Mauro Picotto at the MTV Valkana Beach Festival 2004.

[Note: The following is a first-hand account of the Valkana Beach Festival by someone who doesn’t read this blog, but was still kind enough to write a post for it. Thanks, La Flaca.]

MTV Valkana beach is an electronic music festival. This year was the 8th one. The founder of Valkana beach is Marc Grabber, a well-known Croatian DJ and producer. Previous festivals were held in the town of Rovinj, Croatia, or to be more specific, in the Monvi amusement center. This year they moved it to Rijeka (Avtomotodrom Grobnik). They had to move because the previous location had become too small.

The festival had three areas. The biggest was the main MTV arena for trance and progressive, which was open air. (See a video.) Then there was a tronic treatment tent for techno music (video) and a house all-star tent for house music. Among the 46 DJs and live performers there were some big names like Paul van Dyk, Mauro Picotto, Todd Terry, Felix Da Housecat, Sonique, Richie Hawtin, etc…

These are the reasons why I went:

1. I’ve never been to such a big festival
2. I got a free pass
3. I really wanted to see some of the DJs
4. I had time and a friend to go with
5. I got a free pass

The DJs I was looking forward to seeing were:

1. Mauro Picotto!!!
2. Richie Hawtin
3. Felix Da Housecat
4. Todd Terry
5. Paul Van Dyk

The list could go on, but these were the main ones.

The gates opened at 6 o’clock, we arrived around 7.30 and there weren’t a lot of people. The big crowd only came after midnight. We spent most of the time at the techno tent and when we wanted to cool down we went to to the open-air stage, sat down, and listened to some “down-tempo” progressive sounds. Roughly all the DJs on the MTV stage were pretty good — the music was different and very nice to listen to. The main difference between the DJs on stage had to do with their technical skills.

At around 9 o’clock, we went to the techno tent and saw Pero-Fullhouse (Split, CRO) whom I knew before and who did a very nice warm up. The first person to surprise me was the Italian Andrea Leme. He played hard-banging techno and got the whole crowd jumping and screaming. After him we moved to the open air again to cool down. Then we went to the house tent and saw Martelli from Ljubljana who was a DJ and also a conga player and it was interesting to see how he jumped from the decks to the congas to play alittle and then back to the decks to play the next record. It was nice but after a while it became a bit boring and we went back to the techno tent.

All smiles: Alen Sforzina, the Wizard of Fez.

At around 11.30 there was Alen Sforzina aka The Wizard Of Fez from Graz (AUS), and he had a live performance. It was very nice and all the time he had this big smile on his face and was interacting with the crowd a lot. There are a lot of DJs who don’t do that at all — they just look down at their decks and play music.

Around 1 a.m., there was Phil Kieran at the techno tent. He’s a 25-year-old Irish DJ and producer who was very good. He played nice groovy techno that I will definitely remember. At 1.30 it was time for the first superstar: Paul van Dyk. He’s a trance DJ and producer from Germany, who is the second best DJ in the world, according to DJmag. We watched him for about an hour and he was good. (Video #1, #2) He played mainly trance and barely interacted with the crowd although the crowd was euphoric from the moment they saw him on stage. For me, he’s nice as a producer, but the music he plays isn’t my thing. I think there are several better trance DJs, like Armin van Buuren and Tiesto.

After that we went to the House tent to see Todd Terry, a house legend from New York. From far away we saw a black person who was strangely dressed but playing very good music. Afterwards we found out that Todd Terry wasn’t playing at all because he wasn’t satisfied with the equipment. It turns out we were seeing Paulette from London, one of the rare DJanes (female DJs) on the festival. That explained the strange clothes.

DJ Paulette

We were a litle bit tired amd decided to go back to the car to eat something and have a little rest but we passed the techno tent and saw Richie Hawtin, aka Plastikman, a techno legend from canada who invented Final Scratch: a hardware/software device that lets you play mp3s or any other music file from the computer with a standard turntable. He was awesome! He played on two or three turntables and he also had two laptops — one with the Final Scratch System and the other to make his own music and play and mix it with other records. He never moved his eyes away from the computer or the decks as he was so fully concentrated on his performance.

We finally went to the car to have a rest. I had a nap for about half an hour and then returned to the festival alone, just to see my man: Mauro Picotto. And I didn’t regret it at all. (Here’s a video of Picotto in action.) I realized that he was absolutely the main reason I came, because he was absolutely awesome. He has a very unique style. He can play absolutely hard techno and then go over to soft trance melodies and than proceed with progressive sounds and go back to techno. I also like his production very much.

The main stage the next morning.

That was the end of my trip to Valkana Beach. It was around 7 in the morning when we went to sleep, although I heard later on that the party continued till 10. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stand on my feet any longer.