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Sorry it took me so long to write this review, but after a 3-day festival of this caliber, it takes a while for the dust to settle.
Day 1
We arrived on Saturday during the mid-afternoon at the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Detroit. We decided to stock up on supplies (beer, snacks, etc) before we got to the festival. After picking up beer in a very sketchy area of downtown, where the variety store cashier was surrounded by bulletproof glass, we went back to the hotel room to start drinking.
Once we had an adequate level of drinking done, we decided to make our way to the festival at around 7pm. The lines moved very quickly and they seemed to be quite organized. Once we finally got in, we made our way to the Beatport Stage. The Beatport Stage was a lot bigger than I thought it would be, and was in a very good location. Not only did they have a fairly large tent, but they also had speakers behind it, pointing away from it, toward a large grassy field that overlooked the water. This allowed for much more people to be accommodated, and created a nice venue to sit down and relax while listening to the stage that in my opinion housed the best DJs of the weekend.
We arrived at the Beatport tent to the sounds of Guido Schnieder. I had heard a few sets from this individual prior to DEMF, and I was excited to see him. He surpassed my expectations. Everyone from Toronto seemed to be enjoying his set, as we were really some of the only people in the tent dancing at this time.
At around 8pm I decided to check out Kerri Chandler. Kerri is a DJ that I’ve always loved and I’ve always wanted to see. I tried listening to him for about 20-30 minutes or so but the deep house just wasn’t doing it for me. I made my way back to the Beatport tent for Claude von Stroke who wasn’t really impressing me either, so we decided to go back to our hotel to drink some more cheap American booze.
We made our way back for Marco Carola at around 10pm. It had been a couple of years since I had seen Marco last, and while he impressed me the last time I saw him, it was nothing compared to his performance this time around. Marco hammered it out with a great mixture of minimal and banging techno, and the crowd ate it right up. The vibe in the Beatport tent when we left at 8pm to when we returned at 10pm was night and day. We had our own little section at the left of the tent where we ripped it up for the duration of Marco’s set. Once his set was done, I was completely shocked at how crazy the first night had been, and was unable to comprehend how it could get any better. Little did I know…
We all decided (except for the rock star named Sarah) that it would be a good idea to take it easy on Saturday night to give us energy for the rest of the festival.
Day 2
After about 9 hours of much needed sleep, we woke up and decided to hit up the famous iHOP for breakfast. The extremely greasy, mildly disappointing food was a small price to pay for the entertainment that we experienced during this little excursion. Between Detroit slang that I thought only existed in movies, a charming waiter named Red who memorized our entire order (complete with a few changes) without writing anything down, to Red proclaiming to his boss that he needed to take the next day off because he was going to “get sloppy drunk” for his birthday, the trip to iHOP was well worth it.
After breakfast, we decided to make our way to a grocery store down the street instead of the variety store in the ghetto to buy supplies. After we stocked up, we called a cab TWICE, and proceeded to wait 40 minutes before we finally found one on the street that we hailed. Apparently getting a cab in Detroit is not fun.
After some more pre-drinking at our hotel, I made my way down to the festival by myself because I didn’t want to miss Heidi in the Beatport tent. I caught the latter half of her set, and while she was pretty good, she was no where near as impressive as she was when I saw her at the Armada Night in The Gallery. She played some fun electro-y tech house until Mistress Barbara hit the decks. I gave Mistress Barbara about 20 minutes to impress me, and like any other time I’ve seen her, she just didn’t do anything for me, so I decided to check out Gui Borrato the Waterfront Stage.
Gui played a good set, but got to be a bit much for me at certain times with the effects. It was fun to hear him spin his own productions, but his set was nothing really to write home about. Michael Mayer hit the decks after him and played a very impressive set. In my opinion, Michael Mayer played the best set of the day.
The Waterfront stage was easily my favourite venue of the festival. It over looked the water, had a cool lighting system, and had raised areas where you could watch the crowd and the water. I wish there was more music that I liked going on at this stage during the festival.
We decided to leave the festival a little early because we had heard that the M_NUS afterparty was sold out, and that they weren’t selling any tickets at the door. Even though barely anyone in our group had tickets, we decided to leave early and risk it anyway since we thought that an absence of tickets at the door was highly unlikely. How wrong we were. We arrived to an absolute “no tickets at the door”, and someone telling us that he tried to bribe a bouncer $150 to get in to no avail. Josh and I decided to go in, while everyone else went to Bleu.
Troy Pierce was on the decks when we got inside. Troy’s sets have been in heavy rotation on my computer in the last little while, so he was one of the DJs I was anticipating the most. He played exactly like I expected him to – slower paced minimal techno and eerie tech house that suited the dark warehouse that was MoCAD very nicely. Troy played one of the best sets of the weekend for me, but unfortunately there was not more than 50 people there for the duration of his set since everyone was probably still at the festival. Ambivalent played a pretty decent set, so did Magda, and JPLS just plain sucked. During every DJ’s set right up until Richie, the vibe was non-existent, and everyone was just standing around in what seemed to be anticipation for Richie, who hit the decks 30 minutes late. This was pretty disappointing and made it hard to stay considering I was tired from 2 days of partying at the festival. Richie’s set was only an hour long, and it was very up and down. There were certain good parts, but other parts where it was just too abstract and experimental.
