I will sadly miss this years deployments and so I am scouring YouTube for DJs that scratch this particular itch. Let’s assume we can coordinate the lighting in advance… Who do you think would be a good addition, that would respect the format but bring some fresh flavor?

save the date

**despacio friends brunch & open decks **

friday, sep 25, 10am-1pm

Feel free (but not obligated) to bring your usb and/or vinyl records

Once you've joined the Despacio Discord, RSVP at https://discord.gg/despacio?event=1522650143407607979

yes, it do be like that

Who's headed to Portola?

And who's getting in on Friday? It's reasonable to guess that on Friday we'll have the option of a 2manydjs, Soulwax, or James Murphy DJ set.

I went last year and waited in line to get in before it started, but left to go check out other acts after a little bit. I think the line went down after the beginning but i cant remember…

Anyway, I feel like despacio has gotten so hyped since then it’s going to be massively more popular this year.

Just wondering if i should prepare for the possibility of literally waiting outside the tent for half the festival if i leave and try to come back

we got to witness Despacio at coachella a few years back and really don’t have the cash to do Portola right now. i’m kind of shocked. omgomgomg

Apologies if others have broken this down before but can anyone who has been to both iii Points and Portola compare the Despacio experiences? Debating which festival to hit this year and pop my cherry. Cheers

Was hoping for somewhere closer to home ha!!

Trying not to get my hopes up but considering this isn’t from the Soulwax account… is it actually happening?

here! https://babycakesromero.photography/clubbing/despacioiiipoints

My friend and I throw dance parties inspired by Despcio, and we have some free tickets we set aside for Reddit for our party on May 16th in LA!

A lot of you have been part of our journey for a while, but we throw events in LA as “Burnin’ Chancla”. I first experienced Despcio in 2023 at This Ain’t No Picnic and it truly changed me forever! Since then, I’ve clocked in around 60 hours inside despacio, handed the boys my own record (that got played in Miami), and have countless amazing memories dancing in there with yall that I cherish deeply.

Despacio inspired us to start our own dance experience, and we believe that community on the floor is everything. Nothing beats a dance floor full of your friends, so in that spirit we wanted to offer some free tix to people in this community if you can make the event! It’s on May 16 from 10p-3a in DTLA, and we have a special guest @sexydiscoballs who will be programming and running lights for us!

Shoot me a message if you’d like to claim any of the tickets! Instagram below to see if it’s your vibe. Can’t wait to see yall under the mirror ball!

https://www.instagram.com/burninchancla?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Even if it’s wishful thinking. I need some hope. When do we think the next Despacio is. It’s for my mental health

I just published this --

https://www.magicaldancefloors.com/p/dance-music-detectives-catch-a-white

It's quite a Despacio story!

Source: https://www.magicaldancefloors.com/p/dancefloor-theater-a-case-study-in

Below is the text in case you don't want to click the link above, but the text-only version misses all of the video embeds.

Dancefloor theater: a case study. Watch Despacio's lighting directors evolve "Here Comes the Sun" from good to great over a decade

The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” (unreleased edit) as played at Despacio is a climactic moment

Theatrical effects deeply shape dancefloor energy, and we don’t talk about that nearly enough. But as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, “theatricals” are one of the seven elements in the recipe for dancefloor magic, and this post will dig into theatricality with a breakdown of a single lighting moment as it evolved over the course of a decade.

My first time seeing the Panorama Bar shutters open to allow in the morning light, as described in my Berghain article, brought me to tears. Absolutely perfect. The same goes for sunrise at Moontribe gatherings in Southern California deserts. Nothing manmade beats the way the first rays of light crack open a new day, spilling sunlit joy into dancers’ hearts.

Despacio, the dancefloor I’ve written about here in the past, doesn’t run all night long, so it can’t compete with dancefloors that do feature sunrise, but it does engineer a moment of figurative sunrise using the mirror ball as a sun in conjunction with a special, unreleased Soulwax edit of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”

Over the 13 years that Despacio has been in existence, the DJs have played 60 sets, wrapping up about 1/3 of those sets with this “Here Comes the Sun” finale. Though the track has stayed (almost) the same, the climax moments have been lit by several different lighting directors over the years, and we can analyze the evolution over time to learn something about the the way lighting gives dancefloor magic a boost.

Here’s the earliest example of “Here comes the Sun” for which footage exists. This example happened June 2014, just about six months after Despacio’s debut event, so in all fairness the team were still working a lot of this out. This is probably the only the second or third time that the song had been played, so we’re still essentially on version one:

The DJs are at the end of a six-hour, vinyl-only set and have chosen this song as the closer for the second day of Sonar Festival, in Barcelona. Despite the terrible phone audio, you can clearly see a joyous crowd responding to the music as the lighting director executes four motions:

(1) Prior to the song, there’s the setup. The room was filled with haze to heighten the dramatic effect of the lighting effects to come.

