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SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
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 Oct-02-2017 17:23 
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SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
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So, a little re-cap of ADE. I was there for five days with my girlfriend and caught something every day, even if it was only a free pop-up event. There were two main parties we went to in Amsterdam, though. The first was the Sudbeat x Soundgarden showcase at Panama on Friday night, with a 9 hour B2B from Cattaneo and Nick Warren and a tasty second room line-up including Cid Inc, D-Nox and Interaxxis. That was my party. Then, more to my girlfriend's taste, we did the Kompakt label night on Saturday, organised by mega-promoters DGTL.
What a contrast between nights! The Cattaneo and Warren night was basically me doing one last prog-out for the year. It’s the third time I’ve seen Cattaneo B2B this year, and the second time with Warren. As he never plays in the UK except at the Ministry in London (which me and my mates are sick of), I won’t be seeing him again for quite some time. His B2B with Warren in London in April was one of my favourite nights of the year, and 9 hours of them was too good to miss. We got there nice and early, whilst Graziano Raffa was still warming up the main room. Panama is a cool club, just about as big as I like a club. I’d guess the capacity of the main room was around 1500, with a balcony and tiered perimeter to the dancefloor creating a nicely atmospheric rave pit with a booming high ceiling and fancy light show. The sound wasn’t as good as The Box at Ministry, and at times just didn’t really feel loud enough, but towards the end of the night I found a sweet spot for it.
In all honesty, Cattaneo and Warren were pretty sluggish off the mark. We’d eaten a big meal only a few hours before, which probably added to the slightly ponderous feel of the night. They were playing solid enough atmospheric fare, but the flow between them was unspectacular and my girlfriend was a little restless. At 3am it still didn’t feel genuinely peak time, so we absconded to the second room to see D-Nox followed by Cid Inc. As often is the case, the second room had so much more energy than the first. D-Nox did his marching proggy-techno thing at a smaller, second-room scale, with more of a “party” feel than anything big on skyscraping atmospherics. Cid Inc was the real revelation. He was playing a mixture of plenty of his own productions along with tunes very similar in style – that punchy techy end of prog with heavily compressed basslines. I was worried he’d be a bit too purist, as that clinical tech-prog sometimes feels, but actually it was really driving and also oddly groovy. Tunes of his like Roihu and the remix of Dousk – Whisper Unit worked really well in the smaller space, and we enjoyed it so much we stayed in there until 5.30am when the room closed.
Back to the main room, and Warren and Cattaneo were finally getting to the business end. My girlfriend was flagging badly at this point but the main room had emptied out slightly and I found a magnificent position directly in eye-line with the DJs at the other end of the dancefloor, giving me a brilliant view of the whole sea of people and also a raised rampart which caught the bass resonance nicely. I was elevated slightly above the crowd but still felt part of the action. And I have to say, the last 90 minutes of their set were beyond sublime. Driving, growling monsters, huge skin-tingling breakdowns… it was basically dance music as I love it, and from that position, staring across the crowd, it seemed in my slightly hazy mind to be exactly as I’d always imagined clubbing as a spotty teenager reading the inlays of those old Euphoria trance compilations.
The crowd, for their part, were brilliant too. The club was still 90% full at 7.30am and every big tune got a humungous reaction. It felt like every hardcore prog fan in Europe had descended on one club. It wasn’t a consistently great night, but the last hour or two were quite simply as good as clubbing gets.
Now, at this point I was half-tempted to carry on into the afternoon and go to Lee Burridge’s ADID party, but that would have murdered me long before the Kompakt night started. So we regrouped that evening and got the NDSM ferry across to the docklands to the most humungous warehouse I’ve ever seen. The ceiling must have been about 25m high, no joke. All the signs were of a commercially-minded mega-arena event, and so it proved. 7.00€ for a locker, 2.90€ for a bottle of water. Merchandise stands and food trucks. A crowd completely opposite to the previous night’s, mostly comprised of trendy Dutch locals who spent more time jabbing their phones and chattering than dancing. And music that was mostly pure self-indulgent dogshit.
The truly enormous main room was mostly host to live acts like Gui Boratto and Weval, and Apparat playing the most wanky DJ set I’ve ever heard. Very little in the way of thumping beats or grooves. It was more of a giant electronic live gig than a club night. Needing some energy, we tried to stick to the second room. Tobias Thomas did a slick warm-up set of trippy techno, and then Roman Flugel came on the decks at 1am on absolute fire. The first 45 minutes were as good as I’ve heard anyone DJ all year. He was playing in signature leftfield German techno style, but more banging and driving than I knew hm capable of. When this kind of music fuses its innovative sound palettes and structures with proper rave energy it’s undeniably brilliant. However, after this storming start he eased off the gas and became increasingly noodly and oddball. He finished on one last techno banger, and that was the last good tune I heard all night.
