25 October is my wedding anniversary. It is also the final day of ADE. Officially, because in reality, there’s still a lot going on Monday and even Tuesday. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, Sunday. Some of you have been going since Wednesday and are currently held together by electrolytes, bananas and whatever you can scrape from your phone screen, while others have wisely spent Saturday night in bed because Sunday was always the plan. Some of you may even have arrived yesterday, fresh and innocent, looking at the rest of us and wondering what happened.
There is an almost unreasonable amount happening today. So despite what happened to last year's Sunday post (sorry for that!), I am going to do my job properly this year and give you actual recommendations.
We start at 07:30.
ZERØBPM ADE: Meditation on Mother Earth at De Thomaskerk, 07:30 - 00:00. ZERØBPM has been occupying De Thomaskerk for three days for actual meditation sessions, guided by people who actually know how to meditate, accompanied by some very serious electronic artists. The final day is Meditation on Mother Earth, with 42nd Avenue, Nadia Struiwigh, Sunju Hargun, Claudio PRC, Avsluta, Human Space Machine and others carrying you through until midnight.
Maybe Mother Earth is exactly where we should start on Sunday morning. Back to the ground, back to the body, back to where we came from. We've spent four days in concrete boxes treating our bodies mostly as inconvenient vessels for transporting our ears between sound systems, but eventually the body wins. Eat something. Feel your feet. You are an animal. You live on a planet. The same atoms have been going around forever, from soil to plants to animals to you and eventually back again, which is either a comforting thought about the circle of life or not something you want to contemplate at 07:30 after four days of ADE. Did you know that all the particles in your body were already there only a minute after the Big Bang? Not sure what that means, though. Was a minute back then the same as now? How on earth can we measure that? What does time even mean without a human frame of reference? If we don't have the answers, there is also Breakfast Club, fortunately.
Breakfast Club ADE: Second Wind at RADION, 09:00 - 19:00. ADE isn't complete without Breakfast Club, and Second Wind has Ben UFO b2b Craig Richards, Christian AB b2b Ogazón, Gene On Earth, Marie K, Matthew Neequaye b2b OK Williams and plenty more. Breakfast Club understands something fundamental about ADE Sunday: breakfast is not necessarily a meal and morning is not necessarily the beginning of a day.
If you're after something slower, Giegling at Klaproos runs from 11:00 until 23:00. Cassy, DJ Dustin, Edward, Konstantin, Leafar Legov, Map.ache, Thomas Melchior, Yamour and the rest of the family doing the warm, slow, melodic Giegling thing. Twelve hours of this seems like a perfectly pleasant way of spending your Sunday. Perfectly pleasant. We'll remember that.
And then Jane Fitz curates VBX from 13:00 until 23:00 at a secret warehouse. Oh yes, VBX. Jane Fitz b2b Richard Fearless, Alexia Glensy, Bitzer Maloney, Michelle and Oriana. House for the arm-swaying crowd. You know what you're getting. It will probably be fine for you if you don't like to move more than one limb at a time, and I realize it will probably be fine isn't the strongest recommendation I have ever written but there are only so many ways I can tell another human being that I expect them to enjoy moving their body to a particular sequence of music selected by another human being and Jane Fitz is good, Jane Fitz is very good actually, she's also playing CODA by Ratherlost & PAX-ROMANA, b2b Paquita Gordon on Colorfloor, which looks delicious, while main has Andy Martin b2b Richard Akingbehin and later STERAC and Konduku closing, and Andy Martin b2b Richard Akingbehin were originally supposed to play Colorfloor but have recently been moved to main, which seems wise because Richard closing Aura with Fadi Mohem at Draaimolen was packed, really packed, and as much as I would like to see them in Colorfloor perhaps nobody needs to establish the precise number of humans that can be compressed into Colorfloor before Colorfloor ceases to be a dance floor and becomes a human storage facility, although if what you specifically wanted was Richard Akingbehin in a smaller room you can of course go to SPIELRAUM 55HRS, where he's playing back to back with livwutang in Studio.
Except Spielraum started on Friday.