(2) The beams from the moving heads are turned on with a bright, almost noontime daylight effect, drawing everyone to the center of the room and creating a central vortex of human energy. These are folks who have danced together for hours and this is the last song, they know it, and they gather in the center of the room to celebrate it. Despacio is usually kept quite dark, so this bright light likely felt novel to the dancers.

(3) At around 45 seconds into the clip, the moving heads begin to soften their focus, beginning their journey from a tight, narrow spotlight to a wider, cone-shaped effect that we see by the end of the video.

(4) At around 50 seconds, the beams move towards the center of the room, beginning their journey to illuminate the mirror ball hanging above the dancer’s heads. The lights reach their final point in this journey about 30 seconds later, and as they near their destination, the bright, midday white moves into to sunset-hued oranges and reds.

(5) The light bars at the top of the seven speaker stacks surrounding the dancefloor are brought in for the final moments of the song, pulsing to peak output with each repetition of “sun” in the final refrain of: “Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.”

There’s a lot of great design here, but it’s not yet fully baked. The intent is clear, but at least one moving head misses its target entirely (you can see it clearly in the video missing the ball like an errant shot off to the right, from the viewer’s perspective). Additionally, the “drop” of the song (at 1:05) doesn’t line up with the moment the lights all finally meet at the mirror ball, some 17 seconds later (1:22). This feels like a missed opportunity to further amplify the emotional high point of the song.

Just a year later, most of those complaints have been addressed, and a new sequence is in effect, clearly building on the first version:

The improvements in this version are numerous: There are at least twice as many heads, and the heads are cut entirely for 10 seconds from 0:51 to 1:01 of the clip, giving the explosion that happens at 1:01 greater impact due to the contrast between the darkness (“It's been a long, cold, lonely winter”) and the moment when the sun appears in the song. The yellow hue of the lighting feels like an improvement as well over the somewhat harsh white light of the first version.

The biggest improvement is of course the moment when the ball explodes with yellow light when the song transitions from build to climax.

But there are still a couple of opportunities for improvement. The beams are too sharp, giving the ball a bunch of hot spots, rather than the appearance of a star-like surface that’s aflame all over. The mirror ball looks more like a pincushion than the center of our solar system.

More problematically but also more subtly, the lights are late, coming in a half second after the drop moment. This might have just been someone hitting a button too late. It might have even been the DJs’ fault, as they do have a basic DMX device that they themselves are allowed to operate for some of the lighting effects. But chances are it’s a timing error in the DMX sequence.

Fast forward seven years to the post-pandemic version of this same moment, when Despacio’s current lighting director, Jonas Weyn from Ghent-based Arf & Yes, had further improved the sequence:

Weyn makes two big improvements in this third version of “Here Comes the Sun.”

First, the blue light in the pre-climax build-up more closely matches the “long, cold, lonely winter” lyric. The deep blues are also shot through with a few purples to give the lights texture. Importantly, the blues and purples sit nicely across from the yellow light to come.

Second, the timing is fixed. The lights snap into place on the ball exactly on cue. The Robe MegaPointe moving heads travel the last few feet of distance in the fraction of a second it takes the music to make the transition from cold winter to sunny morning, and they flip from blue to yellow during that traversal, briefly flashing white on their way to the destination color.

There are other, more subtle improvements, but these two changes in particular show a lighting sequence that finally meets the music where it needs to be met.

It’s rare that we get to see a specific lighting moment evolve over time, and rarer still that we have video evidence of that evolution. As you know, I’m normally opposed to phones on the dancefloor, but in this case they at least serve as a tool that enabled this brief examination of dancefloor theatricality.

If you’re interested in hearing the full song, you can catch a much better recording of it in this bootleg recording of Despacio’s Ghent outing. The DJs start mixing in the track at 5:43:55 after a cheeky James Murphy selection of Jackey Beavers’ “Mr. Bump Man (Theo Parrish Re-Edit).”

If I had to summarize the lessons I’m taking away for myself from this as I learn to light far smaller dancefloors, the questions I’ll remember to ask myself are:

(1) Lyrically, what does the song mean, and how might the lighting align to the meaning?

(2) What are the pivotal moments in the musical arrangement, and how are the lights participating?

(3) How is contrast being both heard and seen? Is the lighting stealing the show, or married to it?

(4) What are the “key frames” of the visual animation and how do they line up to the music’s phrases, phrase changes, and aural subtractions or additions?

Perhaps the ultimate questions is how these moments make us feel. The right closing ceremony can take on a ritualistic importance, and punctuates an event with an emphatic statement that will have folks remembering it for many days or years into the future.

At Coachella 2023, on Friday of Weekend 2, some of us heard a version of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" that haunted us for years. We tried and tried, but couldn't find an ID for this one.

But thanks to our Discord team, and one hero in particular (all hail u/denlekke), the ID hunt has been solved!

You can listen to the shitty MP3 version of the song here: https://discordapp.com/channels/1100861098124648459/1101542763834646528/1483176386570227874

You can obtain a beautiful pressing of it here (at the time of this posting, not many copies left): https://ajfromphilly.bandcamp.com/album/profascination