Danny Daze has reserved a special place on my shit-list for what followed. With Apparat jerking off all over the decks in the other room, it fell to Daze to provide a techno contrast. And what he did was pure angry teenager “challenging” dark techno dross. Weird rhythms, off-beats, silly droning sounds, laser splashes. Anything except an ounce of groove. We found ourselves trapped in the docklands for two hours with nothing, nothing to dance to. By the time Michael Mayer and Patrice Baumel emerged to close the main room, our buzz was long gone and tiredness was setting in hard. When they decided to mark the occasion with their crap tribute to dark dystopian Berliner techno, we’d had enough. It was pissing it down with freezing cold rain outside and took an hour to get home. I’ve now returned from the Netherlands with a horrible head-cold for my troubles. If only we’d seen sense, sacked off Kompakt, and gone to Lee Burridge instead.
As a side-note, for anyone curious about ADE, it was an amazing experience. Even living in a fairly busy clubbing city, the “dance music industry” often feels like a travelling roadshow that only occasionally stops by for a party. During ADE you really are at the heart of the scene for a week. You can barely walk down a street without seeing a name like Nina Kravitz DJing on the radio through a studio window, or wander into Ritchie Hawtin doing a free outdoor party in a city square. The city is super-liberal and the friendliest, most open-minded place for a giant mashed-up party. As I learned the hard way, some of the mega parties are as soulless and joyless as they are everywhere in the world, but the smaller parties are things of beauty, and the number of mouth-watering line-ups in such a short space of time is surely unrivalled anywhere else on the planet. I’m already planning to go back next year, and this time holding off buying any tickets for anything until All Day I Dream gets announced. Don’t wait so long next time Burridge, you bald-headed bastard!
___________________
Mixes:
> Back To Deep [Deep Trippy House]
> Terra Nova [Modern Progressive Trance]
> Rough & Ready [Modern Trance]
>A Different Energy [Good Modern Trance]
> The Edale Mix [Panoramic Beats]
Last edited by SYSTEM-J on Oct-27-2017 at 12:08
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Oct-25-2017 16:47
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OrangestO
–30–
Registered: Feb 2010
Location:
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| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
So, a little re-cap of ADE. I was there for five days with my girlfriend and caught something every day, even if it was only a free pop-up event. There were two main parties we went to in Amsterdam, though. The first was the Sudbeat x Soundgarden showcase at Panama on Friday night, with a 9 hour B2B from Cattaneo and Nick Warren and a tasty second room line-up including Cid Inc, D-Nox and Interaxxis. That was my party. Then more to my girlfriend's taste, we did the Kompakt label night on Saturday, organised by mega-promoters DGTL.
What a contrast between nights! The Cattaneo and Warren night was basically me doing one last prog-out for the year. It’s the third time I’ve seen Cattaneo B2B this year, and the second time with Warren. As he never plays in the UK except at the Ministry in London (which me and my mates are sick of), I won’t be seeing him again for quite some time. His B2B with Warren in London in April was one of my favourite nights of the year, and 9 hours of them was too good to miss. We got there nice and early, whilst Graziano Raffa was still warming up the main room. Panama is a cool club, just about as big as I like a club. I’d guess the capacity of the main room was around 1500, with a balcony and tiered perimeter to the dancefloor creating a nicely atmospheric rave pit with a booming high ceiling and fancy light show. The sound wasn’t as good as The Box at Ministry, and at times just didn’t really feel loud enough, but towards the end of the night I found a sweet spot for it.
In all honesty, Cattaneo and Warren were pretty sluggish off the mark. We’d eaten a big meal only a few hours before, which probably added to the slightly ponderous feel of the night. They were playing solid enough atmospheric fare, but the flow between them was unspectacular and my girlfriend was a little restless. At 3am it still didn’t feel genuinely peak time, so we absconded to the second room to see D-Nox followed by Cid Inc. As often is the case, the second room had so much more energy than the first. D-Nox did his marching proggy-techno thing at a smaller, second-room scale, with more of a “party” feel than anything big on skyscraping atmospherics. Cid Inc was the real revelation. He was playing a mixture of plenty of his own productions along with tunes very similar in style – that punchy techy end of prog with heavily compressed basslines. I was worried he’d be a bit too purist, as that clinical tech-prog sometimes feels, but actually it was really driving and also oddly groovy. Tunes of his like Roihu and the remix of Dousk – Whisper Unit worked really well in the smaller space, and we enjoyed it so much we stayed in there until 5.30am when the room closed.
