It is one of the most beautiful culture clashes of the current festival season. In the dance tent Greenhouse at the five-day festival Dekmantel, a gray gentleman in his 70s shuffles onto the stage through the back entrance on Saturday afternoon. He observes the crowd, who are still waving their hands in the air at a hard dancehall and bubbling set by the Hague DJ De Schuurman. He grins and slams his drumsticks against his thigh.
Then De Schuurman is ready. His DJ table is towed away and within five minutes the stage is converted, ready for a complete band. And suddenly, it really is true, the legendary Brazilian band Azymuth is on Dekmantel, including that eminent gray drummer Ivan Conti (75).
Azymuth’s samba and jazz rock was hip in the 1970s, about when Santana was still hip. But on Dekmantel, the funken sound of this primal band seems to be gaining new life. The bleep solos on the Fender Rhodes by keyboardist Kiko Continentino, and especially his voice drawn by the vocoder, sound very contemporary, of the dance and party culture that digs up styles and timbres from distant music history. It’s not easy dancing to the frantic jazz rhythms, but the entire place understands why this is rock solid, and what story is being told here.
Festival Dekmantel, which kicked off on Wednesday in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam and continued from Friday on a tent site in the Amsterdamse Bos, presents itself every year with a difficult search. Dekmantel does not just put the finest (and available) DJs in a tent camp for three days, but tries to place the current dance culture in a broader context. There are lines to be discovered between house and techno and African music traditions, just to name a few. Or Jamaican dancehall, or even South American jazz rock. It is of course wonderful that Dekmantel also has those bands from the past perform, for an audience that mainly comes to be absorbed in a DJ set or thirty.
But perhaps even better about Dekmantel: in the smaller tents in particular, the future of dance and club culture is also opened up. The most beautiful parties always arise in hangar-like sheds like the UFO II and in the pure DJ tent of the Boiler Room, no matter how hard big names like Canadian Jayda G try their best on Saturday to get Dekmantel dancing at carefree but also some everyday house.
On Friday evening, the Rotterdam duo Animistic Belief plays a roaring electronic punk set in UFO II, and their bouncing basses from analog synths blur the boundaries between styles and eras again. And later in the evening, the corrugated iron sheets splash from the hangar, to the crushing drum and bass of the Canadian Aquarian, which sounds futuristic but also looks back on the trip-hop of the nineties.
On Friday, Dekmantel gives a selection of the best British dance of today around the main stage, which also tries to build something new on the foundations of the past. Joy Orbison plays dubstep and the old UK Garage, but knows how to give those styles an exciting, own dynamic, which also makes his own work so special. The same goes for brothers Tom and Ed Russell aka Overmono in their live set, which evokes memories of rave culture, when techno, acid and even rock converged on the dance floor.
And then there is also a festival within the festival around Dekmantel, at the back of the site in the tents where the loudest techno can triumph. This primal genre of club culture is also still developing, although the Saturday sets by the Dutch Talismann and the Ghanaian-American Akua are especially good because they take into account the rhythms cast in concrete by the drum machines. Akua’s bleak basses and drums are bare and scary hard, but what a euphoria she knows how to drive through the UFO I when she suddenly throws a lashing hi-hat or snare drum over the basses, as another push towards ultimate dance redemption. It is strict and metric but also so insanely grooving: impossible to walk away from.
Still, you have to move on, because there is more to discover. The dance music from a number of African countries, from Uganda to South Africa, has been doing well for years and Dekmantel features a few beautiful acts from the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege. For example, in the greenhouse Greenhouse on Saturday the duo Debmaster with MC Yallah, which pushes the boundaries even further. Debmaster’s mechanical hip-hop and trap beats give a boost to Kenyan Yallah’s raging and hyper-contagious raps. And with this band you also think afterwards that you have had a vision of the future, and that you have looked much further than the dance itself.
Green festival
You can already see it when you enter the Dekmantel festival site in the Amsterdamse Bos. The green around the stages is and will remain green. This year, Dekmantel introduced a sustainability novelty for smokers: portable pocket ashtrays, handed out at the entrance. They did their job, because there were almost no kicked-out butts to be found in the natural beauty.