Day 1

We arrived over late yesterday evening, got checked in with our delegates passes (which came with a nice record bag loaded with goodies) and then set off to hook up with some friends from a few Dutch and German labels.

While the emphasis at ADE is very much on the business side of things, there's a huge programme of events on every night. The big one last night was the Official Opening Party at Melkweg which saw the kings of Detroit, Carl Craig, Derrick May, Juan Atkins and co. tear up a sold-out venue until the early hours of Thursday morning with Stacey Pullen dropping one of the best sets of the evening.

After a slow start to the day, we headed straight for the conference HQ at Felix Meritis for a day long session of meetings and panels this morning with Roger Sanchez chairing discussions on the so-called 'club-crisis ' and digital promo delivery in the 21st Century.

Tonight we'll be checking out Joris Voorn's Party as well as Dave Clarke's live broadcast of his White Noise radio show....

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Day 2

So the big one last night was the Excession Showcase party featuring Sasha, James Zabiela, Robert Babicz and a load more. Best of all it was on a small cruise liner which was going to set sail from Amsterdam docks at midnight. So we hopped in a taxi around 11.30 but 45 minutes later and 40 Euro down, we were back in the city. Turned out the address we had for the party was the actual registered office address for the boat and not the actual departure address. So that was great fun.

We checked out a bit of the '5 years of the Made to Play' party with Jesse Rose and Riva Starr which was only really starting to fill-up before we headed off to Melkweg again for the Superrauw night featuring Boys Noize and Aeroplane (which was absolutely rammed). The Melkweg is a huge two-room venue with the small room resembling the Mandela hall and the main room just a large rectangular room with a high ceiling, balcony and wicked sound and lighting.

We also checked out the invite-only Network Bash which took place in a beautifully restored chapel (they actually had decks on the altar) called De Duif. Dave Clarke was there doing a 3-hour live radio broadcast for his White Noise show which I did a quick interview for. The rest of the day was spent hanging around the main conference locations, Felix Meritis and Dylan Hotel. Loads of the headliners like Josh Wink, Carl Craig, Roger Sanchez and Dubfire were all just hanging out chatting to people, as well as making the most of the various happy-hours (free booze) laid on by the likes of Beatport among others.

It'll be interesting to see on Day Three if the conference events are as busy as they have been the past few days once the festival fatigue kicks in. Right now though, I'm off for some pastries and coffee...



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Day 3

I can only describe today as being a rollercoaster ride of emotions, which despite my near 20 years of DJing experience and 10 years of radio experience, nothing could have prepared me for. We had our big [sold-out] show for Dave Clarke presents at The Melkweg, so we dropped the gear off at the venue and then headed for dinner at an amazing Teppan Yaki restaurant with the other DJs Dave Clarke, Green Velvet, Abe Duque, Estroe, James Watts and Tom Trago, which was truly amazing despite Curtis Green Velvet clearing everyone's plate and eating the biggest bowl of ice-cream I have ever seen.



At The Melkweg, they were on a tight turnaround from the Goldfish show before us, so they had to clear out 1500 people at 11pm and reopen at 11.30 for Dave Clarke presents, pretty hectic stuff. One of Holland's finest, Estroe opened up 'The Max' where we were playing with some lovely deep and melodic grooves, with the hall filling up nicely throughout her set. We took to the stage just before 1am and the room was at full capacity and ready for action.



Everything was going great until three tunes into the set, when the unthinkable happened, our software crashed on the main laptop - silence. For the first time in 7 years of using a laptop to perform live, it decided that tonight, in front of 1500 punters, journalists, music industry heads and assorted individuals it was going to deliver a cruel, cruel blow.

If you ever find yourself in this rather unenviable position, you'll realise it's probably one of the most un-nerving experiences you can imagine. We managed to get things going again pretty quickly and then ten minutes later - silence again. By that stage i was scrambling round the stage grabbing cd decks as I had packed some CD back-ups (best decision ever) and we managed to finish our set by DJing until Dave Clarke came on after us. Although we didn't get to play the set we have intended to, at least we weren't left standing on stage in front of all those people twiddling our thumbs and with the exception of those couple of minutes where it all went horribly wrong, the Melkweg was going off.



Afterwards we stuck around to catch awesome sets from Dave, who totally wrecked his now adopted home town and Green Velvet who was the perfect curtain closer for an amazing night which ended just before 6am.



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I woke up licking my wounds and tried to figure out what went wrong the night before but soon decided enough was enough, it was time to move on and concentrate on the day ahead. Thankfully I didn't have too much in the way of meetings set-up for today, apart from taking part in Dave Clarke's Demolition Panel XV in conjunction with Soundcloud at 5pm in the Felix Meritis.



The Demolition Panel is an annual event where producers can submit demos, via Soundcloud or in-person on the day and a panel of musos would critique them and offer feedback. Dave was the panel host and I found myself sitting alongside the legendary Toddy Terry, music journalist Jonty Skruff, head of digital promo company EPM - Jonas Stone and booking agent Niels Brand.



The Felix was packed with around two hundred people in for the event (mostly blokes unsurprisingly) and the demos (which were picked from the submissions by an independent panel) ranged from trancey progressive stuff, to house and dubstep. Despite being at the tail-end of a long week, the panel were a kind bunch, with feedback mainly constructive, and everyone trying to think of variations on the term 'not my cuppa tea'. We listened to a few of the Soundcloud submissions before Dave asked the audience if anyone had brought CDs with them. Only about 2 or 3 people put their hands-up, but when invited up on stage about 100 CDs appeared out of nowhere and we were sitting there with a mountain of new music to go through.



So we spent the best part of an hour going through some of the submissions, before whittling it down to just three finalists and then to an eventual winner. It was a pair of Amsterdam based dubstep producers under the name Stereologue and their track 'Anger' that the majority of the panelists deemed to be the best track of the day - it's a well produced track on a very dark tip but with plenty of dancefloor punch. They walked away with a studio masterclass, loads of new DJ gear and the glory of being the Demolition XV grand winners.