De Gashouder in Amsterdam has a solid reputation in nightlife. For 25 years, the round hall has been home to the techno empire Awakenings, with drums and bass thumping against the circular airframe approximately bimonthly until dawn. The former warehouse on the Westergasterrein is also ideal for harder music styles: the stark techno becomes even more beautiful when the square rhythms are given extra reverberation and echo, in a round, concrete sound box that is almost an amplifier itself.
Nevertheless, the hall also makes excursions as a more refined cultural stage. The Holland Festival programs there every year. Last edition, for example, the silent music theater piece time performed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. And even the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra played the Gashouder during a screening of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 2012.
It is actually strange that the Gashouder does not serve as a pop stage more often. Because Amsterdam has a great need for a room with a capacity of about three thousand: exactly the number of visitors that can gather in the Gashouder. The main pop venues in the city center, Paradiso and Melkweg, can accommodate up to 1,500 guests. The step to the larger halls is immediately a giant leap: the Afas Live is good for five thousand visitors, the Ziggo Dome for 17 thousand. In cities such as Utrecht and Tilburg, those intermediate rooms with space for two thousand to three thousand people are available, so Amsterdam regularly sees larger artists pass by, for whom 1,500 is too little and five thousand too much.
Then you would think: open those gates of the Gashouder more often. And that’s happening now, at least this month. In the coming weeks, Mojo will be programming a number of concerts, from the London trio Above & Beyond to De Staat and the Belgian rock band Balthazar. And last weekend, the Gashouder turned into a hip-hop temple, with three sold-out shows by the hip-hop duo The Opposites.
At the first of those shows it appears that the raw factory hall is doing well as a stage for this band. In the first place because Willem de Bruin and Twan van Steenhoven like to celebrate a solid party. Especially with their current comeback, which should breathe new life into the duo. The Opposites, who broke up in 2014, played legendary festival shows and in 2013, for example, lowered the largest tent Alpha to ashes at Lowlands, with very exciting party starters and a show that dragged the public by the hair.
This trick can be repeated in the Gashouder, also because the arena in front of the stage lends itself well to maximum audience participation. The visitors are lined up in a circle because of the space, and that already feels like a kind of snake pit before the show has even started. When the band then starts with the well-known hospitable games – ‘All: left, right’ – hardly anyone can avoid that. When The Opposites deploy their big hits, the entire Gashouder passionately screams along. ‘Sucker for love, king of the nightclub.’
The sound also helps. Acoustically, De Gashouder is a difficult venue, and a show by the band Editors in 2013, for example, drowned in the hollow echo. But now it actually helps the beats and basses of The Opposites. The band became so loved and big because of their special sound combination, of raps with hard-hitting trance and gabber. And it hits hard against the concrete dome walls. the hit Dom, Lomp and Famous get the allure of a closing act at a dance festival, just like the closing Thunder, a tribute to the gabber party Thunderdome. The hall explodes to the screaming lasers, hard-hitting techno and disarming, super-funny lyrics: ‘All night, we’re going thunder† Break it down, we’re going to thunder. This is what I exist for.’
The question is whether the Gashouder with a good acoustic plan can also handle the less brutal concerts in the coming weeks. But the seething shows of The Opposites have in any case shown that the hall can be a festive addition to the Amsterdam offer.