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Welcome to DBTR Festival 2026!
Click here for German version of website
The 15th Down by the River – the "Festival for Unheard and Crooked Sounds" is celebrating a milestone birthday! And once again, it invites you to a laid-back summer bash in Berlin’s cosiest club garden.
Accompanying this round-number anniversary is a well-rounded live programme – with
plenty of edges and angles. With sweeping arcs and full circles. Long-time festival friends perform alongside new favourite bands. Gritty guitars give way to playful electronics. Hypnotic grooves meet raw, raucous beats; profound lyricism meets unvarnished honesty. Expect lovable sloppiness, quirky theatricality, and explosions of pure energy. Plus: a cosmic sound installation. And everything converges along the winding paths of ://about blank – saying "Hey! Hello!" and pausing for a joyful reunion or a curious introduction.
11 acts > 3 stages > 1 summer day
Between the courtyard stage, the garden stage, and the caravan, an eclectic festival buzz unfolds – straddling the line between party and politics, street and space, electronic and acoustic, accessibility and eccentricity. Taking the stage are newcomers so fresh that not even a search engine can find them, alongside familiar DBTR faces that invite you to a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
A SMALL, FRIENDLY RESISTANCE
It all began in 2009, "down by the river", at the legendary Bar25. DBTR was founded by
the underground connoisseurs of amSTARt and Fourtrack on Stage. Back then, the
festival still had a folky slant, but already maintained a love for the weird and the offbeat.
Open to genre-hopping and unexpected encounters. Which is precisely why it was an indie festival held inside a techno club – pretty innovative at the time! Following the closure of Bar25 and a brief stopover on the opposite bank of the Spree at Kater Holzig, the festival relocated to Ostkreuz in 2013. No longer situated by the water, it found a new home in the idyllic, unkempt garden of ://about blank. A venue on the periphery of the city centre that, to this day, continues to defy the worsening conditions of the times: gentrification, polarization, autobahn expansion.
And DBTR, too, defies the odds. A prolonged pandemic hiatus, followed by a warmly
welcomed comeback in 2023, organised without funding. Now, the festival’s milestone
anniversary also takes place without financial support. But we will celebrate regardless,
once again offering tiered ticket prices to suit various budgets, along with free admission for children. DBTR is here to stay! It offers a pocket amidst the storm of everyday life. A friendly wave within a shrill public discourse. A small, pulsating act of resistance against the looming monotony of hotels, office blocks, and the A100.
So come on down to the garden and raise a glass with us to 15 years DBTR!
Feel free to bring the family. No gifts necessary – just open ears and a festive mood!
DBTR ARTISTS 2026:
With impeccable, natural timing, Räubertochter’s rap slams with brutal honesty right at us – straight from the everyday life of a twenty-year-old: period cramps, Berlin Sundays, sex and the indignities of capitalism. Meanwhile, Räubertochter and her producer, Frisch, move so effortlessly – shifting from techno-rap to hip-hop to piano compositions – that it feels as though they could take off into any direction at any moment. A boundless potential, unleashed with youthful abandon. An unbridled energy that makes Räubertochter’s live performances burst at the seams. On stage, she is truly in her element, ready to party!
Paloma 004’s unpretentious stage presence captivates audiences with a rousing, high-energy sound. The band from Vienna navigates deftly between punchy and intricately woven indie rock – shifting between the sensitive and the urgent, the resolute and the doubtful, the fragile and the aggressive, with sprinkles of humour. While their, predominantly German, lyrics and vocal style occasionally evoke echoes of Tocotronic, the band doesn’t stop there: their songs quickly take on a life of their own, forging unique perspectives within well-crafted, atmospherically dense post-punk and New Wave dynamics.
These young guys – brimming with musical drive – haven't set out to create timeless indie rock due to narrow-minded ambition. With Sonic Soup, nothing feels forced. Even when they really let loose or dig into heavier riffs, they remain fluid and relaxed. Stylistically, the band from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania lives up to its name in every respect. There’s quite a lot simmering in this sonic pot: acid rock, garage punk, stoner rock, fuzz guitars, folk touches, and bone-dry funk basslines. Add to that: pinches of Sebadoh, Pavement, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, The Go-Betweens, and countless others (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard being a declared influence). And despite the many ingredients, this "Sonic Soup" sounds remarkably organic. Bon appétit!
BGTCB are so brand-new that they barely exist yet. Nevertheless, we made an effort to get an advance listen to the inner workings of this young band – and received a fantastic response: “BGTCB is the Berlin ‘Holiday Band’ within the legacy of Blue Gene Tyranny’s ‘Double Life.’ … Elektra Breinl, Linda Finny, Lily Beltane, and Ella Mae Hengst swap instruments somewhere between ‘Trust in Rock’ and their own original songs. They combine accordion, electric guitar, glockenspiel, harmonica, synthesizer, flute, and Space Echo with English and German lyrics about dispossessed farmers, 50 euros, and ‘not being guilty of anything’ as a flower. Neo-folk, neo-chanson, neo-avant-garde, neo-noise. BGTCB do it all – live.”
