Timewarp festival in Mannheim, Germany

Saturday 6th April 2013

As a fervent listener to techno music (to not mistaken with what the American call any electronic dance music genre), Timewarp festival is the holy grail festival of this pounding genre.

La creme de la creme djs play in this huge market hall temporarily transformed into a techno heaven.

Having already been to a dance festival in Germany, I knew the organizers would not disappoint. 

The country simply provide the best sound system, light effect and organization when it comes to hosting a music event.

With a capacity of 15 000 techno vikings, you would think there would be an endless queue to get in, horrendous toilets, frustrating bars waiting and mountains of litter...well, if this was in the United Kingdom, that would have been the case...however, the Germans are simply efficient to their tasks.

We did not queue longer than 10/15 minutes, the toilet was never an issue and in fact clean even towards the end of the event, and if you pick the right bar, you would just not queue.

Also, the Germans have a "recycling system", which means they give you a voucher when buying your drinks and..if you return your glass/bottle with the voucher, you will get some money back. A very clever way to encourage people not to litter the dancefloors (take note UK festivals!).

As for the atmosphere, people across the globe travel for this event, of course most of the crowd are European and you can easily spot the Italians... Considering the amount of beer flowing in Mannheim, it is surprisingly well behaved. Again, if this would have been in the United Kingdom, there would have been undoubtedly several fights.

So overall a no drama, good nature and fun night out with top quality music.

Simply imagine the best and longest running techno djs playing hours (not just a naff hour set) of finest techno and house and you will see what I mean.

 we are ready to party!

The night officially started when my friend Alex and I went to stage 1 for Carl Cox. Imagine a room bigger than a football pitch of incredible light effect, with thousand of people stomping to Carl's beats. Needless to say that he simply was phenomenal.

stage 4 playing deep house

Carl Cox

Following him was Sven Vath in stage 2 (slightly smaller than stage 1). Now the few times I have seen Sven, although good, his sets were always kind of mellow. Not in Mannheim. In Mannheim, he revealed his darker and dirtier sound and my friends and I simply could not get enough of him!

Unfortunately, after hours of playing superbly, he sort of slipped and lost it (forgiven as it was his last half hour of his long set) so my friend Andy whisked us to another stage, stage 5 he said, "it is time for you to go there". We were rather intrigued...

 Dark vathor

 Clowns reunited

As we finally arrived in stage 5, not only we discovered the stage was in fact a glass sphere which allowed the sun rising and shining through it, but Laurent Garnier was on the decks playing an incredible set mixed of tech house and electro. To be honest, I am still not entirely sure what was the exact genres he was playing, but despite our tiredness, we were stomping as hard as we could with the biggest grins on our faces. The french veteran was doing a 5h set in this magic sphere, and no doubt he could have played even longer.

Alas, we had to leave as we wanted to catch a glimpse of Richie Hawtin.

Laurent Garnier playing the magic sphere as the sun rises

So there we were, back to stage 2, it was now 7.30am and we were rather tired, as most of us (me including) were pretty much sober. We thoroughly enjoyed the first 45 minutes but past 8am, we decided to call a day as our bodies started giving up on us, and we had a long road to hit back to Koln.

Good bye Mannheim!

We got back to the hotel in early afternoon, had a swim, sauna and well deserved sleep before having a lovely dinner.

I could simply not recommend this event enough, everything from start to finish was fantastic and we all flew back to London with a smile on our faces.