Be a Salmon.
a Time Warp Review
One of the positive side effects that low cost flights brought to Europe is certainly the exponential growth of electronic music festivals. Some of these events has grown from some thousands to some hundred thousands attendees in just few years, evolving a scene which is present since already more than twenty years: the rave.
Attending a rave party requires more preparation than what you think, both physically and mentally but also logistically. Veterans like me will remember those past experiences, when a mistake revealed itself as a useful lesson for the next times. Everything requires a certain level of planning, from the check in/check out time to the proper outfit to wear, from what to eat before the event to what to drink and ingest during the event. I don’t pretend to teach you how to become a “perfect raver” with this article, I’m just sharing a recent experience, from someone that can easily be the one dancing next to you, offering “contaminated” water on the dancefloor.
I had the pleasure to live one of these mystical experiences just few weekends ago, attending Time Warp 2017 in Mannheim, Germany. What is Time Warp? Just the biggest techno festival you will find in Europe. There are certainly others even bigger, but you will hardly find another event with such a lineup of great techno artists. Why attending? Quoting the CEO of Atari back in the days: “Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” I’m just a victim of this messed up and fast-paced society. Plus, I just bought a new car so I wanted to test it on German’s freeways, opening the gas to 230km/h.
With an early arrival in the center of Europe on Saturday morning, after a rich meal of sauerkraut and sausages, a bucketful of beer and a postmeridian nap, me and my raving partner decided to face the promised 19 hours of festival (of which we could attend just 12 because me, hereinafter called “the dickhead”, reserved an updating course in management right for the Monday after, starting 9am, without even thinking I would have been away for the weekend).
Some tips for the newbies:
- Wear comfy shoes, comfy pants and comfy tees. Don’t bring too much at the venue, even though lockers are always present in these major events. Lockers are useful areas for many reasons, can be used as meeting points for large groups or even chill out lounges to cool-down between one dj set and another;
- Bring enough cash with you. Usually large events take cards too, but if not you don’t want to go crazy looking for an ATM in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere;
- Don’t bring stuff with you, the risk to getting caught is high, plus you will surely find someone inside that is there for the specific reason of providing whatever you are looking for; less time lost in police searching at the entrance gates, more adventure in building new friendship during the event;
- Choose the right raving partner, it is possibly the most important thing. Find someone which has your same likes and preferences, someone not too edgy, that doesn’t make you run back and forth all night, someone that can stay at your pace or someone you like to follow. I prefer groups of three: few essential people, you can stay together or do your own, without worrying the others get lost alone;
- Don’t go full-on right from the first hours, 15+ hours of event are challenging to keep up if you want to enjoy all of them from beginning to the end;
- Drink a shit-load of water.
That being said, let’s move to the event. Held in Mannheim fairgrounds, it is quietly accessible with public transportations and cars. In order to avoid drunk-driving violations, we opted to share a cab from the hotel with another couple of guys. Dropped right in front of the entrance, we greet the guys and we approach the gates. Although the entry point was a bit too unmanaged, with just 4 gates and a mass of squeezed people merging like a funnel towards them, it took no more than 15 minutes to pass the security. We went straight to purchase token for drinks, raided the merchandising stand, pushed everything in the lockers, then our adventure moved to the next phase: stages discovery.
The two main rooms were one next to the other, both very long and narrow, with minimal decorations but heavy lights scenography and massive sound systems. The entrance to these floors was oddly controlled by security and metal railings. I was picturing already in my head the crowd of people squeezed to get in, later that same night. My raving partner gave me a pearl of wisdom right there: “Be a salmon. Everyone is going down with the stream? We go upstream!” That was the best tip in the whole weekend. Anyway, as it wasn’t too crowded yet, we went in for a drink. Chris Liebing and Rødhåd playing, stage 1 and 2 respectively. Not to take anything away from the good ol’ Chris, but the Berlin based guy on stage 2 was dropping heavy bombs that captured us. Got the drinks, we then got lost in music and in anthropological research.
Official report says the event was sold out with 20,000 people. Saying that an event went sold out is more a political and economic choice rather than a proved fact, but looking at the size of all the stages and counting the never-ending human traffic that we faced basically all night, we can say the report is fairly honest. Age range was very wide, which is a pleasure for veterans like me. It helps to avoid the statement “I’m too old for this.” Fashion-wise, we weren’t too much impressed. We were expecting way more colorful and bizzarre dress ups, but a monotony of jeans with lapels and H&M t-shirts killed our buzz with a “meh, whatever. We’re cooler.”
Growing hot from sweat vapors, we left the main stages and adventured in the minor stages. Stage 3 was dedicated to huge names like Villalobos, Loco Dice, Luciano or Hawtin, so we preferred not to get involved in there as we heard them already many times and were not in our streams at the moment. We went more “underground” visiting Stage 4, which offered a way lower sound system in terms of volume, but a great performance from The Martinez Brothers kept us there dancing our asses off. A less greater performance from countrymen Tales of Us, maybe due to the poor sound system, made us move to the next room.
Facing an insane mass of people trying to get in Stage 5 to attend Monika Kruse performance, our motto came up: be a salmon. Therefore we headed towards Stage 6 in which we were greeted by an amazing Nick Curly on the decks. In this room we had a great encounter with a countryman from Naples, migrated in Germany some years ago. After an initial approach praising our style, attracted from an unquestionable southern-european party animal savoir-faire, he debuted with a sentence like “are you operative guys?” that made us realize the following nine hours would have been confused and emotionally altered for us. Who are we to avoid this from happening? No one. So, once operative, we threw ourselves in the techno jungle again.
Passing in front of the main stages, I realized my fears were right, as three hundred people were trying to squeeze one by one between a 40cm entrance. That convinced us even more to keep acting like salmons, so we headed to Stage 5 to listen Karotte playing. Hands down, the best set of all night. I couldn’t leave the floor until he was done. He made all the 1200 km drove in two days, worth.
From then on, confusion. I vaguely remember lots of vodka lemon, watching the sunrise from the locker room in a chill out moment, meeting some other friendly foreign party people, some inopportune phone calls in the early morning, trying to make some friends jealous of not being there, and a supreme Adam Beyer playing on Stage 1, when we decided to leave and get back to rest.
Was I repented to leave earlier than the closing? Yes but not. I definitely heard what I was there for, but surely next year I’ll take Monday off.
