Just in its third edition, Austria’s Electric Love has grown to be one of the more prominent electronic festivals in Europe. AndΒ The Sherp was obviously there to give you a lowdown on its recently concluded edition.
The 2015 run of Electric Love has only gotten bigger and better, including names like Tiesto, Steve Aoki, Armin Van Buuren, Adam Beyer, Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike, among several others. And it was a massive show of electronic spirit at the Plainfield Racecourse in the beautiful city of Salzburg, Austria. Here’s the blow by blow account of everything at the festival, and our opinion on it.
The venue’s largenessΒ
From the time we got off the Electric Love bus, specially set to pick us up from Salzburg HBF, the city’s main train station, we had a 20-minute walk awaiting us to South Camping with our luggage. The venue wasΒ widely spread out for different entry types. All entries are very strategically placed for the convenience of festival goers. It’s just one road that takes you to different drop zones depending on what tickets you hold.Β The venue was in between a Race Circuit, so obviously it was HUGE. The festival easily saw over 150000 attendees spread across all 4 festival nights.Β The venue was clean all through out but just for the entry point, cause of the rains, it got a bit mucky and keeping your luggage on the ground was a trouble while standing in the queue to enter the Festival.Β But overall, it was well organised.
Electric Love’s Stage Show
There were five hugeΒ adorning the venue, and each one of them was suitably designed to the theme of the kind of music playing at the stage. For instance, the main stage which was on glow all the three nights, had an amazing use of LED blocks smoothly synchronizing with each beat drop.Β After this, the qDance stage which was active for 2 nights was also very well done up. You could just make out looking at the stage and its production that it was meant for some hard core music.Β The Pre-party stage (Club Circus) was active for all 4 nights but the highlight was the opening night. A good 75,000 peopleΒ danced their hearts off. Visuals included top of the line intelligent lights and LEDs. This was a tented semi dome venue and the weather was just perfect for the opening night.Β All of these stages were greatly located from each other in terms of accessibility, except the walk to any of the stages from the campsite was a complete downer.Β All in all, the stage accessibility once at any party, was excellent.
The line-up
Our group’s first choice forΒ attending this festival was for the artist line up. It had almost all of the top 50 DJs playing at the festival. All the big names you could think of from Tiesto, Β Armin, Steve Aoki, Alesso, Axwell to R3hab, Showtec, Coone and Brenann Heart. There was not even one bit of regret in seeing the artists that were topping the music scene around the world. The only problem, like in any other festival, was seeing 2 to 3 great artists performing at different stages at the same time. But given the quality of the performances, I will choose to not complain about it.
The worthy distractions
One of the more interesting ideas that Electric Love had implemented was that they charged you 15 Euros at the beginning of the festival, in return of which they gave you a huge garbage bag and a green token. On returning the bag completely filled, along with the token, they’d return your money back. This process made keeping the festival clean a lot less painstaking than otherwise.
As for the food, there was a food counter every 300 metres, in any direction you’d look at. There was round-the-clock management as far as cleaning was concerned to keep the venue as clean as possible. There was portable loos in every corner, and clean bathroom spaces. Hygiene alone is worth rewarding this festival with extra token points.
The Vibe
The overall vibe at the festival was great. The weather was a scorching dampener in the afternoons, though, bad enough to give us sunburns. But during the evening, the atmosphere turned very cheery. You could look around and make out that everyone was having a good time. Almost 70% of the crowd were aged between 15 to 23. And everyone from different nationalities getting together and playing games around the camping site was a total highlight!
The only miss!
A storm hit the venue on Day 3, at about 8 pm. Tents shifted and loos were shut down to combat with it. There was total chaos, but save that, it was one good festival to wind up at!
Words and Images by : Harvey MartisΒ