliges: a similar level of drizzle accompanies ‘Sorted for E’s & Wizz’ as it did a quarter-century earlier, and all the synchronicity and nostalgia and elation and performance magic and Sunday-night three-days-on-your-feet festival exhaustion delirium comes together: ‘This Is Hardcore’ is an unlikely tearjerker, but I’ll take the surprise. Another indelible memory made. 

I shuffle back to the shuttle bus with the synth line from ‘Common People’ rattling around my head. Just hours earlier, I realised, I’d been swimming in a pool abutting the Baltic Sea doing the traditional Finnish sauna routine. Between then and now, I’d seen disco queens and other-worldly drones, towering architecture and one-of-a-kind performance spaces, indie royalty and nosebleed techno. As I fall asleep, I struggle to think of another place that offers quite the same cocktail antidote to Big Summer Festival fatigue.