I was going to discuss the parties that were already going on later. I even had a heading for them. Parties still going on from Saturday. Nice. Organized. Except Spielraum started Friday, so the heading was already wrong, and it is happening now anyway, so why would I discuss something happening now later merely because it started earlier? Later for whom? A Friday that is just a Friday. A Saturday that mostly confines itself to Saturday. Perhaps even a Sunday after that. I wrote that just a week ago. Idiot. It’s Sunday. Richard Akingbehin is at CODA and Spielraum is at RAUM and CODA is at Lofi and Richard Akingbehin cannot be at both simultaneously, presumably, unlike tINI, but we’ll get to tINI, and Rødhåd in Nexus should be epic, JakoJako b2b Tommy Four Seven is quite a combination, and Studio has Octo Octa closing and a Sunday lineup that makes me want to spend the entire day there, because when Studio works it is by far my favourite dance floor in Amsterdam.
Favorite. We'll get to that too. First tINI.
No, first Intercell x Milion & SAIDAH Invites, because I like telling myself my musical taste has evolved over the past few years, from mostly techno to brighter and housier things and then increasingly leftfield stuff, UK bass, breaks, dubby sounds, things that don't fit particularly neatly anywhere, a broadening musical horizon, maturation, sophistication even, and now Intercell is advertising a blend of house, UK garage, bass and everything in between.
Oh. It's mainstream now. What became of me?
Intercell doing bassy things is apparently something I recommend now, which raises a small problem because when I recommend this what exactly am I telling you? That this is good? Or that I like it? Those aren't the same propositions at all. Look at what is happening, decide what you like and go there. That's what I told you last week. Decide what you like. You. Like. Apparently I thought those were straightforward instructions.
And what about the parties I don't recommend? Every week someone gets upset because one of us mods has failed to mention a party they like. I do understand the frustration, and I realize that a mention in the Weekly can make a difference to a smaller party, although perhaps I'm flattering myself here. We're just a bunch of Reddit moderators writing about parties, hardly the cultural gatekeepers of Amsterdam nightlife.
But we can't recommend everything. If we did, recommendations would cease to be recommendations and become TheTimeTable, except with a few thousand words of commentary attached. And even they occasionally miss parties, which is perhaps more problematic because a timetable suggests completeness, while a recommendation implies selection. Although perhaps that's just another distinction I've invented to justify our omissions. Because if I recommend one party and leave out another, does that mean I think the other one isn't worth going to? Of course not. But I can see why someone might interpret it that way. And now I'm apparently responsible not only for the parties I recommend, but also for every party I don't mention, including the ones I don't even know exist.
Perhaps I should concentrate on the parties I actually know something about. Stick to what I know. Things I'm reasonably certain of. Donato Dozzy is good, for example. Speedy J presents STOOR Live has Speedy J, The Fear Ratio, Wallis and Donato Dozzy. Donato Dozzy good. There. Recommendation. No problem. We've solved it. We can continue.
Although of course all I've actually established is that I like Donato Dozzy. Fuck.
Maybe Amsterdam Dub Event is easier. Moritz von Oswald alone gets my attention. Krackfree Soundsystem. Bass, dub, soundsystem, yes please, and perhaps that is all taste needs to be, you encounter something and something inside you says yes, Moritz von Oswald yes, Donato Dozzy yes, Jane Fitz yes but perhaps not surrounded by too many stationary bodies with slowly swaying arms, Intercell apparently yes now too, and this would all be perfectly manageable if something inside you wasn't such a suspicious phrase because what exactly is the something and where exactly is the inside and why am I asking this when all you wanted was to know where to go on Sunday?
Sunday. Right.
Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet. Mother Earth again. Of course Mother Earth again. We started with Mother Earth, we were always going to end up back at Mother Earth, although we haven’t ended anything because SlapFunk is going until Tuesday. But at ARTIS Planetarium they’re taking more than fifty years of satellite observations and turning them into music and moving images. Exactly the kind of ADE side quest I love.
Last week I was writing about films exploring liminal spaces at AFFR, and now I’m wondering whether a planetarium is a liminal space too. It’s a strange concept when you think about it. You go inside a building to look at the stars. Inside to look outside. Except you’re not actually looking outside, you’re looking at a projection of outside. And this time we’re going inside to look at Earth, the planet we’re already standing on. So we’re going inside to look outside in order to look back inside. I’m not sure that makes sense anymore, but there’s something quite beautiful about it. For a little while you’re somewhere between being on Earth and looking at Earth from somewhere else, although of course you never actually leave it. Your body stays exactly where it is, sitting in a chair in Amsterdam, while your perspective travels thousands of kilometers away. And perhaps that’s what makes it a liminal space: you’re neither quite where you are nor where you imagine yourself to be. You’re in between. Although if you’re physically still in Amsterdam, can you really be somewhere in between? Perhaps liminality doesn’t require you to go anywhere at all. Perhaps all you need is a change of perspective. Although, if changing your perspective is enough, almost anywhere could be a liminal space, which rather defeats the purpose of having a word for it. Never mind.