Drums, fretless bass, and a percussive guitar form buoyant grooves, while washes of keyboard drift by. Vocal harmonies evoke echoes of Americana, as if a warm breeze had carried them in from the West Coast... The Morning Stars is a new band featuring Barbara Morgenstern, Sebastian Vogel, Alex Paulick, and Felix Müller-Wrobel – all of whom are hardly strangers to the scene (see Kreidler, Kante, Coloma, or Morgenstern’s solo project). Having known one another for quite some time, they are now embarking together on a project entirely their own, blending dream-pop, anthemic indie-rock, stop-and-go funk, and post-rock.
Smells like sensation: Frau Kraushaar presents “Gurke Kartoffel Ahnung”, the stage show to her latest concept album, which dives deep into the subject of the nose. What do a Japanese flute, a mini-Casio keyboard, and a sorely under-estimated sensory organ have in common? They all find refuge in this experiment – one that not only shatters the rigid boundaries of the classical concert format but gleefully deconstructs them. A delightfully offbeat performance blending musical theater, literary readings, and electronic excess.
A mix of catchy pop hooks, melancholic chansons, radio-drama electronics, and spirited Acid House. An event that tickles the mind and moves the feet. Come for the experiment, stay for the dance!
Featuring a super special guest performance by actor, dancer and choreographer Katja Inga Baldowski!
Compared to the anti-folk and freak-folk madness of his former band, Dufus, Seth Faergolzia’s music now seems almost mellowed by age: occasionally, he even leaves an existing structural framework more or less intact. Generally, however, the word "mellow" sounds grotesque when applied to Faergolzia’s compositions. Of course, this old New York friend and recurring DBTR guest is a kind-hearted individual, and his creative output is deeply imbued with empathy. Yet this empathy manifests itself, not least, in his generous bestowal of utterly zany musical possibilities. He turns folk music inside out, exposing its underlying patterns only to stitch them back together into strikingly novel forms: exhilarating songs that, in the most adventurous, ragpicker-style splendor, present themselves to us in full voice – colourful, enigmatic, exuberant, and at times, even electronic.
Freschard sings about love, friends, bars, parties, tequila, french fries. With hundreds of songs on dozens of albums and unforgettable, free-spirited, epic concerts, when Freschard, DBTR veteran and the finest folk singer of today, sings that she's ready to party, you feel ready to party too. You sway, you sing along. It's the same when she belts out a "lalala lala" or "toudawou wahou" – you don't even question it: you follow the melody, as if it's always been there. Sometimes, she'll even bring a tear to your eye. It's folk, pop, blues, or calypso over a few guitar chords, where catchy choruses and disarming solos soar in a magical symbiosis with her partner-in-crime Stanley Brinks. Freschard is a minstrel of our time. Essential.
In the sci-fi series “The Expanse”, the “Belters” are underdogs toiling away in the asteroid belt of our solar system. Having grown up aboard dilapidated spaceships, they tolerate planetary gravity poorly. Beltership, on the other hand, is a project by Julia Kotowski (aka Entertainment for the Braindead). And her electro-acoustic soundscapes set out to lift listeners right out of Earth’s gravitational pull. The Beltership fleet consists of whimsical, homemade instruments, cobbled together from odds and ends scavenged from the streets of Berlin. Kotowski’s primary focus lies on the very process of sound generation; the sounds you hear are visible in the very moment of their creation – before they take flight amidst loops and effects. Kotowski’s Beltership is currently on an open-ended mission of exploration, and she invites you to come aboard.
Where? In front of the caravan on the festival grounds.
The Kurdish guitarist, singer, and songwriter Helan Jawish was born in Afrin, Northern Syria, and currently resides in Berlin. Her pieces blend traditional Middle Eastern elements with contemporary influences, featuring lyrics that explore Kurdish life and its struggles. When the rhythm of a song emerges seemingly out of thin air, establishing a connection with the infinite, it dances for a few minutes alongside sinuous guitar figures, drifting off somewhere else: into the utopian unknown. And you find yourself dancing along. At the same time, Jawish’s soulful, melancholic voice ushers in a gentle tranquility that lingers even after the music has faded away. Magical.
Songs that question, observe, and groove. That don’t seek simple answers, but rather an open form for narrating the present – as laconic as they are rich in nuance. Songs that may channel a “Twin Peaks” vibe or an NDW aesthetic, both intricate and accessible. This is Die Quittung, the project of Leipzig-based multi-instrumentalist Josen Bach. Bach’s self-deprecating lyrics are grounded in precise observations, where themes of intimacy, distance, self-assertion, and exhaustion appear not merely as private states, but as shared societal experiences. Live, Die Quittung takes the stage with rotating lineups. What unfolds in the interplay between Neue Deutsche Welle, Dadaist pop, EDM, punk, indie, and experimental rock is written in the stars of the singer-songwriter firmament. Within Rio Reiser’s orbit.
This year's festival design contribution with friendly permission by FS Blumm. With graphic design extensions by Tim Tetzner.
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