- Dekmantel have been running parties in Amsterdam for the past six years, and their success has spawned an always on-point record label. This would be a busy enough workload for most, but now they've also launched a festival in Amsterdam Bos, a mix of park and woodland next to Schipol airport. The move into outdoor parties has been the creative death knell for many a successful club night, but the four-stage event stuck to the underground ethos of their parties, without resorting to crossover sounds.
Still, Dekmantel was full of contrasts, and stumbling between Jeff Mills and Gerd Janson on the Saturday afternoon laid them bare most starkly. Though they performed on stages just metres apart, Janson's low-slung grooves, where piano licks rolled over a crowd of impossibly high-cheekboned people, couldn't have been further from the fistpumps that met Mills' relentless percussion. That both felt right is testament to the festival's careful planning: every backstage element from the speakers (whose setup notes apparently ran to 300 pages) to the security was near-perfect.
Much of Dekmantel's success came from its focus. With a comparatively modest crowd of around 5,000 people rolling through each day, it eschewed massive headliners; Carl Craig was about as regal as it got, and even he was tucked away in the trees. In afternoon sunshine, he slowly built his loping rhythms, evidently under no pressure to go big. Elsewhere, Beautiful Swimmers, still up from the night before, laid down a medley of sinuous house and disco. Peven Everett's "Put Your Back Into It" was a highlight of their set, which admittedly relied more on selection than technique (but knocking back Moscow mules among all those smiling bodies, the needle slips just didn't seem important).
Photo credit: Merlijn Hoek
Joy Orbison's Saturday set was about as close as things got to anthemic, thanks to tracks like "Swims," Outlander's "The Vamp" and the Paul Woolford remix of "Renegade Master." Subtle? Not even slightly. But for the hardy souls raving in ponchos amid Biblical rain, the big guns were most welcome. Those who preferred things less polished were equally well-accommodated, first with the raw sounds of L.I.E.S. boss Ron Morelli, then with Traxx's jacking rhythms pummelling the crowd on the FACT stage.
Such was the strength of the lineup that every choice of what to see next was tempered by a nagging knowledge that you'd have to miss something else. Choose to take in Move D, whose selections matched his Smallville shirt, and forgo John Talabot on the mainstage. Throw shapes to Karizma's saxophone-heavy jams, and miss the bubbling acid and electro of I-F. It's a good problem to have, though, and the festival's compactness made it easy to stroll between the stages. It was some sort of sorcery that they managed to get them so loud and so close together without any bleed.
Photo credit: Merlijn Hoek
There were some misfires, mostly on the Sunday, when blazing afternoon sunshine made some sets seem wholly inappropriate. Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald's dubby Borderland performance proved as dull live as it did on record (45 minutes into their set, I overheard someone asking if they were soundchecking). Jamie XX's mix of techno and steel drums was uninspired, bordering on hackneyed.
The most stirring moment of the weekend came during Levon Vincent's set when, as the strains of Larry Heard's "The Sun Can't Compare" tickled out of the Funktion 1s, a stream of enormous bubbles floated by the trees that surrounded the park. It looked almost exactly like the cover of his sublime fabric mix, and as a beachball bounced its way around probably the happiest crowd I've ever had the pleasure of dancing in, it was hard to think of how the moment could be any better.