Back to the main room, and Warren and Cattaneo were finally getting to the business end. My girlfriend was flagging badly at this point but the main room had emptied out slightly and I found a magnificent position directly in eye-line with the DJs at the other end of the dancefloor, giving me a brilliant view of the whole sea of people and also a raised rampart which caught the bass resonance nicely. I was elevated slightly above the crowd but still felt part of the action. And I have to say, the last 90 minutes of their set were beyond sublime. Driving, growling monsters, huge skin-tingling breakdowns… it was basically dance music as I love it, and from that position, staring across the crowd, it seemed in my slightly hazy mind to be exactly as I’d always imagined clubbing as a spotty teenager reading the inlays of those old Euphoria trance compilations.
The crowd, for their part, were brilliant too. The club was still 90% full at 7.30am and every big tune got a humungous reaction. It felt like every hardcore prog fan in Europe had descended on one club. It wasn’t a consistently great night, but the last hour or two were quite simply as good as clubbing gets.
Now, at this point I was half-tempted to carry on into the afternoon and go to Lee Burridge’s ADID party, but that would have murdered me long before the Kompakt night started. So we regrouped that evening and got the NDSM ferry across to the docklands to the most humungous warehouse I’ve ever seen. The ceiling must have been about 25 high, no joke. All the signs were of a commercially-minded mega-arena event, and so it proved. 7.00€ for a locker, 2.90€ for a bottle of water. Merchandise stands and food trucks. A crowd completely opposite to the previous night’s, mostly comprised of trendy Dutch locals who spent more time jabbing their phones and chattering than dancing. And music that was mostly pure self-indulgent dogshit.
The truly enormous main room was mostly host to live acts like Gui Boratto and Weval, and Apparat playing the most wanky DJ set I’ve ever heard. Very little in the way of thumping beats or grooves. It was more of a giant electronic live gig than a club night. Needing some energy, we tried to stick to the second room. Tobias Thomas did a slick warm-up set of trippy techno, and then Roman Flugel came on the decks at 1am on absolute fire. The first 45 minutes were as good as I’ve heard anyone DJ all year. He was playing in signature leftfield German techno style, but more banging and driving than I knew hm capable of. When this kind of music fuses its innovative sound palettes and structures with proper rave energy it’s undeniably brilliant. However, after this storming start he eased off the gas and became increasingly noodly and oddball. He finished on one last techno banger, and that was the last good tune I heard all night.
Danny Daze has reserved a special place on my shit-list for what followed. With Apparat jerking off all over the decks in the other room, it fell to Daze to provide a techno contrast. And what he did was pure angry teenager “challenging” dark techno dross. Weird rhythms, off-beats, silly droning sounds, laser splashes. Anything except an ounce of groove. We found ourselves trapped in the docklands for two hours with nothing, nothing to dance to. By the time Michael Mayer and Patrice Baumel emerged to close the main room, our buzz was long gone and tiredness was setting in hard. When they decided to mark the occasion with their crap tribute to dark dystopian Berliner techno, we’d had enough. It was pissing it down with freezing cold rain outside and took an hour to get home. I’ve now returned from the Netherlands with a horrible head-cold for my troubles. If only we’d seen sense, sacked off Kompakt, and gone to Lee Burridge instead.
As a side-note, for anyone curious about ADE, it was an amazing experience. Even living in a fairly busy clubbing city, the “dance music industry” often feels like a travelling roadshow that only occasionally stops by for a party. During ADE you really are at the heart of the scene for a week. You can barely walk down a street without seeing a name like Nina Kravitz DJing on the radio through a studio window, or wander into Ritchie Hawtin doing a free outdoor party in a city square. The city is super-liberal and the friendliest, most open-minded place for a giant mashed-up party. As I learned the hard way, some of the mega parties are as soulless and joyless as they are everywhere in the world, but the smaller parties are things of beauty, and the number of mouth-watering line-ups in such a short space of time is surely unrivalled anywhere else on the planet. I’m already planning to go back next year, and this time holding off buying any tickets for anything until All Day I Dream gets announced. Don’t wait so long next time Burridge, you bald-headed bastard!
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Nice recap.
I'll def try to get there next year.
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Oct-27-2017 09:55 
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SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
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Feb-13-2018 19:10
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