25 European Dance Festivals You Can't Miss This Summer
It's Monday, and Circoloco, DC10's founding night, is celebrating its 18th year in Ibiza. It opened in 1999 as an anarchic after-hours venue. "The DJ was playing on milk crates," Jamie Jones, the Welsh techno DJ who now hosts Paradise at DC10, remembers fondly. "The toilets were filthy, with drug wrappers all over the floor. It was a madhouse." Underground music also thrives like never before at such nights as Luciano & Friends, Marco Carola's Music On, Solomun's +1, Sven Väth's pioneering Cocoon and, up until this year, Richie Hawtin's ENTER. "Ibiza is probably the only place in the world where the underground scene is neck and neck with mainstream EDM," says Turner. "The music's different, but I think it holds the original spirit of Ibiza."
Ibiza Tourists Will Be Hit With a New Tax This Summer
The following evening I visit Ushuaia for a very different experience. Tanned, well-dressed tourists sip top-dollar vodka and champagne in the VIP area or dance around the pool as DJs Sick Individuals play hyperactive EDM remixes of Moby and Adele from a festival-style stage, punctuating their set with cannon bursts of flame and glitter.
Ushuaia's founder and artistic director is Yann Pissenem, an uninterruptibly enthusiastic 42-year-old Frenchman who moved to Ibiza in 2008. "I called it Ushuaia [after the world's southernmost city] because this beach was the end of the world," he says. "Everybody told me, 'Don't do anything there. It will be a fiasco.' " Pissenem's game-changing inspiration was to target older clubbers. "The world of electronic music has grown a lot," he says. "The kids who were clubbers 20 years ago are now clubbers with money. They don't want to wait till five o'clock in the morning in a dark club full of kids to see their kind of DJ."
Pissenem will be taking over Space next summer. "It's a big responsibility," he says. "It's not going to be an EDM club" like Ushuaia, he insists, but he promises big changes. "We're going to transform the club for sure, because it's a new generation and a new era, no?"
For repeat visitors, whether they have been coming for five years or 30, Ibiza is never as liberated, as affordable or as special as it used to be, yet they keep coming back, because a changed Ibiza is still Ibiza. "I can't see it slowing down anytime soon," says Cox. "I don't know many people who have been to Ibiza and been upset. I've known many people who have gone to Ibiza and had the best time of their life."