Piknic Electronik wrapped up its season with an Igloofest branded send-off. A duo of yeti mascots wandered the grounds posing for photos and dishing out high-fives to festivalgoers, while artificial snow cannons dusted the front of the crowd & bars dished out hot drinks.
With no secondary stage this time, all the action went down at the FIZZ (main) stage, where British producer and DJ Eli Brown (the house alias of Gavin Harris) was headlining. Some lucky partygoers were even allowed on stage behind him. Despite the cool, crisp autumn air, the crowd showed up to squeeze one last outdoor party out of the summer season.
Eli opened with tech house and a few acid blurbs, then immediately started dropping the flips: a take on Depeche Mode’s « Enjoy the Silence » and a remix of TikTok’s favorite gabber track, « The First Rebirth » by Jones & Stephenson. That set the tone for a night that leaned more commercial than what I’m used to, with plenty of tracks I’ve mostly seen on social media rather than heard in real life.
My main issue was the pacing. The set was a constant onslaught of buildups that ended in disappointing drops, as if he were trying to cram as many clip-worthy moments as possible into two hours. That’s a broader issue in dance music right now. The quick-shifting nature of it left none of the songs or transitions room to breathe. Between Da Hool’s « Meet Her at the Love Parade » and a lot of generic EDM filler with the occasional hit sprinkled in, the rapid-fire flips of familiar songs made the whole thing feel a bit scattered.
The energy climbed noticeably around the one-hour mark. A DnB interlude, a nod to his past as Xample, one half of the drum and bass duo Loadstar, drew applause from the crowd, but he killed the momentum by dropping the BPM right after.
The remixes kept coming. Zombie Nation’s « Kernkraft 400 » had the crowd singing along, while A$AP Ferg’s « Work » got jazzed up with gabber kicks, and « Revolution » by BK got a distasteful vocal blend. Throughout, he struggled to capitalize on the dancefloor energy he had built.
He did land the finale, closing on trance with Faithless’s « Insomnia. »
All in all, it was a good night, but I left feeling a tiny bit cheated by the programming for the last Sunday party of the year. In my humble opinion, it was an underwhelming close compared to previous seasons.
