Efforts to invite the Canadian-by-birth, Berliner-by-choice Sean Nicholas Savage to our festival are as old as the festival itself. As early as 2012, he appeared as a guest star in Touchy Mob’s audacious supergroup at Kaffee Burger; now, six years later, the songwriter will play solo at the festival for the first time ever, equipped with no more than his standard fare of playback and microphone. Sean Nicholas Savage may be bare-bones, but he’s also the bonafide patriarch of new DIY romanticism, whose ambassadors frequent the concert series Shameless/Limitless, the label Mansions & Millions, or the Neukölln bar Das Gift, and have long been spiritually connected to Torstraßen Festival. Over some 10 or 20 albums, most of them released on cassette via the Canadian label Arbutus, Savage has honed his customized take on the genre of Kuschelrock. As cashmere-blanket as his tunes are, though, he has also become well-versed in the genre’s pitfalls, down to the last detail. He uses those pitfalls, zooms in on them until they’re out of focus, and counteracts them with a less-cuddly, bad-boy image. In the end, Savage, whose last name might best be taken seriously, paints himself as a dreamer who doesn’t subdue, as a rogue wolf, a marauder, a tempter and a villain whose emotionalism tumbles unbridled to the fore, attracting as it repels, repelling as it attracts, but ultimately persuasive, like an ocean’s deceptive undertow. My oh my.

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