All in all, the party was ok, but considering how much hype surrounded it, I was pretty disappointed. There was basically no vibe, the place was only busy for a couple of hours, and Richie only played for 1 hour. Other people that I talked to said it was the same kind of BS last year. I don’t think I’d ever attend the M_NUS afterparty again.
Day 3
We decided not to waste much time getting to the festival because it was on this day that the biggest names were playing.
When we arrived at the festival, I was headed straight for the Beatport stage when I was stopped dead in my tracks from the sounds coming from the Main stage. Vladislav Delay was playing what I can only describe as disordered ambient minimal that walked the line between music and random sounds. There was very little apparent pattern in the “music” that he was playing. When you hear someone describing music in this way, it’s usually negative, but what Vladislav was playing was very captivating. I sat down on one of the steps of the main stage for about 30 minutes and went on a journey through the warped soundscapes I was hearing.
I decided that it was time to check out Locodice since I had never seen him before. I got to the Beatport stage and immediately started rocking out to some unexpected darker more “polluted” sounding minimal. I immediately thought to myself, “This doesn’t sound like Locodice at all!” Sure enough, it was actually Gaiser on the decks. I got excited at this point because I thought I had missed his set, and from what I read from last year, Gaiser was one of the stars of the festival. This year was no different. In fact, I would say that this was my favourite set of the festival. Some of the sounds that I was hearing in the tracks Gaiser played made my eyes bulge out of my head in astonishment. He played a very well put together set that got the Beatport tent rocking early in the day. It was too bad his set was only an hour long.
After Gaiser, Locodice hit the decks, and played a standard tech house set. It was fun, and I enjoyed it, but this is just a testament to the housier direction he has been taking recently – a direction away from the sound that got me interested in him in the first place.
Once Locodice had completed his set, I parked myself right in front of the DJ booth for the DJ I had been anticipating the most: Luciano. His dirt bag techno DJ appearance is what made me appreciate him even before he played his first record: scraggly, long hair, unshaven face, and dirty moustache. 5 points for appearance right off the bat. Although at this point I can’t remember exactly what his intro was, I remember that I really enjoyed it. It looked like Luciano was pretty surprised with the crowd response he got, so he must have decided to pull out all the stops for this set. As Chris mentioned, he didn’t really play true to his DC-10 style. However, I wouldn’t call his set downtempo at all. He played a proper upbeat techno set that the crowd in the Beatport tent ate right up. He played quite a few tracks with saxophones, trumpets, and other band instruments in it. There was one song that had a very uplifting saxophone solo that I would expect to hear in a Chicago house track instead of a techno track. Luciano didn’t let me down at all, playing one of the more unique sets of the weekend.
It was now the moment everyone had been waiting for: Richie Hawtin. The tent got sooooo unbelievably packed at this point. Being anywhere near the middle of the tent meant that you were right on top of everyone else. The difference here though was that no one was really walking around the tent at all – everyone was just fixated on Richie. This made for being in the busier parts of the tent a lot more bearable. That said, it only took about 10 minutes for me to reach my threshold of annoyance so I relocated to our spot at the left of the tent.
After Richie’s somewhat disappointing performance the night before, I was really hoping that Richie would play a set that would showcase exactly why everyone talks about his DEMF performances… and boy did he ever do just that. For the next 2 hours, he put on a performance that I have been getting serious goose bumps and surges of euphoria when recounting the experience to the people who did not attend the festival. Right from track 1, Richie played a banging, mind bending techno set, sprinkled with minimal, crafted together with Richie’s trademark effects and sounds. Save for about 2 or 3 tracks, I was literally jumping up and down, screaming at the top of my lungs for every song in the set. The set had about 4 or 5 of those absolute maximum my-head-is-going-to-explode-if-this-gets-any-better moments. For a 2 hour set, that is pretty damn good. To make it even better, Detroit absolutely loves Richie, so I could tell almost everyone in the tent was on the same level as me. The vibe in that tent was on a level that I have not often witnessed.
I couldn’t comprehend at this point how the main event of the festival was still yet to come. I was pretty skeptical that Jeff Mills would be able to top Richie’s performance. It turned out that he didn’t even come close. Having Mills close the festival was a pretty bad idea. I wouldn’t have mind seeing him at another point during the weekend, but as the closer? The guy’s songs had pretty much no builds at all, his beat matching was horribly off, and the sound was awful. There are many that believe on Detroit clubbing message boards that the mixing and the sound problems were actually done on purpose by Mills so that no one would record his set. This is such BS. If you want to destroy everyone’s experience at the end of the festival just to destroy any possibility of someone recording your set, then don’t fucking play!
Although the closing set was anti-climatic, the festival was an overall very good experience. Before going, my main purpose for going was because of the music, and I didn’t really care about much else. In the end, the music was definitely one of the best parts of the festival, but it ended up being so much more than that. Techno lover or not, I recommend this festival to anyone and everyone. If you go with the right people, it is a guaranteed good time. I haven’t heard anything but positive reviews from everyone that I went with.
The Good:
Top sets of the festival:
1.Gaiser
2.Richie Hawtin
3.Troy Pierce
4.Luciano
5.Marco Carola
Highlight of the festival: Richie Hawtin’s set
Best stage: Waterfront Stage
-The food (surprisingly good)
-The crowd on Monday
The Bad
-Beer prices (~$8.66 USD/beer!)
-The crowd on Saturday and Sunday
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lol.
