March, 2017 will mark 20 years since now the historical techno music festival of the Netherland’s, Awakenings, organised it’s first with their edition in 1997. To commemorate the occasion, 5 nights and 1 day in the coming April the Gashouder will again breathe in the techno spirit. As the festival will be throwing up 20 Years Anniversary with the most selective line-up of their closest most admired musicians, needing no further introduction.
What became now the largest and best-known techno festival in the world started off at the good ol’ Gashouder in 1997 with barely seven Djs on the lineup: Godard, Angelo, Nick Rapaccioli, Billy Nasty, Zen, Dimitri and Derrick May (it must be really special for the latter two to be invited to stand on the same stage 20 years after it’s first edition).
The seed was sown and now, in over the two decades it can count over 1.5 million ravers entertained, over 2000 hours played, marked by the threshold of 200 parties organised. The publisher Mary Go Wild will be taking these numbers and putting them into a 500 pages story of ‘AWAKENINGS: 20 Years of Techno’.
The Awakenings 20 Year Anniversary program will take place from Thursday April 13 thru Sunday April 16 and, according to the organisers “will invite all best of our old & new DJ-friends”. The day session, that will take place on Saturday the 15th, will be the first time will enter Gashouder in the daytime and it’ll feature sets by Joris Voorn, Ben Klock, Adam Beyer, Jeff Mills and Chris Liebing.
The nighttime program on Thursday will symbolically begin with both Dimitri and Derrick May, who’s names were on the first line-up of Awakenings ever and who will accordingly go back-to-back with Remy Unger and Kevin Saunderson, followed by sets from Sven Väth and Nina Kraviz. Friday the 14th, billed as Awakenings’ 200th event, will feature special back-to-back sets from Drumcode’s Adam Beyer with Joseph Capriati, and Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann. Jeff Mills, Liebing, Dave Clarke and DJ Rush returns on Saturday before the series finishes up with performances from Seth Troxler, Len Faki and Ricardo Villalobos.