Ready for combat! – Airforce Festival leaves a lasting impression.

Last weekend, justice was served as thousands of die-hards revolutionaries gathered at the Military Airbase Twente for the ultimate soldierly bash! With event heavyweights Art Of Dance and Absolutely Fresh exclusively teaming up to hold this event for the very first time, it was ambitious to say the least, however an impressive spectacle for all visitors.

In the competitive harder styles event market, formulating a fresh concept is far from easy and pulling it off with flying colours is also quite stressful, however Airforce Festival proved to be a huge success as satisfied ravers vivaciously flooded around the festival terrain with high spirits as they partied until the very last seconds.

Myself, and another member from the Alive At Night team was present at Airforce Festival and in my primal half-drunken/half-critical state I observed the ins and outs of what made this new concept so incredibly successful. Wrapped up into a neat little list of five, read all about how Art Of Dance and Absolutely Fresh executed this breakthrough event.

– Pre-battle marketing

Leading up to the event, it’s evident that both organisations gave it their all to create a fully-fledged marketing campaign for Airforce Festival. Even when the festival ran into a lawsuit started by two nature conservation organisations, all spirits were high as the website announced that ‘justice had been served!’ Additionally, the website for the event looked awesome, there were podcasts made leading up to the big day and I also really enjoyed reading the facts about the location. Art Of Dance and Absolutely Fresh were quite ambitious with this event and there’s no doubt that they’ll be able to make Airforce Festival one of the biggest highlights in the summer agenda.

– The line-up was on point!

Seriously, that line-up was intense! Over 100 artists had the honour to perform on the sacred grounds and both a-listers and talents had their time to shine over the six diverse stages. This called for many unfortunate clashes, however as the festival grounds were quite small it wasn’t a mission to pop over to the next stage. Hard Dance fanatics had the opportunity to satisfy their cravings for an assortment of sounds ranging from Hardcore, Industrial, Frenchcore, Raw Hardstyle and Freestyle.

– Armed and ready!

The concept revolving around Airforce Festival is something that we’ve somewhat seen resonate in popular events Q-BASE and Daylight Festival, except I must admit that Airforce definitely had more of a military feel. The rough underground is something that the Hard Dance movement thrives from, so it was incredible to see an event celebrating this edge. From the first announcement and leading up to the big day, the military concept was consistent through its designs, flyers, anthem, website and well, everything!

– The aesthetics were great!

And I’m not just talking about the stage designs! The visitors at Airforce Festival truly immersed themselves in the concept; I saw so much khaki to the point where my Woodstock-goes-Hardcore outfit was inferior. True radicals came out to play as party-goers unleashed their freakier, shadowy side. Now, more about the stage designs! I’m not going to lie, the stages were smaller than I’d expected, however the designs were still solid and the industrial, underground feeling resonated throughout the entire terrain. Additionally, as the darker hours began to dawn, the production shifted into full throttle as the stages blew up with an explosion of lights, lasers, fireworks and everything in between!

– Good vibes everywhere

One thing that I noticed was that Airforce Festival was quite an international event, meaning that there would be some cultural differences – however the vibe remained high throughout the whole day! I was quite impressed with how friendly everyone was; I must stress that I was dressed like a stray techno fan that’d gone on walkabout from Dekmantel, however people were accepting and friendly as ever. Like any harder styles event, everyone came together to unite and share the mutual love for the music and this is something that will never get old. Furthermore, another huge plus was that there was plenty of room to move and dance wildly, which is something that’s sometimes missing at larger festivals.

I’d like to thank Art Of Dance and Absolutely Fresh for having Alive At Night at Airforce Festival last weekend! I certainly had a blast and was awestruck by this innovative, new event concept. All I hve left to say is – bring on Airforce 2017!