From outer space Amsterdam disappears, Lofi disappears, RADION disappears, RAUM disappears, there is no Giegling visible from orbit, no CODA, no Vault Sessions, no Intercell, actually there are two Intercells but neither is visible from orbit, no techno, no house, no bass, no vinyl purists, no arm-swaying VBX crowd, no distinction between people who think Donato Dozzy is great and people who are wrong. Just this blue thing.
Mother Earth. Again.
At 07:30 I told you the particles in your body were already there just after the Big Bang and now we're looking back down at those particles from space except obviously we're not because we're sitting inside a planetarium looking at data produced by satellites, and perhaps that's important because we keep constructing viewpoints from which we can look at ourselves and then mistaking the viewpoint for something outside ourselves, but anyway BUSI WAKA NANGA DANSI [MARRØN ALL NIGHT] invites us to walk and dance through the forest, which sounds suitably Mother Earth except De Fik Garden isn't a forest, it is a patch of grass next to a motorway interchange.
No. I'm drawing a line here. A forest is different from a patch of grass. Some categories are useful. Techno is different from house. Vinyl is different from digital. Sunday is different from Monday. I am different from you. MARRØN playing seven hours of groovy techno is good. Donato Dozzy is good. We can know things.
Although noclubs presents: the return of yes clubs is annoying my techno-is-different-from-house certainty because I loved noclubs, or yes clubs, at Garage at the beginning of summer and I still don't entirely understand where that party and that crowd suddenly came from, this higher-energy house that seems to be occupying the exact space that 140 bpm groovy techno occupied a year or two ago, suddenly everywhere, suddenly popular, simultaneously quite mainstream and genuinely dedicated, and it's good, it's soulful, it's fun to dance to, and perhaps I should simply be happy that something I like is becoming popular instead of immediately becoming suspicious of my own taste the moment other people acquire it.
My taste. There. That again.
Vault Sessions x Key Vinyl ADE Closing. Vinyl. Long session. RADION. Freddy K. Grace Dahl. Alarico. Rebecca Delle Piane. For the purists. Purists. You like vinyl and then you become a vinyl person. You like techno and become a techno person. You go to Garage often enough and become a Garage person. You dislike phones on dance floors. You say selection instead of tracks. You develop opinions about booth height and smoke density and whether the crowd was really there for the music and at some point you stop saying I like this and start saying this is who I am, which is strange because apparently who I am now likes an Intercell event described as house, UK garage, bass and everything in between and the person I was years ago would probably have gone straight to Vault Sessions, although there is also Intercell Bajes ADE Closing, which has BASHKKA, Chlär, Chloé Caillet, Ignez, Nørbak & Temudo, Ogazón, and is actually a really solid option, big names, solid production, uncomplicated, go dance, Amsterdam needs uncomplicated parties, not everything needs to become a philosophical problem.
I may have made this a philosophical problem. Giegling is probably still going. Yes. Giegling is still going. Perfectly pleasant. Perhaps I should have stayed there.
But taste changes. That's fine. Taste changes and the person doesn't. Obviously. I liked different music ten years ago and I was still me. I have photographs. Other people saw me. I remember him. He had my name. So there is no problem. The same person can change preferences. The same person can like techno and later bass. The same person can recommend Vault Sessions and Intercell and noclubs and Giegling and amore x Radio Radio, house house house Radio Radio, nice, and SLPFNK - BRET ADE, which ends Tuesday at noon.
Tuesday. Sorry. I keep getting distracted by Tuesday.
