Trance EDM Concert

Banner with the Festival Name "We are One"

 Posted by James

On Saturday, Town Mouse and I went to a trance music concert on Rummelsberger Strand, a beach along the Spree in Rummelsberg. The concert was organized by Paul van Dyk, a well known trance DJ, and ran from 3 PM until 10 PM, with an after hours ticket available until noon the next day. I've been watching the trance/goa-psy music scene in Berlin on line for a while looking for something that was happening at a reasonable time. Most events are like the Kit Cat Club, which has a regular Mystic Friday event every Friday from 10 PM until 12 noon the next day, which is much too late for me. Even if the event is at a reasonable time, like the music festival a couple weeks ago at the old Tempelhof airport, the style is usually techno or house, neither of which I like as a rule, though there are a few techno DJs whose style is more appealing to me.

We arrived in Rummelsberg around 6, wanting to get there when the sun was less intense. The weather in Berlin over the previous couple days was really hot, with temperatures in the mid to upper 90's F. At the address on the ticket there was a run down old factory building and no sign of the concert, and no music that we could hear. Last year at the Beyond Wonderland concert in Mountain View, the music was so loud that it was vibrating our house over a mile away from Shoreline Amphitheater. We had to wear ear plugs.

A security guard directed us to a blue gate, and we entered a typical Berlin post industrial landscape:

This was the road leading into the concert site. I got the following picture of the graffiti covered abandoned factory  on the way out:

And this picture of some barges moored right off the festival site:

So the site was certainly a lot less posh than Shoreline and the ticket price reflected it too, only 24 euros.

The whole event was quite relaxed, no hour waiting to get through security then having your pockets searched and your backpack torn apart like at the Beyond Wonderland concert. We stood in line for about 10 minutes, then a guy with a barcode reader scanned our ticket and told us to have fun. The concert had two stages, and when we got there James Zabiela was on the main stage:

 We listened to him for a while but despite the spectacular video graphics, his music was a bit too on the techno side, lots of percussion little of the soaring harmonies and female vocals that I like so much in trance. So we headed down to the beach to check out the second stage:

I couldn't get a picture of the DJ here because the crowd was so thick and really rockin', but the stage was right next to the water, and true to the nautical and beach theme, there was an old ship's wheel in the back.

While the name of the DJ wasn't up, this music was more to our liking, so we stayed and danced for an hour. The area was decorated with three huge mushroom jellyfish. Here you can see the white one:

They had seats around the base where people could sit and talk or just relax. The other two were clear and one had a red light in it.

The crowd was a really nice mix of young people from different countries, mostly of course from Germany. I heard a couple Finnish girls chatting on the way in. We even saw people nearer our age there. Inside were a couple bars scattered around the main stage and the secondary stage for people who got thirsty while listening or dancing. I saw no evidence of drugs, not even someone smoking a joint.  Naturally with the exception of alcohol,  mainly beer, and cigarettes. Most everyone was smoking cigarettes furiously. My theory is that it might have been a tactic to keep cool, because nicotine causes the peripheral blood vessels to contract, reducing blood flow to the skin. And it was hot. I checked the temperature with my cell phone and it read 99 degrees at one point. We had along a liter and a half of water and we drank up the whole thing in the 3 hours we were there.

After a while, we left the secondary stage area and walked over to a lawn where there were food stands. The line for pizza was really long:

 Even though we hadn't eaten much, we weren't really hungry because it was so hot, so we just sat around watching the crowd and relaxing.

After about a half hour, we went out to the main stage. Zabiela was still on, but at 8 Paul van Dyk himself came on:

Here you can see his name on the wrap around screen. In the photo below, you can see him:

They had people running large video cameras standing on elevated platforms around the dancing area and every so often, they would throw up a picture of the crowd on the display.

We danced for another hour, until 9, then headed home. The tram and S Bahn were packed with people headed back from the concert. 

I can't help but compare this to the Grateful Dead concert at Soldier Field in Chicago and Levis Area in San Jose that was held over the weekend, billed as a "good-by" concert even though the Dead officially broke up when Jerry Garcia died in 1995. They reanimated the corpse of the Grateful Dead with Trey Anastasio, from Phish, as the lead guitarist and staged four massively hyped zombie concerts, two in Chicago and two in San Jose. I was really into the Dead when I was in college, but got out of them when I finished, so I was never a serious Deadhead. I do still like some of their music, for example "Box of Rain", but to me, there is a lot more energy and fun in the trance scene. The other think I like about EDM in general is that there isn't a lot of hype around the DJs. They're primarily around to do the music, which is where the focus should be.