OMG…….OMG…….OGM
Gary D
Technoboy
DJ Issac
Danelle Mondello
SuperMarco May
DJ Zenith
Beholder & Bellastic
How them DJs grap ya folks??? Well on Saturday 8th I went to HARDBASS in The Hague, Netherlands…. Myself and James were in Amsterdam for the weekend and did our usual flyer hunt for parties – picked up the HardBass flyer, saw the line up and thought, how the feck we gonna get to The Hague, where is The Hague?? That was Friday night, so we had time to ponder the situation…
We asked our friendly coffee shop chap where the Hague was – he said about an hour away by train – yea, nice we thought can there by train! Party on J
We spent most of Saturday day time toking and then hit the record shops in the afternoon – I got me some fierce new tunes – I had a good chat with the record geez in Groove Connection, he was DJ Dany D (I think…) and we had seen him play on our previous trip out there.. He was cool, preferred more uplifting hard trance (TG mix of Definitely he said was one of his favs..).
So Saturday night comes round, 9pm we heard off to get the train, 10pm we are in the Hague, nicely pissed and stoned… the area around the train station was full of party people, so joined the group, jumped on a bus for a mad 10 minute journey on a full bladder across some dumb ass cobbled roads!
At the venue, there was about 10-15 security doing there usual searches – we had sussed from the coffee shop bloke in the Two Twenty Two (DanceValley-HQ official shop) that it was cool to take herb in to such parties – sure enough I had my herb in my hand and the security bloke thought nothing of it J
Into the Venue…
HUGE
HUGE
HUGE
HUGE
The venue was huge – think of the Sanctuary long ways – add two and half lengths and the about four widths – probably bigger then that still….
And the sound system… WOW….
WOW
WOW
Bass, bass, bass and some more bass… standing roughly 50 metres away, the system was kicking the same as how I like to hear the MiSSiON system kicking standing at 10 metres… WOW! Nose and tops of the ear were all vibrating but yet you could hear the treb and the mid crystal clear from the 8 bin towers that were hanging down above the whole stage area – which rotated 360, that was sweet as… so all around the venue, the DJ could see out and everyone could see the DJ!!
DJ wise, they were all amazing – all of my fav tunes were played, pretty much every latest thing on germantrance.com was played and heard some wicked new ones..
Technoboy was banging, mixing was tight and worked the crowd well..
DJ Issac was hard hard hard man – I’ve heard of DJ Issac but had him down as a cheesey fellow – how mistaken was I!?? I ended up getting “On the Edge” before we went home.
Beholder and Ballistic were a good back to back set, they seemed to be well liked by the crowd and they played their new track “HardBass” , which funnily enough is the nights new anthem tune…very good it was too! They chucked a couple of vinyls out into the crowd – sadly I didn’t get one L
We only caught a quick bit of DJ Zenith – he was playing in the second room which didn’t have a particularly good system (compared with the other one) so it kinda sounded shit and tinny and hurt the ears after a while – what we did hear though was hard dirty screeching hardstyle!!! Yea….!
Danelle Mondello (hope I spelt that right) was the ****ing tits! The dood was scratching over +8 pitched hardstyle, doing double speed scratching…so tight, it sounded like part of the tune… damn he was good and played some hard ass big bass line monsters.
SuperMarco May was last… can only compare his stage presence with that of Mark EG, a true nutter!! OK, I didn’t see him smash up the decks, but he was jumping and moshing and conducting the crowing about.. They loved it, and the tunes he played were soo aharhahrahhrahrh!!!!! Hardest set of the night.
The journey home was a piece of piss and once again, English public transport is made to look even shitter then it is… Back to the hotel room by about 6am, hooted some bongs and went to sleep very content and dreaming of one day promoting such size and type of events myself.
BUT
This was one thing I couldn’t quite figure out;
We consider hard trance/hardstyle to be underground…yes? Do the Dutch/German/Italians consider what their playing to be underground or do they view it as the same as say our Ministry of Sound/Cream/God’s Kitchen ..? Could/Should the scenes even be compared?
The maddest thing I found was that everyone I spoke to said this was generally a small party – the kinda thing they go to every week… lucky sods!
Chaz.