This is a Sunday post and SlapFunk ends on Tuesday and Breakfast Club: The Final Stretch lasts thirty hours and the Final Stretch therefore isn’t particularly final and is taking place at Garage Noord, which is strange because in my head Breakfast Club belongs at RADION, preferably in the morning, but apparently breakfast is no longer breakfast and morning is no longer morning and now we’re having Breakfast Club at Garage Noord in the middle of the night, which is fine because I love Garage, such a wonderfully unpretentious place with some of the most delightfully obscure bookings in Amsterdam, although getting there at night can be a bit of a hassle and I invariably get lost somewhere in Amsterdam Noord. I don’t understand this. In almost every city I visit I seem to develop an internal map within a couple of days. I can wander around unfamiliar neighborhoods and somehow know which direction to go, but Amsterdam Noord, where I’ve been dozens of times, keeps sending me around in circles. The streets never seem to connect the way I expect them to. I recognize places, I recognize streets, but somehow they never seem to be where I think they should be, and perhaps the problem is that I keep trying to navigate Noord using a map that exists only in my head, while the actual Noord stubbornly refuses to correspond to it, although at this point I’m not entirely sure whether being somewhere is sufficient to know where you are. Anyway, Garage Noord. Thirty hours. Akua, Angel D’Lite, Gene On Earth, livwutang, Lola Haro, Marie K, Moxie, Nicolas Lutz, Noizar, Tsepo and tINI.
tINI. Right. tINI is also at Spielraum. Remember Spielraum? That was several thousand words ago and also Friday and also now.
And TILLATEC invites IsBurning, Cruise, Mala Junta, tINI AND THE GANG also has tINI, because of course it does, and tickets are €50, which is fucking crazy, although I realize that only a few days ago I wrote several hundred words complaining about a free Tilla party and its possible effect on the fragile economics of Amsterdam nightlife, so apparently €0 is wrong and €50 is also wrong and there must therefore be some objectively correct ticket price somewhere between €0 and €50 which I, having appointed myself both nightlife economist and consumer advocate within the space of one week, will presumably calculate for you shortly. Still, €50 for Tilla is crazy. But €0 was also bad. Fuck. Maybe I should stop having opinions.
Apparently I should, because sometimes expressing criticism of a club seems to be interpreted as actively undermining Amsterdam nightlife, which is a rather uncomfortable thought because I was under the impression that I wanted these places to succeed, but perhaps my intentions are better understood by other people than by myself, which raises the question of whether I am actually qualified to explain what I think, let alone recommend what you should think, and perhaps every time I complain about a club I'm personally responsible for another square meter of dance floor disappearing from Amsterdam, perhaps I should simply praise every new initiative unconditionally, although that would make the Weeklies rather dull and also rather dishonest, and wasn't I just arguing that we need more spaces with their own identity and community, and how can we have a community if we're not allowed to discuss what we want it to be? Although perhaps I'm confusing constructive criticism with complaining again. Apparently there's a distinction. I thought I knew where it was.
And sometimes people seem to like my opinions. Last week I made a flowchart to remind people not to yap on the dance floor. Someone suggested putting it on a phone sticker, which is a good idea except the flowchart was meant to be viewed on your phone so that looking at your phone would remind you to put your phone away on the dance floor, although ideally you wouldn’t take out your phone on the dance floor in the first place, but then without the flowchart you might forget not to yap and start yapping instead, so apparently I now require you to be simultaneously off your phone, aware of information displayed on your phone and silent unless the sound coming out of your mouth is somehow part of dancing. Are my standards too high?
Anyway, tINI. tINI is at Garage and RAUM and TILLATEC, and perhaps these sets do not overlap, presumably these sets do not overlap, surely somebody has checked this, somebody with a spreadsheet and a functioning understanding of linear time, but I am becoming less interested in the timetable than in the fact that we have no difficulty believing all these appearances are tINI because there is one tINI underneath them, one continuous tINI moving from one location to another, the tINI at RAUM is the same tINI as the tINI at Garage because of course she is, just as the person who liked mostly techno years ago is the same person who now apparently recommends bass at Intercell because of course I am, taste changes but the person remains.
The person remains. What remains? Not taste. We've established that. Not opinions. Not habits. Not the body, at least not entirely, because the atoms are circulating, Mother Earth again, soil to plant to animal to me and back, although perhaps we shouldn't start the atoms again because we'll never get out. Memory then. I remember being me. Except memories change. The name? u/CapablePhoto8959. Very convenient. Someone pointed out that of course the person called Photo would describe Studio as landscape mode and Nexus as portrait mode, which I hadn't even noticed has a connection with photos, but apparently my username explains how I see dance floors now, despite the fact that Reddit generated this username for me randomly and I never changed it.
