[27 – 29 September 1996]
courtesy of marita*
Another review. um… where do i start? We got along to Sloterdijk around 10.30 or 11 pm I think, to find a number of people waiting for the directions to this secret location. Turned out to be Amerika Havens as I had suspected, but all that was there so far was the tent, no sound system or anything, all that was only arriving the next day. We were going to wait until saturday to go there, but finding parking for a camper in Amsterdam ain’t so easy, so Timo and I went on out there friday night anyway.
Next day, saturday, made a few trips back and forth to sloterdijk to pick up some people, but up until 11 pm or so, there wasn’t much of a turn out. The music was good, the dj’s seemed to be playing all well known tracks to get the crowd (well, the people that were there 🙂 on the dance floor. Then the cops arrived saying that people were complaining about the noise. utter and complete bullshit. There’s no houses or residencies for miles and miles out there! Just an excuse to exercise police control I think.
But! At the same time the police arrived, so did about 50 people! So the cops (*slightly outnumbered) left after making us promise to turn the music down. We did. For a while. The crowd continued to get bigger after that, and at about 3 or 4 the place was packed. The cops turned up again of course, and we had to restrict the sounds to monitors only until daylight. I really don’t know what the cops were on about, ’cause at one point we went for a walk around the site, and as soon as you were about 150 or 200 metres away from the tent, you couldn’t hear a thing! It was really windy, and that was distorting the sound, but even so.
About 5.30 or 6 a dj started to play that sent the majority of people to sleep. Literally. He was the only dj to start playing extreemly *boring* trance. He came on just after Zen, who had everyone at high energy level, and completely deflated the lot! He wiped the place clean of energy. Everyone started to flake out then, ’cause the music just wasn’t good anymore. It was *real* plod. And i’m not knocking trance, not by a long shot, it’s just that this guys track collection didn’t contain anything even *slightly* melodic. I was talking to one of the Israeli dj’s afterwards, and he said he had even gone up to the decks and turned this guy off at one point and told him to play some decent tracks. Well, i missed that, ’cause we decided that while this guy was arsing around, we’d catch some sleep.
We came back later on that morning, and zen was playing again, the majority of the crowd and headed for home, (whimps! 🙂 and of course only the die hards were left, but what a sound bunch of die hards! We had really good fun dancing around together. there were quite a lot of different nationalities, there seemed to be an oriental contingent, a crowd from England, a few Israeli’s, dutch people, (of course 🙂 and us! The Israeli dj I mentioned earlier took over from Zen, and he had really good fun behind the decks. He was well into his music and he was having a ball. Gave him a lift back to Sloterdijk afterwards as well, and he’s a really nice bloke. The whole party had to stop around 5.30 or 6 pm on sunday ’cause the wind got too much and the tent started to suffer something major. The weather was miserable, it pissed down most of sunday, and the wind was horrible all weekend, but we had a brill party anyway.
Maybe timo, Goose and Undertow can throw in some more comments. Matt & Remko, you missed a good one! Hope you’re jealous! But not as jealous as I’ll be when you go to Luna Landing in Bochum on wednesday…. why do they have such line ups mid-week! Obviously not aimed at us working class…. :o(
Wish i could fill you in more on the dj names, like, the names of those two 17 yr olds that blew the top off the tent….. maybe you know timo? They were wicked! like a junior version of Bansi and Riktam.
That’s it for now. ’till next time,
sssssssssssmiles,
=o)
marita
