Bloc Festival 2008: a line up to die for

Bloc Festival 2008: a line up to die for

24 March, 2008 | 2.20PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Beatport Blog
• Written by: Beatport Ronny

When I first heard about the Bloc festival line up for this year, I simply couldn’t believe it.

The listing of artists just seemed to good to be true.

Such an excellent balance of classic and current artists of all kinds of advanced electronic music is something I have never seen before in my personal 15 years of electronic dance music history.

As a representative for Beatport, I simply had no choice but to initiate a collaboration with a festival of this kind.

The passion, love and experience needed to come up with artists like this fit 100% with our approach at Beatport.

I was more than happy to see the interest from the festival to work with us, and thanks to our European marketing manager and our UK label management team, the collaboration finally came to life.

Even though it seems almost unfair to pick out only a few artists, I would like to mention a few of the live shows at the Bloc festival that I was able to see which stood out for me personally.

Amon Tobin (for me the Future Sound Of London of the new century) played another one of his amazing performances in 5.1 sound.

Boring to watch — but mind-blowing to hear.

Lory D [main image], owner of probably the first ever Italian experimental techno label from the early 1990s, Sounds Never Seen, destroyed the main floor with a fantastic pulsing techno live set and seemed to enjoy the feedback from the audience.

Bochum Welt, another Italian with wonderful releases on Rephlex Records and a brand new album coming soon, unfortunately had a few technical problems and a computer freeze due to some voltage issues.

Nevertheless, his performance contained all the goods people wanted to hear.

From melodic IDM to synth pop and smashin’ acid tunes, Gianluigi took us on a ride through the worlds of Bochum Welt.

Christ., original founding member of Boards Of Canada, played a fantastic afternoon show with incredibly touching tunes.

Towards the end, when the first notes of ‘Perlandine Friday’ came to my ears, I had goosebumps all over!

One of my absolute highlights of the festival was definitely the live show from Monolake.

Robert Henke has always been one of my favourite techno producers and his set was another one of this memorable moments.

The way he builds and layers elements and places sounds in space is just outstanding.

The crowd went nuts, and so did I.

D’arcangelo, the third Italian project at Bloc and also part of the Rephlex family, moved every human, sub-human and alien at the Tecbloc to dance.

Their show was brilliant and again, there was a goosebump alarm when ‘Fate In Us’ began, a wonderful electro pop tune from the ‘Shipwreck’ album that appeared with its driving bass sequence.

The originator of bass, Mick Harris [right image], played one of his rare Scorn sets of absolutely destructive bass power.

Mick has been a huge influence on countless artists from Modeselektor, Surgeon and Regis, and created a blueprint for dark drum & bass and dubstep dating back to the early 1990s.

Check out his new album ‘Stealth’ on Ohm Resistance and you’ll hear what I’m talking about.

In typical Scorn style, his bass sound nearly evoked an earthquake.

Radioactive Man, one half of Two Lone Swordsmen, played an excellent electro/techno set on the main floor.

Milanese, who’s just recently moved to Berlin like so many others, combined almost every kind of electronic music from breakcore, hip-hop and pop into a total mash-up set, which was very energetic and more than enjoyable.

As you can see, the amount of superlatives used to describe artist performances here is as extraordinary as the festival line up itself.

I could go on forever and mention other artists, but I think you’ve got the idea.

As soon as Bloc 2009 starts the pre-sale, make sure to reserve your ticket.

This is a festival that anyone who likes electronic music should attend.

See you in Hemsby 2009!

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• Check out Lory D on Beatport