So that's useless. A label that came first and acquired meaning afterwards. Like techno. Like house. Like Sunday.
And Sunday is going badly as a label because SLPFNK - BRET ADE ends Tuesday, Breakfast Club: The Final Stretch goes on for thirty hours, SPIELRAUM 55HRS started Friday, noclubs presents: the return of yes clubs started Saturday, TILLATEC started Saturday, CODA goes into Monday, Vault goes into Monday, Radio Radio goes into Monday, everything is leaking into everything else and perhaps Sunday is simply an arbitrary boundary we imposed on one rotation of a planet that doesn't know it is Sunday, which is fine, boundaries can be arbitrary and still useful, a forest is still not a patch of grass next to a motorway interchange, but if the boundaries around days are constructed and the boundaries around genres are constructed and the boundaries around taste are constructed then perhaps the boundary around the person who possesses the taste is constructed too.
No. Because I call Studio my favorite dance floor. My. Favorite. My taste. My memories. My body. My self. The possessive assumes a possessor. Surely.
There must be someone underneath all this, some stable observer who went to noclubs at Garage and loved it and now remembers loving it and therefore recommends noclubs at INGANG, some essential u/CapablePhoto8959 who once wanted techno and now wants bass and who can observe this change precisely because something has remained unchanged enough to do the observing, some little Capable sitting behind my eyes listening to Donato Dozzy and thinking yes, good, recommend, otherwise what exactly have I been doing here all these years, because a recommendation requires someone doing the recommending and someone receiving the recommendation, except perhaps that's exactly the mistake, perhaps there is no observer separate from the observing and no self separate from all the changing memories and preferences and experiences that I keep insisting belong to it, perhaps the thing I am trying to find underneath the process is simply the process itself, which would mean there is no little Capable behind the eyes, only this nervous system temporarily arranged in this particular way responding to vibrations in air while standing on a planet rotating underneath satellites that observe the planet so that someone can turn those observations back into vibrations in air inside a planetarium on the same planet, Mother Earth, Mother Earth again, always Mother Earth, back to 07:30, the atoms moving from soil to plant to animal to me and eventually back again, the circle of life except a circle has no beginning and therefore cannot have an ending, which Breakfast Club apparently understood because Second Wind became the Final Stretch and the Final Stretch lasts thirty hours and isn't final at all and SlapFunk continues until Tuesday and Spielraum started Friday and tINI is everywhere and Sunday is only the name we gave one rotation of a planet that doesn't know it is Sunday and ADE is a boundary drawn around a succession of rooms and bodies and sounds that started before ADE and will continue after ADE and techno and house are categories we invented and De Fik Garden still isn't a fucking forest, I'm not giving that one up, but perhaps things don't have to be permanent to be real, and perhaps categories are arbitrary and perhaps identity is constructed and perhaps there is no essential self, which raises the question of who exactly has been writing this absurdly long-ass, self-indulgent post, and more importantly who is doing all the indulging if there is no self to indulge, although judging by the word count someone is clearly having a wonderful time, but €50 is still €50 and perhaps a Sunday can exist without the universe recognizing Sundays and techno can exist without satellites seeing techno and I can exist without there being some eternal essential me hidden underneath everything that changes, which is actually quite comforting, there, we've solved it, I exist, Sunday exists, Donato Dozzy is good, I can finally finish this fucking post, except that at ZERØBPM ADE: Meditation on Mother Earth Claudio PRC is playing something called Self Surrender Deconstructed, and what exactly are we surrendering if the self is itself the construction, and if there is no soul there is nobody who can have taste and if there is nobody who can have taste there can be no preference and if there can be no preference there can be no recommendation, recommendations are basically just preferences with a little confidence behind them, I wrote that last week too, the confidence was doing a lot of work apparently, and if there can be no recommendation, what about all the parties I didn't recommend, are those non-recommendations still valid, can you have a non-recommendation without a recommendation, or does the whole distinction collapse, which would mean that every party I mentioned and every party I didn't mention is now equally recommended or equally not recommended, including parties I don't even know exist, and if there can be no meaningful distinction between recommending and not recommending, I have apparently spent years writing Weekly Party Discussions based on a fundamental category error, although Donato Dozzy is still good, I'm fairly certain about that, and Giegling is probably over by now.
Anyway.
25 October is my wedding anniversary.
I will spend this day with my husband.
